Words by Janhavi Gosavi (she/her)
CW: Transphobia
To those who have never walked its hallowed halls, Law School is both ostentatious and illusive. A cool kids club to some, a pretentious prison to others.
Students who have never touched a LAWS paper with a ten foot pole have their own ideas about what it means to be a Law student. Assumptions and accusations run wild: Law School is an elitist, competitive, toxic, and cliquey place full of rich, white, poncy brats who turn their noses up at other degrees.
So what is the culture of Law School? I spoke to a variety of current students and alumni to try to whittle down the answer to this complicated question.
What mechanisms give Law School such a unique culture when compared to other faculties at VUW?
Longevity, location, and student societies.
The Bachelor of Laws (LLB) is one of the longest undergraduate degrees at VUW, typically taking at least four years to complete. Most Law students do a conjoint degree or double degree, which usually takes five to six years to complete. The LLB is also highly prescribed; until students get to their third or fourth year of study, all courses are compulsory. This means Law students are in the same classes with the same peers for multiple years, affording them time and proximity to get to know one another.
Manraj Singh Rahi is the current president of Victoria University of Wellington Law Students’ Society (VUWLSS). He explains that the location of Law School isolates Law students from the rest of the University, which contributes to the perceived clique-y culture. The Law School has been situated in the Old Government Buildings since 1996, which have a rich political and colonial history. Walking into Law School, the air is thick with legacy and self importance. “Law students also have a common room - its very high school prefect-y vibes,” Manraj points out.
Law School’s student societies including representative groups for Māori, Pasifika, Asian, and Rainbow students, and the Feminist Law Society. They all maintain a busy calendar full of social, academic, sporting, and career events. Long standing social events include Law Ball, Cocktail Night, and Law Camp, where second year students get wasted and bond. Certain halls of residence such as Weir House also have a history of attracting Law-hopefuls. These traditions create consistent and meaningful engagement amongst Law students and allow for a ‘culture’ to exist, thrive, and be passed down.
What kind of relationship do Law students have with one another?
Nathan Tse graduated with a BCOM/LLB(Hons) from VUW in 2019 and is a solicitor at Russell McVeagh. He was the 2020 president of the New Zealand Law Students’ Association (NZLSA), and the 2019 president of VUWLSS.
Nathan says the culture of law school is “set by the people” and describes the people as “peculiar”.
Nathan picked up Law in his second year of university and found it to initially be “quite an intimidating environment” for shy or reserved students. In his first year at Law School, Nathan didn't make any friends. “All my friends from the halls that studied Law were the year ahead of me, and the Law students in my year had their own cliques from high school or from the halls,” he said.
Being a lawyer can be conflated with being outgoing, charismatic, bold, and even brash. He wonders if these perceptions attract Type A personalities who feel the need to be “on” 100% of the time.
He recognises that this stereotype was mostly untrue, and that even those “on” personalities were “genuinely nice people” who were easy to talk to because “they do the talking for you”.
Many interviewees agreed that surviving the heavy academic load and mental pressure of Law School created strong friendships and comradery between students. Interviewees also emphasised how involvement in student societies had been instrumental to their wellbeing.
Caleb Turnbull is one of the current co-presidents of the Pasifika Law Students’ Society (PLSS) and says the friendships he’s formed there are the main reason he’s stuck with Law. He’s immersed himself within the Pasifika and Māori community at Law School, which he describes as “really positive” and void of competition. Caleb explains that “most of us stick together because it's slightly less of a safe space outside of our cultural community” and that it's easier for them to navigate Law School together because they’re “naturally collaborative people”.
Molly McCarthy graduated with an LLB/BA from VUW in 2015. She now works as an independent barrister at the Woodward Street Chambers.
Molly said the best thing she got out of Law School was “going through baptism by fire” with her mates. After graduating, they were able to laugh over unifying experiences, like how they thought Professor Grant Morris would be “the decider of their futures”.
Molly spoke about the importance of maintaining balance while studying Law. Although Molly befriended a lot of Law students while attending Weir House, her closest friends at Law School weren’t involved in VUWLSS and had “one foot in and one foot out of Law School”.
What makes Law so competitive?
One of the cornerstones of Law School’s culture is its perceived competitiveness. The narrative that students are in competition with each other is established before they even enter Law School.
When Molly came to VUW’s open day in 2008, it was emphasised to prospective students that while enrollments for first year law were very high, only 300 students were accepted into second year. She attended a lecture about Law run by Professor Grant Morris and his research assistant, a second year student who already had a Russel McVeagh scholarship lined up. The research assistant was shown off as a model student and Molly felt like the message was “if you can't be like her, why are you here?”
Competitiveness is also embedded into different phases of the LLB.
First year students are placed in direct competition with one another to get into second year Law. Several interviewees spoke of Grant Morris’ infamous warning, which he used to deliver on the first lecture of every LAWS121 course: “Look to your right, look to your left. Only one of you will make it into next year.”
Molly deliberately did not spend much time at Law School because she did not like the culture. “People kept asking about grades and working out where you stood compared to them.” From his experience in NZLSA, Nathan learned that other universities’ Law Schools had a worse competitive culture than VUW—“you hear of stories of students at other Law Schools stealing each others’ notes”.
As Law School places so much value on academic excellence, Claire Downey, one of the current co-directors of Rainbow Law, “felt like crap” when having to repeat papers. Repeating some first year papers left Claire out of swing with her original year group, knocking her confidence and making it harder for her to participate. Now in her final years of study, Claire has secured an internship and feels she “turned out alright”. She points out how “students can get all the way up to electives and still fail a paper like Ethics.” Repeating papers is common at Law School, but not enough students speak openly about it.
