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<p>I pretty much agree. As someone who was at Harvard Law School not <em>that</em> many years before President Obama, I’ve always found the idea that it’s possible to graduate magna cum laude from that institution without being amazingly smart, and working amazingly hard, to be amusing (especially when such skepticism emanates from ridiculous buffoons like Donald Trump, whose academic career – never mind his business acumen! – wasn’t nearly as distinguished as he pretends). It cannot be done. Do you have to be Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln? No, I very much doubt that. I had classmates who graduated magna cum laude – the rumor was that only a small handful of people, including Professor Tribe if I recall correctly, had graduated summa – and they were clearly impressive intellectually, but I didn’t feel I had to bow down to their staggering genius, or anything remotely like that. And I’m no Jefferson or Lincoln.</p>
<p>And, yes, it’s possible to skate by without doing significant amounts of work and without flunking out. I hated almost every minute of law school, found almost every aspect of it excruciatingly boring, and probably shouldn’t have gone right after college anyway, given that my mother had died suddenly two months before my first year of law school started, after we were in a car accident. I can realize in retrospect how distracted and traumatized I was for most of my time there. I’m afraid I was quite notorious among my classmates, particularly in my first year when our entire “section” of the class took all its courses together, for not going to class about 90% of the time, not keeping up with the work, sleeping all day, and cramming for every exam at the last minute. In my second and third years, there were several courses I took that I never actually went to even once. And then in my third year I was first diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, was hospitalized twice, and missed more than a month in total as a result. </p>
<p>And yet I somehow managed to skate by and graduate somewhere around the middle of the class, with a B+ average and a healthy sprinkling of A’s and A-minuses along the way. So it can, in fact, be done. But I wouldn’t recommend my way of going about it to anyone!</p>