Saket Vora

Menaka,  friend of mine in Hindi class, invited us to the Stanford Law School Musical – an annual event produced by students, with special appearances by law school staff and faculty. Menaka graduated from UNC in 2005 and so she’s a 3L — just a month away from graduating. Amit and I joined her at Old Pro to watch the Carolina game before leaving at the half to Kresge Auditorium.

I knew pretty much no one there — the law school and engineering school are so far apart — and even from a housing standpoint the law students seem to be  characteristically clustered much closer together. Overall, it was an eye opening experience. There was a good mix of 1Ls, 2Ls, and 3Ls, but clearly there was a party atmosphere. The Stanford Law School is on a semester system, so they finish in a month. For the 1Ls and 2Ls, its just about finalizing their job. For the 3Ls, they are done with school but the bar exam is still too far to worry about. Combine that with the very recent shift towards a High/Pass/Fail grading system, you could sense the mental burden on most of the students that night (ie, little to none). 

The musical itself exceed all expectations — easily 5+ months in the making. Featured a large cast of around 30 people, though there were about a dozen main characters. The plot revolved around the idea that the Stanford Business School was closed due to the recent economic crisis and because the 2Ls aren’t graded anymore, they have nothing to complain about so they all left the Law School.  One student getting a joint JD/MBA (in real life he hangs around a lot of B-school folks and wears the preppy popped collar) suggests that the MBA students move to the Law School. Being good B-school students, they promptly take over the Law School, causing a band of law students to go on a quest to find some way to kick them out and save the Law School. They discover a cryptic note written on the Stanford Law School charter that turns out was a note by Benjamin Harrison, one of the Law School founders. They seek the counsel of the portrait gallery (which really exists on the 2nd floor and Menaka says features all these old white dudes that no one knows who they are) and the talking portraits (ala Harry Potter) point the students to a secret note hidden in Harrison’s secret archive. When the law school heroes finally track it down, they find it speaks to the law’s role in ensuring justice in society and how love of the law is required….something the B-school gang found repulsive so they left in disgust. 

Peppered throughout were jabs that are to be expected — poking fun at certain professors, common experiences of all students, current events, etc. There were cameos from a well loved professor, from the dean of the students, and even from the head of the law school himself, who giddily recounts how he decided to do exactly the opposite of what the law school faculty council suggested he do. All throughout the show there were cheers and applauses — the crowd was absolutely into it. The 3Ls we were sitting by were gone by the intersession….as the show ended I saw an near empty bottle of Maker’s Mark and several empty wine bottles. 

The writing was terrific — these guys really knew what they were doing. There was a whole scene with the 2Ls on their Oregon Trail upon leaving the law school, complete with references to hunting buffalo, fording a river, and dying of dysentary. There was a hilarious scene featuring the original Willy Wonka and three oompa-loompas (representing Google search servers), with perfectly recreated oopma-loompa dances too!

Between scenes as the stage hands got the next scene ready, the band would cover songs from the last decade that had nearly the whole audience singing along to — the real iconic songs that everyone knew. Practically everyone in the audience is 24-29 years old, so both pop culture and music references were common experiences — really smart production there. Throwbacks to classic rock were done really well too, like this one with Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing.

 Just a State school boy
did undergrad at Illinois
he drove a piece of shit car to Stanford Law
Just an Ivy girl
on the way to rule the world
she flew a private jet out to Stanford Law

[famous professor signs a girl's arm] 

Sitting in the Law Cafe
it smells of weed and Tanqueray….
…read their books, it goes on and on and on and on

1Ls, no grades,
spending all their nights at Rudy’s (a bar)
….
so much potential, they got the world in front of them
but they’re all in Vegas and Tahoe!

Even for someone like me with an interest in law issues and with only a passing understanding of law school (thanks to Win), I was laughing constantly during the show — which is a real testament to the writers.

As a parting note — it was eye opening to see the level of community and camaraderie on display in the auditorium. It was just tremendous — really stirred the jealously pot.  The law school class size is ~170, but at least for a year it seems that the curriculum is mostly the same for everyone — it gives you a chance to get to know so many people in your class and you’ve all got common experiences to share and draw upon. With the engineering graduate program, everyone ends up rapidly specializing and very quickly your pool of ‘comrades’ shrinks to one or two dozen, at most. And in EE @ Stanford, this starts happening by your 2nd quarter. I hear that the GSB tracks closer to the law school in that regard. And judging from what I know with medical school, it’s probably like that too. Is this something unique to ‘professional’ schools only? Is it the type and age of people who attend these professional schools? 

For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine what I saw happening in an engineering school…and that’s a shame.