For starters, I am confused.
Since entering law school, I’ve noticed there’s been a lot of free food. And I don’t mean snacks. Catering. Business catering. The Wednesday coffee cart, the Thursday Coffeehouse, the frequent lunch-and-learns, and sometimes galas or balls. We are being fed all the time, and it has somehow become an expectation. If you want law students to show up at your events, you better have food. And it better be good. Sorry, chips and dips won’t cut it.
I learned that for some of the swankier catering, the budget is usually a five-figure number for two hours of mingling on the faculty floor. We are getting so used to catering that good food matters, in the sense that there’s an expectation of prestige and luxury for an event to make an impression for law students. And yet good food is so recurring that it matters to nobody. Nobody cares about the food itself. It has primarily become a signifier for the sponsor’s prestige and a pretext for students to go attend and network. It usually works like this “Hey are you coming to this event at 5 PM?” “umm I’m not sure” “well I heard they are really good food. You don’t want to miss it.” “you know what? I’m going.”
This surprised me somewhat because I did my undergrad at McGill, in a liberal arts program. I remember we had food maybe two or three times in our entire four-year program. There were many things I was envisioning about law school when writing the application essay, but the abundant free food never came to my mind.
This contradiction of the abundant free food was documented in one of our Foundation readings. In Coffee House by Manderson and Turner, studies show that even when students “turn their back to the suits,” openly disapproving of corporate culture while claiming to only go for the free food at the Thursday Coffeehouses, they are nonetheless influenced by their environment. To Manderson and Turner, the fancy networking events serve as training to acculturate students to the lifestyle of a professional lawyer early on, so they feel at ease when entering a law firm. During the process, students will gradually normalize and adopt the demeanor of the “suits.” They ultimately become one in spirit.
While plucking grapes from a meticulously-engineered tower of fruit & cheese in the faculty atrium, I can’t help but ponder, how much money is at stake that it is worthwhile to give law students non-stop food, from their first year, on a weekly basis? Why we law students, and not others, need to be fed all the time? As law students, what are we getting into exactly?
I feel that these are the questions I am not supposed to have or that having those questions suggest that I don’t belong in these spaces, or maybe I should just pretend that I intuitively understand these spaces as if I was born into one.
But the truth is, it is not the food per-se I’m uncomfortable with, it is that I feel the law school closing in on me. The faculty teaches us doctrines and theories as much as it seeks to change the way we think, talk, dress, move our body, and relate to one another, through repeated acculturation and immersion in simulated professional environments.
While I am experiencing the environment pushing me, one of the few things I can do is to take note of the push, name it, hold it, and try my best to understand and unpack it.
I might come to tolerate wine & cheese and many other associated rituals, or I might never. Luckily, there is no one way to do law school. But since I am in law school, it is my opportunity to study the rituals, understand why people do them the way they do, and build community with others who are curious to critically deconstruct the culture of law school and the people in it.