In the navy it is boot camp. In many walks of life there is a similar time of trial and initiation, a period when newcomers are forced to be the victims of their own ineptness and when they must somehow master the basic skills of the profession in order to survive. For someone who wants to be a lawyer, that proving time is the first year of law school. There are many obstacles to becoming a successful attorney. Getting into law school these days is far from easy. And following graduation three years later, you must pass the bar exam in your state, find a job, or set out on your own, build and maintain a practice. Yet none of those steps is thought to possess the kind of wholesale drama of the first year of law school. Not only is it a demanding year—the work hugely difficult and seemingly endless, the classroom competition often fierce—but it is also a time when law students typically feel a stunning array of changes taking place within themselves. It is during the first year that you learn to read a case, to frame a legal argument, to distinguish between seemingly indistinguishable ideas; then that you begin to absorb the mysterious language of the law, full of words like estoppel and replevin.
