VALUING WAYS OF KNOWING: An Artist Goes to Law School

By Katie (M.K.) Rainey

Let me ask you a serious question. Is cereal a soup?

Or wait, wait… Is a hotdog a sandwich?

Is a poptart a ravioli?

Is ketchup jam?

If cereal isn’t a soup, what about gazpacho?

Paris Katie Ignores Her Inbox

I was in Paris for a few weeks in July… yes, be very jealous. My partner and I decided to take our honeymoon before our wedding since we aren’t getting married until December and I started law school mid-August. We figured we wouldn’t be able to once school started. So I spent my last few moments of freedom stuffing myself with cheese, bread, wine, and blissfully ignoring my ever-growing inbox. That would be Future Katie’s problem. Paris Katie had escargot to devour. 

But then she came along. Future Katie. We knew she’d come eventually. There she was, mourning the loss of Paris Katie while systematically cutting down the mountain of emails and tedious tasks that accumulated in her absence. 

And then it was our first communications meeting back since vacation. 

But this meeting was different from your normal weekly meeting. I regularly look forward to them. This group of people I have the pleasure of working with all have such different perspectives and ways of thinking that it makes work a lot more interesting. And we typically don’t just jump straight into work. We often open with fun warm ups. Which is why we opened with the above questions. So… is cereal a soup?

Whatever you’re thinking right now, someone else hard disagrees and has a pretty compelling argument why. Go ahead, take these questions to the next group you're in and see what happens. Then, come back here. I’ll wait. 

Finished? Okay, we can proceed. 

Future Katie Goes to Law School

Unsurprisingly, law school encapsulates this spirited debate. In my first month of school, the only thing I’m sure of is just how subjective the legal system is while trying (or pretending) to be objective. It’s a mismatched collage, a tangled mess made up of thousands and thousands of different ways of thinking. Our legal system, which many people would probably sheepishly admit thinking is just a finite set of rules, is ever-shifting and subject to a multitude of human frailties. But this… this is what makes it so exciting. In fact, in the introduction section of my Problems in Contract Law casebook (which my professor happened to co-author… Hi, Silvy!), there is a note that starts every edition:

“No study of law is adequate if it loses sight of the fact that law operates first and last for, upon, and through individual human beings. This, of course, is what rescues law from the status of science and makes its study so frustrating, and so fascinating” (pp. #).

What resonates to me here is that not only are there infinite other threads of knowing woven together to create our legal system, but also that my ways of knowing will weave their way in as well. 

My life experiences and the way I know will be a new perspective in our legal system. That means all the arts education I’ve ever had is coming with me too. On the first day of law school, they tell you they’re going to teach you to think like a lawyer. Granted I’m just a baby 1L, but to me it already feels like that means holding multiple perspectives, conclusions, ways of knowing and weighing them against your own in order to get to some kind of justice. 

To me, that sounds like arts education. 

That sounds like creativity. 

And Never Again Will I Look at a Poptart the Same

So as I sit in this communications committee, hotly debating whether a cereal is a soup, I think about how much arts education has allowed me to identify how I know things, while making space for how others know things. And how important it is to see that pathway of thinking. 

Future Katie, will explore multiple plaintiffs and defendants and lawyers and judges and weigh all of their ways of knowing into her legal analysis. And she’s excited. So, as Bridget throws out another question, I think about how I know my answer and how someone else might know a different answer. Is a poptart a ravioli?

Sure, tell me why not?