A Much-Laugh Must-Read
by
Mark Drumbl

Book Review:The Law School Trip: The Insider's Guide to Law School by Andrew J. McClurg

I peer into the frazzled faces of the students sitting in the first contracts class of their lives. And, gauging from the five-star "I love it" comments posted on amazon.com by ribald law student readers, I figure that some of the students out there already have read Andrew McClurg's The Law School Trip. Adorned with a psychedelic cover and festooned throughout with plenty of wit, The Law School Trip is a delightful parody on the lawyer-limbo of law school, that necessary rite of passage into lawyerdom.

Just as I try to get students to think in the categories of promises and contracts, offers and acceptances (and appreciate the centrifugal force of the mailbox rule), they create categories of their own to make sense of the law school experience. Now McClurg, a professor at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock Bowen School of Law, has provided a road map for them. His typology of law teachers -- including the body-pierced "Professor formerly known as Ed," the performer, the legend, the strange creature from outer space -- humanizes the professoriat. So, too, has McClurg provided students a road map to understand their first-year comrades-in-arms and to survive the disemboweling effects of the Socratic method. McClurg even takes on the Bluebook -- that bastion of "technical due process," -- its acolyte The Comma, and their enforcers, the law review board, and makes all three warm, fuzzy, and lovable. His tips regarding "leegle righting" are hilarious yet helpful.

The law school community badly needs to laugh. Especially students and teachers involved in that topsy-turvy first year. Laughter is what McClurg's book provides. Lots of laughter. Heaps and mounds of undulating and ululating laughter. Laughter that ranges from the tightly lipped smile when you realize that he is writing about something you previously thought only you had observed, to the hearty guffaw when he takes something everyone has observed but no one ever has made funny. Such as the fact that Hadley v. Baxendale is one of the most boring things ever written. It's true. But at least I've now got McClurg's action-packed rewrite of Hadley v. Baxendale (where Baxendale delays shipping the millshaft because he uses it to thwart a shark attack) to spice up the topic of consequential damages and the limitations thereto.

There's a lot of writing that purports to be legal humor. We've all been impelled to read some of it. We've all been cornered at boring parties and forcibly told some of it. And, frankly, it's not funny. It's stereotypical, ridiculing, and demeaning; it makes a caricature of us all by denying the spirit, generosity, and creativity of our profession. The kind of humor that laughs at us. But McClurg's is strikingly different. McClurg makes the law school experience sparkle and shine. He has the unique ability among satirists to make us laugh with each other, but never at each other.

Folks, this is a must-read. Law schools, assign this as part of a first-year orientation package. Mental health experts, this book has therapeutic karma. And McClurg, you must write more of this!