An Osgoode and U of T Law student go head-to-head on the topic of friendships
Point:
By Lara Zarum (1L, Osgoode)
I figured it would be easy to write about why it’s important to have friends outside of law school, considering I have no friends in law school. Friends? In this economy? At the moment, my closest friend is my dog.
We didn’t ask to start law school in the middle of a pandemic. We didn’t choose to attend classes over Zoom, where our potential besties are stuck in tiny boxes — floating heads debating the separation of powers, the remoteness doctrine and the necessity defense. Log off, switch windows, read, eat, sleep, log on, repeat. If anyone has managed to make friends in this barren wasteland where human connection goes to die, good on you.
Even if we were able to physically go to class, grab a coffee or a drink with classmates, head to the to library together, hold hands and braid flowers into each other’s hair in a grassy meadow, I would still advocate for holding onto the friends you had before you came to law school, and — to the extent your time and energy allows — making new friends outside of it.
Lawyers, and by extension law students, can be an arrogant bunch. We’re high achievers who are used to being at the top of the class. We’re type-As, eager to point out a typo or clarify a muddy instruction. We are, to put it in humble terms, the future masters of the universe, armed with the kind of knowledge that’s synonymous with power.
This is precisely why it’s so important that we maintain real connections to people outside the profession. To be blunt, we are not so special, and “normie” friends help keep us honest. This is true whether or not you belong to the professional class. Workers in every industry form ties based on the kinds of things only their fellow journeymen can appreciate. If you ever held a job as a barista, bartender, or retail salesperson, you know what I’m talking about. The eye-rolls at rude customers, frustration over malfunctioning equipment, aching feet from standing all day — these experiences function as social adhesives just as much as participating in a mock trial or collaborating on a factum does. Maintaining friendships outside of law school gives you a wider perspective on the challenges facing working people of all stripes.
As future lawyers, we need a wide perspective on the world. It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole trying to parse a dense paragraph in a Supreme Court decision or interpret a vague statute. But it’s harder to balance this nuts-and-bolts expertise with the bigger picture of what lawyers do. No matter what area of the law you’re interested in, keeping close ties to people outside the world of law can remind us of this larger context. A friend lamenting her unpredictable earnings driving for Uber gives texture to scholastic debates about labour law in the gig economy. A conversation over drinks with a friend who works as an engineer might yield invaluable insight into the legal challenges of transitioning Canada’s economy from oil and gas to sustainable resources.
On top of these contextual advantages, friends outside law school can help keep us sane at a time when I suspect many of us are drowning in boredom and despair. Life these days largely consists of reading cases and logging onto Zoom. Reading the news is probably not the escape you’re craving. A conversation with a friend who has no skin in the cutthroat game of law school can be a true relief, if only for a moment.
Having said all that, I’m not sure I really accept the notion that we should think of law-school friends as belonging to a separate category than the rest. There’s no need to hold an us-versus-them mentality about our friendships — the legal profession is adversarial enough. To paraphrase a self-help book with an embarrassing title I once wept into during my office job lunch break: we’re all just people. There’s no way we’re going to get through this year, let alone two more, without the people who boost us up when we’re down. My advice at this point is to do whatever it takes to keep yourself motivated and engaged. Friends — be they classmates, co-workers, or canines — are a crucial part of that equation.
Counterpoint:
By Ivy Xu (1L, U of T Faculty of Law)
Friendships are, almost by definition, valuable. In an ideal world, we would keep all of them. But law school does not afford the luxury of time for attending every virtual gathering or responding to every late-night rant. The question of whether we should maintain non-law friends must therefore be framed in a comparative lens: with a given amount of time and energy, should you invest in maintaining non-law connections or enhancing your law school friendships?
We rely on our classmates for a lot: notes, outlines, counseling service, and relatable memes. It is a cliché, but professional connections and life-long friendships start at law school. The pandemic makes this harder, but this difficulty is easily overcome by the mutual recognition that we need each other. My classmates and I have gone on socially-distant walks, held Netflix Parties, and gossiped during Zoom classes (and researched if private messages are visible to hosts).
There is a perception that law school is full of Type A personalities, and your only breathing space is non-law friendships. Even if this were true — and I believe it isn’t — complaining to non-law friends is not a sustainable coping strategy. I may burn them out before they fully understand why I need to outline every case before an exam. In comparison, I actually find people in the law school more likely to relate to how much I care about grades, for example. Ultimately, we are in the same program and same profession for the long haul, and there is an incentive for even competitive people to build mutual support — even if it’s just for their own benefits.
I also doubt how much effort is required to maintain non-law connections. We enjoy catching up with old friends, but this does not require substantial time commitment on a regular basis. Fortunately, COVID-19 has to some extent normalized out-of-the-blue catchups: I reached out to my travel buddies from exchange and a high school friend asked how I was doing. Friends don’t disappear when you start law school. On the contrary, friends who slip away merely because you get caught up with school may not be worth maintaining anyway.
The belief that we must be intentional with our friend circle perhaps reflects a contemporary sense of anxiety common to our age group: what if we are going through a quarter-life crisis starting with the attrition of friends? This is perhaps more of a problem for millennials in full-time jobs; in law school, most of us are interacting with a lot more people of our own age. Law school is also arguably more diverse in experiences and interests than a team or department in an average workplace. We might have lost some non-law friends, but we could easily make new friends in law school.
Although non-law friends can provide perspectives from outside the profession, I wonder if those tend to differ significantly from our own. In law school, we are a self-selected group with a set of shared traits: we enjoy arguing or advocating for social justice (or making money). Your current friend group is just as likely to be self-selective with similar backgrounds and interests. In other words, constructing a “diverse” circle of friends does not automatically save you from an insulated mentality or help you retain the sense of humility important for the profession. Some people in law school have to balance part-time jobs to pay tuition and the fact that such struggles are not openly discussed does not preclude introducing such perspectives in classrooms or private conversations. What we learn from friends — within or outside law school — is still up to us.
In fact, I disagree that there is anything intrinsically unique about being in law school that requires a different approach to friendships. When I first received this Point/CounterPoint topic, I wondered if it implied an unjustifiable amount of self-regard. If I pursued a Master of Arts degree, would I be forced to make a decision about friends outside my new program? Probably not. And law school friends are not somehow objectively more important than non-law ones. But you naturally gain and lose friends over time. We prioritize law-school friends because we can relate better and frankly, we need each other to survive another weird semester online.