I was supposed to write this post last week, but you know how it is. Busy, busy, busy. And in the grand scheme of things, who cares? The universe is billions of years old, so what’s an extra week? And a week wouldn’t really matter at all except that last week was Halloween, and Halloween got me thinking about masks. Masks and Dionysos. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: what in the pumpkins does any of that have to do with law school? But sit tight; I’m getting there. You’ll see.

Everybody knows Dionysos. The god of wine, madness, and somewhat oddly, pinecones. But nobody actually gets to see the god. That’s the funny thing. Dionysos is always masked, always appearing as something he is not. On the one hand, that’s pretty typical for the Greeks. Mortal eyes cannot gaze upon the divine form and all that jazz. But on the other hand, Dionysos is unique in that regard. You don’t see him; you just feel him looking at you, like a disappointed grandmother. And even though you can’t look at him, when Dionysos looks at you, you feel it right down to your soon-to-be dancing toes. That’s when you learn about a whole new dimension of yourself. 

Just like law school. (See? Told you so…)

In less than a month, I’ll take my final fall semester final exams. My final exams in my final fall semester. Final fall finals. Whatever. And then I’ll do it all over again in the spring. Just with different finals. And then graduation, and then the bar, and then…what? I’m a lawyer, just like that? Doesn’t feel that way. 

Because I feel like I’ve been wearing a ‘Lawyer’ mask all through law school. A perpetual, imposter attorney filled with Latin phrases and portions of the tax code. The bar exam just makes the pretense legal. It surprises me, too, to feel like an imposter. After all, I’ve been in or around educational institutions of one kind or another since I was six years old. I honestly don’t know what I was doing before that. Just goofing around, I suspect. But the point is, I know school. Or I thought I did. And law school was supposed to be just a different kind of school. Sure, it’s a professional program and not a straight-line academic degree, but what’s the difference? School is school. I get school. Nope. Not this one.

Law school is a different animal. Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s all fun and games until you get up close. Then it’s teeth and slobber and “I thought you were a sheep!” That’s law school. But in my first fall finals – fall finals the first – I still thought I had a sheep. I studied different “subjects” of law, learned “about” different laws. And I studied the ins and outs of Respondeat Superior (I might’ve left out some vowels. Hard to keep track.) and other “types” of liability. I did all this so that later on, after I learned “about” the laws, I could “become” a lawyer. I wasn’t one now, didn’t know how to be one, and hopefully (I thought) learning these laws and law-related things would add up to being a “lawyer.” One day. 

Fast forward to next fall’s finals, fall finals the second, and I was still doing it wrong, just less so. It hit me sometime before 2L that I wasn’t learning “about” the law. That’s not what was happening. No, what I was learning, whether I knew it or not, was the law law. The actual law. The ones that real lawyers go out and argue about and…you know…do stuff with. 

So, for 2L I tried on a different lawyer mask, the “I’m not a lawyer, but I play one in law school” mask. Since I was learning the same law that the real lawyers were using, I figured I might as well try to act like one. I stopped learning “about” the law, and I started thinking about how to apply it. My textbooks started to look like instruction manuals. I didn’t need or want any longer an academic understanding of the law. What I wanted to know instead was how to inflict it on other people. I still wasn’t a lawyer, but I started to be able to see it just over the horizon.

Now I’m a 3L. Finally, my final fall of Finals. Fall finals the third. And I finally feel like my lawyer mask fits. Loosely, but even so. Now, I barely read my textbooks and when I do, it’s just for guidance and insight. The textbook is only one among a variety of sources of information. I spend most of my time reading the tax code, case law, or using the same legal databases lawyers use out in practice. And it’s funny, I’m not all that invested in how I do on my exams. The grade matters, no doubt, but what matters more is that I really, really need to know this stuff, and I need to learn it now, so I don’t screw up and harm a firm or another lawyer or most importantly, a client. 

And it hit me, I suppose, while thinking about Halloween and Dionysos, that I had it all wrong. It wasn’t about seeing myself as a lawyer. It was about being seen as a lawyer. That’s what I missed in 1L and 2L, and what (I think) I understand now. You don’t “become” a lawyer. Law school doesn’t turn you into a lawyer with the wave of a gavel. Instead, law school looks at you as a lawyer from day 1, and it just takes you a while to notice. It takes time to adjust to the feeling of being seen as a lawyer. But when you do, you feel it right down to your soon-to-be licensed toes. And though it still feels like a mask to me, a lawyer is what others expect to see when they look at me. And that’s how I start to see myself.

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Michael Deere is a third-year student at BC Law. Contact him at deerm@bc.edu.