Building Community

In cutting section sizes, the law faculty wasn’t only interested in improving the school’s academic environment, but also hoped to improve the school’s social atmosphere—eliminating the school’s reputation for a backbiting hyper-competitive culture.

Professors who serve as section leaders not only have a more manageable number of students, but were given money to arrange social events and extracurricular activities for the section.

Activities held this year varied from group karaoke to a Mexican dinner feast.

Students say that the seven section leaders have taken different attitudes in leading these “law colleges,” but that in all cases the efforts have brought at least some improvement.

And professors say they hope this year’s changes can be improved upon.

“They have worked, but we’re still not sure how to make them work best,” Rakoff says.

Altschuler says that he’s sure the sections always served as a base for forming friendships, but that with the smaller sections and the emphasis on their social aspect, they’ve probably fulfilled this role even more this year.

And while the law school likely can never create communities on the scope of the undergraduate Houses, Altschuler says he supports even the school’s more limited efforts at community building through the sections.

Both he and Alperowicz suggested that second-year students could serve as mentors for their former sections, thus maintaining continuity and providing first-years an added resource.

In any case, students say that the first-year culture was nothing like what they had been led to fear by the school’s brutal reputation, as immortalized by Scott Turow’s One L.

Alperowicz says she is very pleased with her experience.

“I think [the first year] probably always got a worse rap than it deserved, but I also think that the changes they’ve made this year have made the experience better,” she says.

Persistent Problems

Not all of this year’s changes have been met with universal acclaim. The biggest curricular change—a revamped introductory legal writing and research course—has students calling for further reform.