Law School Film Analysis

My personal reaction to this film left me feeling both intimidated and anxious. The insight on what law school will be like is no easy reality to face. The films main message clearly establishes that law school involves an immense amount of studying, a finite social life, and lastly a stressful lifestyle. The film portrays this message by revealing the true difficulties and challenges that come about in law school through the perspective of the main character, James Hart, who is a student attending Harvard Law School. The message is conveyed effectively because the troubles that Hart encounters while trying to balance his studying and social life exposes how challenging attending law school actually is. I personally agree with the message that …show more content…
The Socratic Method was illustrated in this film by Kingsfield, the professor of Hart’s contract law course. Kingsfield believes that the Socratic Method helps one to analyze the facts, trains the mind and keeps the class constantly thinking. This pedagogical tool for learning the law includes both strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses being: it can slow down the class when someone is called upon and is unable to properly answer the question and also lack of participation from everyone. In the movie, it seemed as if the same students were answering the questions every time while the others stayed under the radar. The Socratic also has its strengths which include: being able to hear other student’s responses, creating class discussion and also keeping the entire class prepared and ready to answer a question at any given …show more content…
I think law school as depicted in the film is both typical and atypical because some aspects seemed standard while others seemed a bit divergent. Most of the atypical aspects seemed that way to me because of the difference in this generation and the generation in the film. I also thought the chaos that took place the week of finals was slightly over exaggerated. To my best understanding law school is no walk in the park, it is far from it. Law school requires a considerable amount of effort and results in sacrificing many aspects in life such as relationships and social activities. If I would have been thrown into the same situation I would have put forth a ton of effort and tried to make the best of the situation by remaining calm and equally preparing for each course test, unlike the study group.
Watching this film had very little effect on my view of law school because I have always had a general idea on how troublesome it truly is. Law school is nothing short of a challenge and if effort lacks, the grades will be negatively affected. This film did however make me fear law school a tad more than I did before because seeing the amount of stress that the students develop first hand is quite