Good 🧵 . I should say that I’ve always appreciated that my law school required 1Ls to take a statutory class. Ours was baby tax (individual income tax). Reading statutes is a very practical skill, especially for those of us with no interest in litigation.
Agreed. It's also a crucial skill for people who have an idea that their endgame might be something other than working at a law firm, whether it's in a formal inhouse counsel or a business role.
I decided biglaw wasn't for me after the 2009 crash and transitioned away from firm work. I currently have a business title, but everyone here also knows that I'm a lawyer. Half the legal questions I get are things I learned in Corps class, and the other half are statutory interpretation.
No one wants to argue about various shades of interpretation here. They want to know what the rules are so that they can follow them. I suspect that ends up being a common role for lawyers who aren't working in firms.
I was a corporate paralegal in the 80’s before I went to lawschool. I learned how to read state corporate statutes really well. I also spent a lot of time on the phone with Secretary of State offices because the lawyers hated to seem like they didn’t know an answer and made me call. Good training.
Oh, that is a good background. The transition from law school to work can be odd without something like that, because you go from a place where so many classes focus on different shades of meaning to one where a lot of people just want a definite answer about what they can and can't do.
I would love to have Federal Income Tax as a 1L course! (Though I don’t know what we’d remove from the current 1L curriculum.) How did it go over?
We loved it. Everyone was surprised by how much we loved the class, since we went in with great trepidation. Tax!! It helped that we had a professor with a VERY dry sense of humor. It was one semester and we didn’t have crim law as a 1L.