A lot of learning about legal rules is learning about where a decisionmaker drew a line, and why. There were some competing values or interests, and a line had to be drawn somewhere: The question is where to draw the line, and if it was drawn in the right place.

To some, this is a really interesting problem. It is about how to address conflicts among competing values. It is about how to operationalize that conflict into legal rules. Super interesting.

To others, it is hopelessly boring. It is technical and small-minded. It doesn't prove which values are true and which are false, but just tries to accommodate them, usually in an off-the-cuff sort of way.

How much you like law school depends a lot on which side of that line you fall.

This is particularly true in class, where professors often try to draw out different views of the problem. They want to get a range of perspectives, and to see where the disagreements are. This can be either awesome or stupid depending on which mindset you have.

If you see line-drawing as interesting, the different views are essential. You need to get the competing values and perspectives out there in the open. You need to hear the expressions of the different values and to see how they might impact where the line should be drawn.

If you see line-drawing as boring, then hearing the different views is silly. You're just hearing classmates mouth off with their opinions, and some of those opinions will be totally wrong. Seems like a waste of your time, or even insulting, to have to hear wrong opinions.

The basic difference, I think, is between seeing law as an accommodator of societal values and a decider of societal values. Law school largely teaches who decides how to accommodate the values and how they do it, not what societal values are right or wrong. /end