Over at the Law School Innovation blog, Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer has a long and interesting comment on the the role of the first-year curriculum in American legal education. He asks, "*why* do we have students' full attention only in the first year? Why do we progressively lose them after that?"

  I agree with a great deal of what Larry says, although I think he is overlooking something important: j-o-b-s. By a month into their second year, many students (and almost all at a school like Stanford) are going to have lined up summer jobs at law firms. As long as they don't act like freaks over the summer, they will get full-time job offers. As a result, the rat race is effectively over for many students the moment they accept their summer positions; they pay less attention than before because, well, they can.