Once students make it to second year, they're competing to get a clerkship, get into Honours, and become a tutor or research assistant.
Nathan said that students often learned about career opportunities through VUWLSS events. These events were given naming rights by a sponsor. Typically only big corporate firms could afford the going rate of sponsorship. As a result, most students would apply for highly competitive clerk spaces at big firms, further perpetuating the idea that to be a Law student was to be in a constant rat race.
Nathan says the whole system is “built on meritocracy”. Only the top 30 or so students in each penultimate year are offered entry to the Honours programme, which comes with privileges of 24 hour access to the Law School, access to an office, and the ability to work closely with faculty. He pointed out the Honours board was filled with “names of predominantly white, ex-private school students [...] none of which addresses the underlying privilege of most students who make it into second year law.”
Why are privilege and elitism synonymous with Law School?
Nathan wasn’t the only one to call out private school kids for influencing the culture of Law School.
Sasha Borissenko is a New Zealand journalist who received her LLB from the University of Otago in 2012 and has extensively reported on the law industry.
She attended Knox College at Otago University in 2007-2008, where she says “private school kids brought their private school culture” of misogynistic, patriarchal values. She became close friends with many law students who attended private schools, but recognised that “Law School is privilege personified”. She even recalls students wearing suits to class. She loved her time at Law School and maintained that the culture of privilege wasn’t the school’s problem, it was to do with the kinds of students it attracted.
Sam Uffindell, a National MP, has made headlines after his history of violence while attending King’s College and the University of Otago resurfaced. This has sparked national conversations about the culture of private schools and the privilege they breed. Private school kids are not inherently bad people, but their overrepresentation in Law School contributes to the conception that law studies are only for the wealthy and privileged.
Manraj says the culture is changing. “Not all students are from Kings and Auckland Grammar anymore, not everyone’s parent is a judge”. He also maintains that to brand all Law students as coming from privilege is to dismiss the work that Ngā Rangahautira and PLSS have done to make Law School a more diverse space.
What kind of relationship do Law students have with faculty?
Unless involved in a rep group, students and alumni said they had minimal direct contact with lecturers.
In her time at Law School, Molly attended all her lectures and found it was hard to approach the faculty “unless you were a star student”.
Claire echoed Molly’s sentiment. She said that while the faculty is “pretty amazing on the whole”, she felt she was only doing “averagely well” at law and wasn’t worth the lecturer’s time if she wasn’t “the smartest or loudest person in the room”. She added, “nine of out ten times, the people who feel entitled to taking up a lecturer’s time after class are cis het white men.”
In Caleb’s experience, the faculty “did their best to help out Māori and Pasifika” and were good with giving feedback and granting extensions. William Morrison, the other co-president of PLSS, said that while PLSS did not previously have the best relationship with faculty, Professor Petra Butler maintained a great relationship with them as the current Acting Dean of Law.
William said that faculty felt inaccessible in the early years of Law as “brown students feel more whakamā [than other students] to reach out”. But he added that this inaccessibility was “a student mentality” which people grew out of further along their LLB.
Does the culture of law school accurately reflect the profession of law?
On the whole, Molly did not believe the culture of Law School was an accurate reflection of the culture of the legal profession in Aotearoa. She says the cliques that existed during her time at Law School don't exist in the profession itself.
After graduating and entering the workforce, Molly also realised there were so many ways of practising law and using an LLB that were not limited to mainstream corporate firms. The perception of limited job opportunities became just that—a perception. She no longer felt like she needed to “do her best since day dot, otherwise the doors will close on her”.
Nathan found the high-pressure demands of his LLB to reflect the demands of clients in legal practice, but said the competitiveness and elitism was unique to Law School. “I don’t see anything for me and my colleagues to compete for—we’re teammates.”
How is the culture changing?
Manraj is very proud of the recent work VUWLSS and other student societies have done to improve the culture of Law School.
The phrase “look to your left, look to your right, only one of you will make it into next year” is now banned by the Law School, and Manraj points to previous faculty members like Dr Carwyn Jones who have pushed to make first year Law less competitive. VUWLSS also now hosts a ‘Careers In Focus’ panel, which exposes students to careers in small firms and prevents them from exclusively fixating on competitive jobs in big corporate firms.
In recent years, VUWLSS has made a determined push for diversity within their executive; from the four most recent presidents, three have been POC and two have been women.
A powerful moment for Manraj was when an alumna he had invited to speak at a careers event admitted to him that she had her reservations about attending a VUWLSS event. At her time at Law School, VUWLSS was full of “white privileged men from Kings College who wore Country Road jumpers”, but she was pleased to see how diverse the current VUWLSS executive was.
VUWLSS has new positions on their executive that focus on equity and wellbeing. They also offer non-alcoholic tickets for the ball; cheaper tickets which cater to non-drinkers and dismantle the idea that to attend a law school event is to get wasted.
However Covid-19 has meant current first, second, and third year law students feel disconnected from Law School as they haven’t been able to attend as many events as older students. Manraj notices that the once-full common room now hosts a few stragglers at best—it's disheartening.
Claire says that Law School is still home to bigotry and homophobia. She recalls hearing transphobic opinions being shared in class and remembers lecturers who have made snide comments about pronoun usage.
But she also believes the culture of Law School is becoming more welcoming to queer people. Claire was excited to see that queer students felt safe enough at this year’s Law Ball to dress in defiance of gender binaries. She also points out that this year’s Ball was the first to have gender neutral bathrooms.
Today’s students are redefining what it means to study Law. Deconstructing decades of toxic Law School culture is a slow process, but by the sounds of it, they’re halfway there.