Legal Commentary

I am very bad at being bored.  I change casebooks often to avoid boredom, I rarely write an article that builds directly on a previous one, and I sometimes "multitask" in meetings when I should be paying attention.  As a result, what I'm about to say is hypocritical.  However, I'll say it anyway.  Learning to deal with boring tasks in an important professional skill, and it might behoove us to let our students in on this secret.

There's a common misconception that students only become bored when they are not being intellectually challenged.  While it is true that boredom often results when one is not intellectually challenged, boredom can also result from being asked to learn challenging but important (and mind-numbing) minutiae.  Although as a student I was able to find intellectual pleasures in the most unexpected legal places (tax!),  certain material has the potential to be boring no matter how engaging the teacher and no matter how practical the material.  This contention should in no way be construed as an excuse for bad teaching.  A bad teacher can make the most exciting material dull.  But teachers shouldn't feel (as I sometimes do) that they have to apologize to students for not making every second of every day absolutely scintillating either. 

I've sat in the back of my colleagues' classes--classes which I thought were engaging and well taught--and watched students throughout the classroom on the Internet.  It pains me, because I am sure the same things is going on in my classes.  I worry for the students who can't go a class period without being on the Internet because they haven't developed the ability to be bored.  Practicing law is not always exciting.  Who wants to listen to a client drone on and on?  And sitting in a courtroom for any length of time brings one face-to-face with just how unrealistic courtroom dramas on television are.  For every dramatic moment, there are hours of deadly dull arguments or testimony, but the lawyers involved have to pay absolute attention during these hours nonetheless. 

How do we convey this lesson to students?  Is it something they must learn on their own?  Once, as a summer associate, I was asked to do research on nuclear regulatory issues for a good bit of the summer;  I thought I might slit my wrists from the sheer tedium of it, and yet the topic required every bit of my intellectual ability to understand.  I was shocked by the experience, because it ran completely contrary to my fundamental faith that learning new things is always exciting.  Should my law professors have warned me?  Would I have been able to benefit from the warning?  What should I say to students that won't scare them from the practice of law entirely?  As it currently stands, I tend to address the issue only obliquely.  I am fond of saying to students that I love my job so much that I would do most of it for free, but grading exams and attending committee meetings is something I have to be paid to do.  I also tell them, when we're in the midst of a particularly detailed and tedious topic, that lawyers get paid well (did get paid well?) because they are willing to wade through complexities few people are willing or able to understand.   Is it my place to do more?