It’s time for another blog.  As I have related previously, this is my final semester as an undergraduate student at the University of Oklahoma.  I have also stated that my next step is law school.  All of my friends who are now in law school have approached studying for the LSAT and getting into law schools in different ways.  I’m going to relate to you my method.

I’ve known that I’ve wanted to be a lawyer since I was in junior high school.  Strangely enough that decision coincided with the harsh reality that my previous profession of choice, professional baseball player, wasn’t going to work out.  The seventy mile per hour fastball, with no rotation, just wasn’t going to cut it.

I thought about what things I enjoyed doing, other than sports.  I had already grown out of the dinosaur hunter/paleontologist phase.  The novelty of The Land Before Time and Jurassic Park had worn off.  Also the fact that I had gone on several fossil hunting trips, only to find that after hours of hiking in the hot sun I didn’t find the fully intact skeleton of a T-rex (which I had been expecting to find), but rather one pathetic looking, broken fossilized shell, didn’t help.  That motivated me to pursue a different profession.

One thing that I did love to do while growing up, was argue with my parents.  After a little bit of research I found a profession which would allow me to get paid for arguing and would put me on stage so I could compete.  It’s not simply good enough to know that you won.  You want other people to know that you won as well.  My desire to become a lawyer was born.

In high school I became fascinated with the argumentation abilities (rhetoric) of certain philosophers, namely the sophists and Socrates.  I decided to major in philosophy in college.  With philosophy I was constantly faced with incredibly powerful arguments, which I would agree with, only to see them shredded to pieces by another philosopher later on down the road.  I wanted to learn how to do this.

The ways in which philosophy has helped me the most, in terms of getting ready for law school, have been the study of philosophical arguments, and the study of logic.  Philosophy is the study of things about which we have information, and yet which we are unable to put through the scientific method and either prove or disprove.  This can make philosophy a tough pill to swallow for people who feel the need to absolutely know things.  Philosophy is also very good at throwing into question things that we take for granted that we have knowledge of, such as the world around us.  This may be a painful process for you to go through if you already think that you have everything figured out, but imagine the power that you would have in the court room, if you were able to create an argument that threw doubt on even the littlest, most basic things that other people wouldn’t think to challenge.

Being able to use and understand logic allows you to formulate these arguments in sound and valid ways.  It also allows you to tear to pieces arguments which are not sound or valid.  This is another tool that is invaluable in the legal profession.  In fact law schools put so much emphasis on logic that it’s the basis of their law school admissions test.

How well this method of approaching law school works for me remains to be seen.  I will note, however, that in terms of the majors which are typically used as a pre-law, philosophy students do the best on their LSAT scores.  I hope that this rings true for me.  Time will tell sooner, rather than later, as I’m taking the LSAT in just under three weeks.

For now I’m continuing to sharpen my logic skills through practicing logic games and reading philosophic arguments (they are much harder than what you encounter on the reading section of the LSAT, so I’ll stick with them).  As long as I can remain focused I’m very confident that I’ll be able to blow this test away.

Best, and Boomer Sooner!