Sex and the Single San Francisco Law Student

Sooner or later, “single law student” is a redundant phrase. You may hear early on that nearly half of all marriages fail during the 3 years that one spouse is in law school and more than 90% of unmarried couples will not survive. You ask me, prospective lawyers should view romantic interests the way a fool should look at money: they were lucky to get together in the first place.

But there’s an up side to the bleak statistics. Anyone who would want to spend their life with an expanding, balding, slowly ulcerating egomaniac who will work nights and weekends consistently for the next 40 years can’t be right in the head. If you’re thinking about going to law school, it’s likely that you, too, are not really quite right in the head. Two people so handicapped do not, in fact, cancel each other out. Rather, they annoy others and raise similarly nutty children. So if you insist on eventually being both a lawyer and married, at least have the good sense to wait until you’re actually a lawyer before you settle down with someone, who you’ll at least know is only marrying you for your perceived income potential and not because he/she is crazy (by the way, if you meet your future spouse in the neighborhood where Hastings is located, it’s entirely possible that he/she is a singular designation and not an expression of mutually exclusive alternatives.)

In the mean time, you will be a law student, and you will remain nominally human and inhumanly tense. Therefore, you will continue to have human needs during your three years in hell. For this reason, I have prepared a primer on all things related to sex and law school. These rules are not necessarily unique to USF Law. Apply them as you like to your own law school.

1. He’s not hot, he’s law school hot.

Take a look around you on your first day of class. Make a note of who you find attractive. Seriously, make a note. Write it down and tuck it away somewhere where it won’t get mixed in with an outline that you’re likely to share with others later in the year. If there are more than 3 people on that list, you are being overinclusive. Now swear to yourself that you will not sleep with anyone who is not on that list. Trust me, 3 months from now, you will look at the troll who just said something really funny about the Palzgraff case in your Torts class, and think to yourself, “Hey, she’s pretty hot.” Trust me, she’s not. She’s only law school hot. You have been blinded by the fact that you see the same 85 faces every day, all day. Let familiarity breed contempt, not misplaced lust. Do not be seduced by his double entendre about “accord and satisfaction.” You will regret it later if you do.

2. Resist the Siren Songs of Market Street

You’ll hear it somewhere else sooner or later, so I might as well let the cat out of the bag right now: Prostitution is legal in San Francisco. I mean, it’s not really legal, but it is, and everyone knows it. The DA doesn’t want to prosecute “lifestyle” crimes, so you can feel free to stop by Market Street’s medical marijuana club and smoke a blunt on your way to one of the many Tenderloin massage parlors. But I don’t recommend it. Minka the 56DD sex goddess appearing this week only at the Crazy Horse may seem an appealing alternative to sorting out the intricacies of pendant and ancillary jurisdiction, but she will charge you a lot for her services (I’m told by a cousin of a friend of a classmate of mine who once went) and you haven’t graduated from law school yet. In fact, you’re a first year. You may not ever graduate from law school. Why don’t you wait until the money’s in the bank before you go blowing it on hookers and drugs, okay tiger. You’re going to need that money when you don’t have a paying legal job during first summer.

3. Some People Think Lawyers Are A Catch, Snag Them Before They Learn Better

If you’re in law school right now, there’s a 25% chance that your dad is a lawyer. Think about it, do you like him? Of course not. Do you think his ex-wife – your mother – likes him? Do you think she thought he was a catch, even before she left him for the cabana boy in Cabo because he brought a laptop and drafts of an appellate brief with him? No. And yet, the stereotype persists, largely because our mothers just can’t help but want to say, “My son the lawyer; my daughter the doctor, blah blah blah.” Our parents and grandparents want us to be, or to marry, lawyers so they have something to say to their friends during mah-jong tournaments and on the golf course. Anyway, that’s one of my theories. The point is, the myth persists. There are plenty of bars in San Francisco, and a great many of them are not loud, so you can meet people, talk to them, and casually mention that you’re a lawyer. Since everyone in San Francisco who is not in law school is either a dot-commie or works at a coffee house (and dot-commies are still in front of the computer when you’re at the bars), the cappuccino maker that you just met will see you as an opportunity to move out of the living room that she and her friend from back home pay 800 bucks a month to crash in, and she will have sex with you.

What? It could happen.

Note that it matters not that you are only a law student and not an actual lawyer. No one was ever censured by the bar for practicing without a license in this manner. What we’re going for is plausible deniability here, folks. Throw a res judicata her way and she won’t know the difference.

4. The Import/Export Business

Against all odds, you probably had a girlfriend or boyfriend at some point before you started law school. One that isn’t the same person who left you when he got sick of listening to you scream, “Who’s the freakin’ plaintiff in Pennoyer v. Neff!” You may have even had several. But those people knew you when you were a chronically drunk 5th year at State U / Tower Records stock clerk with no real prospects. Now you’re a chronically drunk law student with no real prospects, but he/she doesn’t know that. He/she just knows you’re a law student, and is likely to think, “Wow, he finally got his stuff together, maybe I’ll give him/her another shot.” At which point you either import the ex-romantic interest or export yourself to them. They have had sex with you before, so it won’t be so bad for them to do it again, even after they’ve discovered that you haven’t really changed all that much.

You scoff, I know, but the import/export business is a viable concern at every law school in the nation. Ask around, you’ll see.

5. The Vacation Rule is in Effect

A slight variation on the import/export business is the vacation rule. You all know how this one works. 26 year olds don’t really get to go on that many vacations, and when they do, it’s not like they’re jetting off to Paris or cruising the Carribean. They stay in-country, but they want the same adventure they imagine they would be having in St. Thomas. They substitute the exotic locale with what – sex with people they hardly know. This is why spring break towns are such a hotbed of chlamydia. And if you’re at USF Law, you’re ahead of the game in terms of tapping into the Vacation Rule. Everyone loves San Francisco. Everyone wants to visit San Francisco, Everyone’s happy to have a friend who’s place they can crash at in San Francisco. Imagine if you had decided after all to go to University of Indiana – Bloomington because of that great labor studies program. Where would that get you when it came time to apply the Vacation Rule. Nobody wants to visit you in Bloomington. San Francisco, you can have a different visitor every weekend. You’ll fail Civ. Pro. but you’ll be much less tense. Trust me.

In conclusion: Look, you have plenty of time to not have sex once you become a lawyer, and plenty of clients and partners to not have it with. If you follow my few simple rules, you will be a happier law student, and your classmates will be happier when you don’t tie yourself to a tree and light yourself on fire.