Category: Advice

This advice applies to most things like your career, your job, choosing the club you hang out , etc!

Wrong. It is possible to be happy in law school, if you pick the right one. I loved it. I adored my classes, my profesors, and my classmates, and I don’t think that I would have had the same experience if I had gone somewhere else. I went to Georgetown, so I can’t really comment on the experience at other schools, but I think that my decision to go there was one of the best I ever made.
I did the Alternative Curriculum, known within the law school by the Roswellesque nickname “Section 3.” That meant that in my first year, my section took roughly the same subjects as everyone else, but re-framed with a more critical, theoretical bent. Think “Democracy and Coercion” instead of Constitutional Law, and “Legal Process and Society” instead of Civil Procedure. That was a good call, for three reasons. First, my fellow students and I had all chosen to do something a little different, and which weeded out the insanely risk-averse students whose lives were governed by fear that they might do the wrong thing. Those guys are less fun to be around. Second, the Section 3 professors had also chosen to step outside the well-worn grooves of the standard first-year curriculum. That correlated with increased levels of zaniness, but also of love for teaching and for their particular subjects. Third, the academic approach suited me (more legal theory, less case law). Programs like Section 3 are rare. Of the top schools, the only similar program I know of is at Yale, whose law school program is just one giant alternative curriculum. But if you get into a school that has one, I highly recommend going.
wronging rights: So You Really Do Want to Go to Law School: What Now?.

I have a post on rules of thumb written in one of my notebooks (The problems of only being able to write in using pen and paper, is you have to type it later, argh).
One of my points is that Rules Of Thumbs are incomplete if they are not accompanied with the bounds that they are effective.

Rationality is a Property of Equilibrium
Some thoughts on rationality and economics, perhaps for a future paper, motivated by the financial panic:
Rationality is a property of equilibrium. By this I mean that rationality is habitual and experience-based and it becomes effective as it becomes embedded in the rules of thumb and collective wisdom of market participants. Rules of thumb approximate rational decision rules as market participants become familiar with an economic environment. Individuals per se are not very rational; shift the equilibrium enough so that the old rules of thumb no longer apply and we are likely to see bubbles, manias, panics and crashes. Significant innovation is thus almost always going to come accompanied with a wave of irrationality. When we shift to a significant, new equilibrium rationality itself is not strong enough to tie down behavior and unmoored by either reason or experience individuals flail about liked naked apes – this is the realm of behavioral economics. Given time, however, new rules of thumb evolve and rationality once again rules but only until the next big innovation arrives.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on January 13, 2009 at 07:20 AM | Permalink
Marginal Revolution: Rationality is a Property of Equilibrium.