During the summer before my first year of law school, I read every book I could find on how to succeed when I got here.  I figured that I should get it right the first time since I have no practical skills, I’ve never hit a golf ball in my life, and I have a terrible time interacting with adults.  

I burned through several books, including Acing Your First Year of Law School, Getting to Maybe, and Starting off Right in Law School.  Although each of these books takes a different approach, they all have one thing in common: they emphasize working your ass off.  Starting off Right, for example, suggests that you read each of the day’s assigned cases twice before thoroughly briefing each of them.  Getting to Maybe, while it was a useful description of the test-taking process, inflated the 3.5 hour law school essay exam into a science worthy of its own liberal arts college department.  The first week of school didn’t help.  Highly esteemed law faculty actually stood in front of lecture halls and told us that to correctly brief cases and prepare for exams, we have to record things like each case’s procedural posture and standard of review– information was never even relevant in Civil Procedure.

All of this advice scared the crap out of me.  For my entire first semester, I read every case once, then read each one again while “book briefing,” using a different color highlighter for each part of the case.  Then, after all of that, I went back through a third time and fully briefed each case.  By the end of first semester I was a law zombie.   If only I’d read this book before coming here.

Juan Doria’s Slacker’s Guide to Law School is a pithy collection of all the conventional wisdom that most law students spend their three years to accumulating.  Like a grizzled law school survivor you run into at the bar, he walks you through the whole law school ritual using his own personal experiences.  He draws on his time at a little-known California law school, and like many law school veterans, he emphasizes that your attitude toward the whole ordeal is what matters rather than a specific method for getting awesome grades.  This is something most of us learn only after flailing in the dark for the first year.  Some things in law school really are worth your time, but many are not.  The critical task is getting over feeling like you have to impale yourself on every small detail.

Doria developed a reputation as a slacker by taking personal time on weekends and avoiding being the guy who answered every question in class:

     After a while … other students would approach me with ease and say stupid little comments like, “Wow, you’re pretty tan.  Were you at the beach again this weekend?”
     “Yeah you pale bastard,” I wanted to respond.  “Of course I went to the beach.  Why the hell wouldn’t I?”
     Or if someone saw me at the library, he might jokingly say: “Hey, is this your first time in here?”
     “Yeah, it is,” I had to bite my lip to keep from saying.  “And it’s probably the last, if I have to run in to douche-bags like you here.”

For some reason I thought these people only existed at Iowa.

Instead of burning yourself out by analyzing every detail in the reading, Doria recommends doing the bare minimum to be able to understand what’s going on.  One section is entitled “Don’t skip class if the professor will notice that you’re missing,” another is called “Go to class if you think that it’s worth your while and it’s the best use of your time.”  In short: get over the idea that everything law school provides you is worth doing.  Large portions of the book guide you through the life you should be having outside of law school.  My favorites include Doria’s experiences with drinking, one involving an outdoor hot tub and projectile vomiting.  He also describes a failed attempt at using Ritalin to study for an exam.

Of course, personal advice has its practical limits.  This book does not have specific information on studying or acing your exams.  For instance, the section on outlining sounds like one of those after-class panel discussions where a group of upper-level students just tell you to “do what works best for you.”  Similarly, Doria advises you “to figure out what kind of outline works best for you.  Personally, I think a median between one and 70 pages is the best bet.  A good outline should lie somewhere between the class syllabus and the textbook.”  But that’s the point of this book: you can ace your exams without turning into a library zombie.  After you read Slacker’s Guide and have tempered that masochistic voice in your head telling you to spend all of your time staring at abook, dive into something like Getting to Maybe, or my favorite, the LEEWS Method.

For these reasons, however, reading this book two-thirds of the way through school won’t be as useful because by that point you have figured most of this out on your own by now.  Of course, there will always be people who churn through law school and emerge the same shut-ins they were at the beginning, but those are the people who wouldn’t read a book with the word “Slacker” in the title anyway.  Instead, this book is for your friends, cousins and college classmates who are just starting the law school ordeal.  It devotes a lot of attention to the LSAT and the admissions process and describes everything in basic terms for the uninitiated.  If nothing else, encourage your pre-law friends to read this book so that life can be more bearable for the next generation of students who have to live and study with them.