I scored in the 99th percentile on the LSAT, attended a top-3 law school in the US, and graduated with honors. All these points don’t insulate me from being bad at school, but the vast majority of law school attendees are even worse at school (not learning) than me.
None of this is good evidence for skill at learning, which is the main topic of the OP. Despite the parenthetical, this is still focused on mostly-irrelevant metrics.
I personally was very good at actually learning things in school and getting value from the things I’ve learned. While my grades were decent, it was always fairly clear that this was not what the grades were measuring—the vast majority of my classmates learned much less, got much less value even from what they did learn, yet many of them got quite strong grades anyway.
80% of school is just a signalling mechanism. You’ll get positive reinforcement mostly for things other than proper learning. But it’s still quite possible to learn things; I wrote a mini-essay on useful techniques for that as an answer here. For law in particular, I would also recommend reading a bit of game theory (especially something on information games, e.g. Rasmussen) and some DavidFriedman in order to get high-level knowledge of what problems the systems you study in law school have evolved to solve. That helps put specific content into context—you can think about why the system works the way it does, why some precedents have stuck around while others have been tossed, other possible ways things could have worked, and what trade-offs are involved.
(Also, advice for anyone else reading this: I think law schools generally do a better job teaching practical writing than any other academic discipline, and much of it generalizes well to e.g. scientific or business writing.)
None of this is good evidence for skill at learning, which is the main topic of the OP. Despite the parenthetical, this is still focused on mostly-irrelevant metrics.
I personally was very good at actually learning things in school and getting value from the things I’ve learned. While my grades were decent, it was always fairly clear that this was not what the grades were measuring—the vast majority of my classmates learned much less, got much less value even from what they did learn, yet many of them got quite strong grades anyway.
80% of school is just a signalling mechanism. You’ll get positive reinforcement mostly for things other than proper learning. But it’s still quite possible to learn things; I wrote a mini-essay on useful techniques for that as an answer here. For law in particular, I would also recommend reading a bit of game theory (especially something on information games, e.g. Rasmussen) and some David Friedman in order to get high-level knowledge of what problems the systems you study in law school have evolved to solve. That helps put specific content into context—you can think about why the system works the way it does, why some precedents have stuck around while others have been tossed, other possible ways things could have worked, and what trade-offs are involved.
(Also, advice for anyone else reading this: I think law schools generally do a better job teaching practical writing than any other academic discipline, and much of it generalizes well to e.g. scientific or business writing.)