Post 1.1 Notes on an unranked ledger, five verticals, and the mechanics of the federal bench.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The legal profession, more than most, is a series of these stories, neatly bound and heavily cited, designed to convince us that a specific sequence of choices leads inevitably to a specific brand of grace. The story told in the Northeast, or among the concentric circles of the elite, is clean: you attend the right college, you sit for the LSAT, you enter the stone arches of a T14, and by your second year, a federal judge marks you as one of their own. It is an industry built on the quiet comfort of pedigree, where the margins are thought to be fixed, the outcomes predetermined by the name on your diploma. But when you look closely at the machine, you begin to see that it is less an immutable monument and more a collection of habits, inefficiencies, and historical accidents. I am looking at it from an outsider’s vintage. I am entering Michigan State University College of Law, a solid, respected institution, but one that the gatekeepers in Was...