Singularity Law

Law students (and virtually every other kind of student) is under enormous pressure to specialize sooner and sooner. While I specialized early when I was in college, today I see doing so as an enormous error.

Law students need to know a lot about a lot of different areas, not just of law, but history, business, literature, culture, languages, etc. This breadth of learning should start in college, continue through law school, and into practice.

There is a wonderful quote from Vladimir Nabokov, Russian author of Lolita (and many other works):

The more things we know the better equipped we are to understand any one thing and it is a burning pity that our lives are not long enough and not sufficiently free of annoying obstacles, to study all things with the same care and depth as the one we now devote to some favorite subject or period. And yet there is a semblance of consolation within this dismal state of affairs: in the same way as the whole universe may be completely reciprocated in the structure of an atom, . . . an intelligent and assiduous student [may] find a small replica of all knowledge in a subject he has chosen for his special research. . . . and if, upon choosing your subject, you try diligently to find out about it, if you allow yourself to be lured into the shaded lanes that lead from the main road you have chosen to the lovely and little known nooks of special knowledge, if you lovingly finger the links of the many chains that connect your subject to the past and the future and if by luck you hit upon some scrap of knowledge referring to your subject that has not yet become common knowledge, then will you know the true felicity of the great adventure of learning….

(Quoted in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, by Brian Boyd.)

My son is getting ready to go to college in the fall. He wants to be a lawyer, and is already trying to find classes (as a freshman) that will “better equip” him for law school. I am telling him that he needs to take a broad, liberal arts education, which will give him the breadth and depth of understanding of human culture, interaction, philosophy, society, history, etc. This will give him the grounding he needs to understand how law works in context. But I can see it is going to be a battle.