I'd like to respond to Leslie/Molissa's response to my response.

Leslie, quoting you: "it seems to me that your list omits one clear benefit of voluntary participation: engaging in an exchange of ideas for their own sake, or because it's interesting (or was formerly) to communicate with our peers and thereby to investigate our own thoughts about society, justice, etc. What an idea! Speaking (and listening to others speak) in order to communicate! The problem seems to be that law school is not a community of scholars, but one of distilled individualistic striving. A competitive environment makes openness and trusting communication difficult. So one question might be: who has created this environment? And one obvious answer might be: who else, if not we ourselves?"

I did omit this "benefit" from my list, precisely because the environment of law school prevents this "benefit" from being "beneficial." I agree (ideally) that we should all strive to share material and learn as much as possible. But is this possible where we are graded on a strict curve? I don't claim to be an expert on how to run a law school, but it seems to me that a curve incentivizes the restriction of knowledge. You take what the professor says and try to understand it as deeply as you can (and hopefully more than your fellow classmates), while avoiding to provoke insightful discussion. Why? Because if you provoke insightful thought, your classmates might get even deeper and better ideas than you have thought of, and thus, you have potentially shot yourself in the foot. Because if there is some sort of game theory, the fellow classmate who has grasped your insight with deeper clarity than you did will horde the gem of knowledge for him/herself. Thus, it results in the unfortunate effect that the more knowledge that is shared, the larger the amount of work you will have to do to best your neighbor. By no means am I a gunner, nor do I purposely horde knowledge for myself. But you can see why this analysis might apply to some.

Of course, my list is not all inclusive, and there is a lot of stuff I'm sure I missed. But in this instance, I happen to think the nature of law school neutralizes this particular "benefit", when benefit to the class is detrimental to the self.

-- AlexHu - 05 Feb 2009