What Nobody Tells You About Law School

Summary

Shaun Ossei-Owusu didn't go to law school to become a lawyer. After a PhD in African American Studies at Berkeley and a fellowship at the American Bar Foundation, he wanted the technical language of law so he could translate what he'd already been studying: how the legal system actually treats people, versus how it says it does. That instinct became his new book, "Law on Trial."

In this conversation, Kathryn Rubino and Ossei-Owusu dig into what "thinking like a lawyer" costs, from law school curricula that leave out issues like civil asset forfeiture, to big law and government lawyering, where the pressure to win can crowd out the question of whether winning was the right outcome. They close with practical advice for lawyers trying to stay honest with themselves about the trade-offs they're making.

Key Takeaways

• Legal training builds what Ossei-Owusu calls a "tragically necessary skill": separating law from moral and social context. It's useful, and it's also easy to overcorrect.

• Core law school subjects often skip the inequality issues baked into them. Property class rarely covers civil asset forfeiture, even though it's a bigger part of practice than most casebooks suggest.

• Big law economics can quietly work against legitimate discrimination claims, not just frivolous ones, because of who's paying the bill.

• City and county law departments face a similar tension: they enforce consumer and housing protections while also defending against civil rights claims brought under the same kinds of laws.

• Lawyers can protect their values by setting ethical red lines before financial pressure sets in, not after.

Links and Resources

• Above the Law

• The Jabot Podcast

• Law on Trial: An Unlikely Insider Reckons with Our Legal System (W.W. Norton)

• Law on Trial on Amazon

Keywords

legal education, law school, thinking like a lawyer, legal ethics, big law, public interest law, civil asset forfeiture, law professor, legal academia, Shaun Ossei-Owusu, Law on Trial, University of Pennsylvania, legal profession, government lawyers, municipal law departments, law firm culture, first-generation lawyers, social justice law, Above the Law, The Jabot Podcast

Episode Highlights

• [00:00:49 - 00:04:20] Ossei-Owusu explains his winding path from the Bronx to a PhD to law school.

• [00:04:56 - 00:06:51] Why mentoring future lawyers, including those headed to big law, matters to him.

• [00:06:51 - 00:08:35] The gap in law school literature that inspired Law on Trial.

• [00:10:46 - 00:13:19] What "thinking like a lawyer" really means, and its necessary trade-offs.

• [00:13:19 - 00:14:33] The civil asset forfeiture example most property classes skip.

• [00:15:50 - 00:17:35] How big law economics can quietly undermine legitimate discrimination claims.

• [00:17:35 - 00:19:16] The civil rights tension inside city and county law departments.

• [00:20:04 - 00:22:20] Practical advice for lawyers weighing big law against their values.

• [00:22:20 - 00:24:01] Why ethical red lines matter more than good intentions.