Why Law School Isn’t About Truth—And Why That Matters

I’ve taken classes in a lot of subjects—statistics, religious studies, black studies, philosophy, calculus, economics, accounting, biology--pretty much everything. I’ve also taken several real law school classes. Not as a law student, and not as a lawyer—I’ve never been either. I took them as part of a deep undercover research project. And here’s the thing I noticed: legal education stands radically apart from every other kind of education I’ve encountered. It’s not a difference of method or of tone; it’s a difference of essence.

In every non-law class I’ve taken, from humanities to the hard sciences, the goal—even if imperfectly realized—has been the same: to discover truth. Whether you’re in a physics lab or a Chicano studies seminar, you’re expected to engage with what is. You may disagree with your professor. You may think the data is flawed, or the framework skewed. But you're still disputing over what is true—about the past, about the world, about experience. The methods may vary wildly, and some disciplines are more rigorous than others, but the aim is shared.

Law school is different. Law school is about something else entirely—and this became startlingly clear to me, not just as a student of the law, but also as someone who’s spent a small fortune over the years on legal fees. I’ve had roughly ten lawyers in my life. I’ve been a defendant in a criminal case (dismissed, no thanks to my lawyers), and a litigant in an estate case. So I’ve seen the inside of law school classrooms, and I’ve seen the practice of law up close. The same theme runs through both.

Law is not about discovering what happened. It’s about navigating what’s admissible.

In law school, the question isn’t, “What actually occurred?” but rather:

• “Is this admissible under Rule 803(6)?”

• “How does this precedent constrain our interpretation?”

• “Can this be argued under the doctrine of equitable estoppel?”

There’s no impulse to find out the truth of a situation. In fact, that impulse is systematically trained out of you. Law school teaches students—consciously or not—that truth-seeking is naive. What matters is whether a claim fits within the system’s rules. If it doesn't, it might as well not exist. And if it does, it doesn’t necessarily matter whether it’s true. It just matters that it’s legally operable.

This was never clearer to me than when I watched professors ask questions like, “What arguments could the defendant make here?” while never asking, “But did the defendant actually do it?” That’s not the point. The point is to see how well the mess of real life can be squeezed into the grid of legal doctrine.

Let me give you a comparison. In a Black Studies class I once took, I strongly disagreed with the professor. I found his views ideologically rigid and his readings of history selective. But we were both engaged in a conversation about what had happened and what it meant. We were speaking the language of evidence, cause, and consequence. The exchange was grounded in reality, even if we quarreled about it.

Law school never got that far. It didn’t even try.

Norms, Not Truths

This tendency bleeds straight into the practice of law. Based on my own (expensive) experience, most lawyers aren’t interested in what happened—not even in what, with a little digging, they could prove happened in a way that a court would accept.

Their overriding concern is norm-compliance.

They want to check the boxes:

• Is this motion formatted correctly?

• Is it filed on time?

• Does this line of reasoning align with precedent?

• Will this argument play well under the judge's procedural expectations?

Whether the client is right—or even provably right—comes second. Sometimes third. The system, as lawyers are trained to operate within it, does not reward truth-seeking. It rewards risk-aversion, conformity, and technical precision.

In short, most lawyers are playing a highly formalized, procedural game. The object isn’t justice, and it certainly isn’t truth. It’s compliance with the rules of the game—with maybe a favorable outcome thrown in as a bonus.

You can see the downstream effects: prosecutors who won’t pursue the truth because it might hurt their conviction rates; defense attorneys who overlook exculpatory evidence because it doesn’t fit the procedural path they’ve committed to; estate lawyers who show no curiosity about misappropriated assets because the rules don’t require curiosity—just paperwork.

In other domains—science, history, journalism—epistemic responsibility matters. If you lie, fudge data, ignore obvious facts, or cherry-pick, you’re punished (at least in theory). In law? Not necessarily. As long as you follow procedure, you’re protected. If anything, you're rewarded.

Legal Realism Knew This—But I Lived It

Legal realists—thinkers like Jerome Frank and Karl Llewellyn—recognized decades ago that legal decision-making wasn’t strictly rational or consistent. They argued that law wasn’t a science, but a practice shot through with politics, personality, and prejudice. They saw that judges weren’t machines spitting out rulings from neutral premises, but people making value-laden choices.

They were right. But what they offered as theory, I’ve experienced firsthand.

I’ve watched lawyers ignore damning evidence of wrongdoing because it wasn’t procedurally strategic to raise it. I’ve seen judges refuse to entertain morally urgent claims because they were filed in the wrong venue or slightly outside the statute of limitations. And I’ve watched my own legal representatives, when confronted with new facts that could dramatically shift the case, barely blink—because facts, in their minds, don’t matter unless they’re procedurally usable.

It’s a chilling thing to realize, especially if you grew up believing that the justice system—even if flawed—is at least aimed at justice. It’s not. It’s aimed at order.

The Hidden Cost of This System

Now, you might say: well, of course the law is about norms—it has to be. Truth is messy. Courts need consistency. Judges need frameworks. Without rules, everything becomes arbitrary.

And there’s something to that. But the cost of this orientation is profound. Because when we build a system that treats truth as a side concern, or worse, as a naïve distraction, we turn justice into a performance. We get a system that mimics reasoned deliberation but is really a ritual of legitimization. A kind of procedural theater.

And the public, for the most part, doesn’t know. They still believe that the legal system is about figuring out what happened, what’s fair, what’s true. They believe, in other words, that it’s like every other intellectual or moral discipline: a quest to understand and resolve.

But it’s not. It’s a quest to contain and formalize.

That’s not inherently evil. But it’s inherently untruthful. And in a society that increasingly relies on courts and lawyers to resolve everything from inheritance to identity, we need to reckon with what kind of epistemology—what kind of world-picture—we’re actually institutionalizing.

Law school doesn’t train you to think clearly about the world. It trains you to think clearly about a system that refuses to map onto the world.

And if you've spent your life trying to understand how things actually are—whether through science, humanities, or just hard experience—this training can feel not just alien, but Orwellian.

Conclusion: Truth Is Not the Point

Let me be blunt: legal education suppresses the impulse to seek truth. It replaces it with a trained instinct to locate procedural validity, no matter how disconnected from reality. And legal practice—especially among the mid-tier, risk-averse lawyers who make up most of the profession—reflects this training to a tee.

That’s not just a quirk of the profession. It’s a philosophical shift in how we adjudicate meaning, conflict, and harm.

It’s a shift that everyone living under the rule of law deserves to understand.

Because once you see the system clearly—not as a truth engine, but as a norm-enforcement machine—you’ll never look at it the same way again.