The two law schools I attended must have had very different ideas about me. I began at Indiana, a tier-one school, and perhaps the reddest of the red schools. (This color scheme is distinct from the political one.) But after some faculty shennanigans that went beyond the pale, combined with being a stranger in a strange land in the Midwest after a decade as a professional actor in the city, I transferred to Cardozo, also tier-one then (subsequently to precipitously decline), in NYC. The latter actually under two flags, American and Israeli, a conservative Jewish university. Honestly, until I travelled a bit in Europe many years down the road, I didn't have the faintest sense why it might not have been a good idea for a Roman Catholic fellow of Slavic ethnic origin to do that.
But these considerations are valuable only insofar as they give me a vantage on the culture, and having picked the minds of the constitional and legal scholars of both schools, and especially the public international law scholars at the second, I have a rather unique vantage on things. Though, in a battle, a stranger with a good vantage on things is at times hostis humanis generis.
The real work was in the texts though, and very atypically for the usual JD, I took as many courses as I could, and briefed virtually every case in full myself. (Combined with longhand notes in fountain pen, typed up at night afterwards. Walking into the first-year contracts final with a fountain pen and some packets of ink perhaps marked me as a true colonial.) As a result, I had the knowledge, though I was past the pale of both houses, in the meadows beyond.
It is possible to have the knowledge, to know the things, to have read the books and written about them, whiel still standing outside of the social forms. The great use of my time working on the research doctorate was finding the resources left over from the last century and presently left to gather dust in the enormous library. (The correlative might be discovering the old basketball gyms at Indiana. Many a point of common law was memorized while perfecting three-pointers from the top of the key.)
It is possible to have the knowledge, to know the things, to have read the books and written about them, while still standing outside of the social forms. When I was in the academy, I made the academic pieces as academic pieces, and I'd like to think that using the vocabulary and methods of the time, I was able to do something wothwhile. But having the knowledge is a different thing. I suspect that such a path is the only honest path now (witness the precipitous decline in adacemic admissions over the last few years), and in the years to come, having the knowledge while not being governed by the social forms, which is to say the world, might be the key task.