Gunners are by far the most hated kind of 1L around. Every year, 1Ls take to Reddit or their class’s GroupMe to complain about the Gunners. It’s worth asking why Gunners seem to be universally hated, and whether that hate is warranted. People tend to adopt a Jacobellis v. Ohio kind of definition for “Gunner”—I know ’em when I see ’em. If you’re like me, you didn’t spend a whole lot of time trying to rigorously define the term when you first showed up at CLS. But hey, I’m a 3L now. I’ve got some time to kill and some #content I need to write for this illustrious newsletter. So here goes: What actually is a Gunner, and why do they seem to attract so much ire?
“Gunner” used to mean something more than just talking a lot in class. It used to mean someone who would, for example, hide pages of the Shephard’s guides to prevent other students from being able to complete assignments. Or a Gunner would openly scoff at a peer struggling through a cold call. It used to mean someone was cutthroat and monomaniacally focused on their own success. They’d sacrifice anything—relationships to their peers, especially—to gain an edge. Think Vivian Kensington.[1] But that’s not how the term is used today. Now all sorts of innocuous behavior gets lumped under the term “Gunner,” discouraging students from speaking at all in class out of fear of attracting social derision. Nowadays, people tend to use “Gunner” to describe someone that participates a lot in ways that feel like a waste of time to the Gunner’s peers.
An oft-repeated criticism of Gunners is that they lack self-awareness. “It is almost a universal truth that the Gunner cannot recognize themselves as a Gunner.”[2] Whether knowingly or not, the Gunner soaks up class time to delve into inane hypotheticals and tangents that are, at best, loosely related to what you actually need to know about the subject. This is a bug of the law-school discussion format. The price of relying on class participation is that people, well, “participate” in ways that are hard to rein in. The Gunner sees their participation in class as perfectly normal and maybe even virtuous—after all, what’s the point of Socratic teaching if you’re not actually supposed to talk? If everyone stopped speaking out of fear of attracting negative attention, the Socratic method breaks down. Surely class would be a lot more painful if professors had to pull teeth all class, desperately trying to get students to answer their questions. The Gunner’s peers, however, groan when they see the Gunner’s hand shoot up at the end of class, signaling that they’re about to take a detour into territory that probably will not be relevant to the final exam.
This criticism of Gunners has more to do with the flaws of law school pedagogy than anything else. For some reason, law schools across the country have decided that the Socratic method is a good way to teach. Professors rely on a series of questions and answers, typically directed at one student, to clarify points in the material. However, this discussion format opens up when the professor asks what the rest of the class thinks, and some students take advantage of this invitation to explore aspects of the subject matter that may not be interesting to the vast majority of their peers. Worse, some students view the Socratic classroom as a venue to demonstrate how smart and interesting they are. Unfortunately, no one really cares how smart or interesting they think they are, and most view the Gunner’s tangents as a waste of time. Most students just care about learning the parts of the law that are most relevant to their success on the exam. Gunners are therefore annoying because they either lack the self-awareness to realize they’re “wasting everyone’s time,” or they don’t care.
Is a Gunner, however, any less self-aware than the typical law student? Incoming law students dramatically overestimate how well they’ll actually perform relative to their peers, which should cast some doubt on whether we’re as self-aware as we think we are.[3] Law students tend to be self-absorbed and overconfident; it’s why we want to become lawyers. But unlike other types of students, Gunners are obsessed with being visible. The logic is simple: If I talk a lot in class, the professor might like me more and then I’ll end up doing better. If the Gunner is thinking strategically, maybe they think they’ll be able to gauge how well they know the material based on the professor’s responses to their contributions. More charitably, maybe Gunners are genuinely passionate about the subject matter and take a genuine interest in exploring the corner cases of the law. Regardless, this logic does the Gunner no favors. Nothing has done more damage to the reputation of Gunners than the fact that they can’t help themselves. Participating constantly becomes a compulsion, and it’s the nail that sticks out that gets the hammer.
This supposed lack of self-awareness and obsession with being visible leads to the Gunner attracting a lot of negative attention. The Gunner’s peers view their frequent, “time-wasting” participation in class as being overall negative to their own law school experience. I pay (insert outrageously large amount of dollars) in tuition, the thinking goes, and I have to sit here and listen to some guy monologue about a hypothetical he dreamed up?
This is a natural reaction, but automatically responding to Gunners this way can be detrimental to everyone’s experience. I doubt most Gunners intend to “waste time,” and I also doubt that most Gunners fit the classic, cutthroat definition. I’d wager most are simply excited to learn, and that exuberance manifests in ways that can be kind of annoying. How you choose to respond to the people in your classes that you think are too enthusiastic has an impact on the general culture—dare I say, the vibe—at law school. Is a Gunner’s behavior in class any more corrosive to the law school experience than a culture that pounces on anyone who raises their hand more than average?
Here’s the upshot: yeah, Gunners may be annoying. They may be wasting class time by always trying to put themselves in the spotlight. But there’s some value in 1) having some empathy for the someone who’s being ostracized and 2) not being so trigger-happy when labeling someone a Gunner. The former is valuable because you might not be so different from the Gunner, all things considered. Plus, sometimes Gunners actually do think about the law deeply, and getting to know people like that is enriching. The latter is valuable because you don’t necessarily know what’s motivating a Gunner. Imagine if, in Legally Blonde, Woods meets Kensington’s animosity with her own instead of extending kindness to Kensington. The film would be a lot shorter and more depressing. Thankfully, Woods instead chooses to get to know Kensington more; she doesn’t write Kensington off as completely irredeemable even when that’s the most natural reaction. You have that same choice. You have the power to shape the culture in your classrooms by how you choose to respond to the people that everyone seems eager to deride. Being a good classmate means learning to chill out a little bit. This includes the Gunners, but it also includes you.
Daniel Sweat is a 3L and Writer for the Verdict.
[1] “Vivian Kensington is initially portrayed as a seemingly cold, snobbish, and competitive character. . . . However, as the story progresses, Vivian’s true personality begins to emerge. She reveals herself to be more complex than her initial facade suggests.” Legally Blonde Wiki, Vivian Kensington, https://legallyblonde.fandom.com/wiki/Vivian_Kensington.
[2] 5–4 Podcast, Welcome to Law School 2024 (Sept. 3, 2024), at 21:20.
[3] Sam Barder & Jennifer K. Robbennolt, Optimistic Overconfidence: A Study of Law Student Academic Predictions, 2023 U. Ill. L. Rev. Online 106 (available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4524497); see also Karen Sloan, Incoming Law Students Are Wildly Overconfident About Their Academic Performance, Study Finds, Reuters (July 25, 2023), https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/incoming-law-students-are-wildly-overconfident-about-their-academic-performance-2023-07-25/ (discussing the paper).