What Being a 'Gunner' in Law School Taught Me About Professional Relationships

In law school, the most pejorative term you can call someone is a “gunner.” Unfortunately, it is probably the label I’ve earned in my law school in the past year and, I suspect, what my classmates may say about me behind my back.

The gunner is the person in the class who dominates the conversation and participates way too much, to the chagrin of the rest of their classmates. The gunner often thinks they know more than the professor, and challenges the professor’s knowledge in class. They ask, according to Reddit and classmates who don’t like them, questions that don’t add any value to the lecture and just try to show off how smart they are. They may engage in a lot of stereotypical cutthroat competitive behaviors like ripping out pages of textbooks, or be overly eager to discuss grades. They may dominate the professor’s time during office hours and use up class resources at the expense of other classmates who want to use those resources.

There’s also the type of gunner I would say I am more of. In law school, there is the Socratic Method of teaching, where the professor would cold call students at random to see if they know the answer to certain questions. This would be the cause of significant anxiety because people don’t want to not have the answer to a question in front of their entire class and be humiliated. I have been called on and not known the answer before — it is pretty embarrassing during that class, but since it happens to everyone, I didn’t stress about it beyond a day.

Fortunately, I am a law student who is working during the day and going to law school at night. The vast majority of my classmates also have their day jobs that they go to prior to attending class. Some have families. Professors always express how much they respect our ability to work and go to law school at the same time, and as a result, many go easy on us and don’t engage in this Socratic Method.

This results in a more typical lecture where the professor asks a question and solicits volunteers for an answer. In some very engaging and interesting classes, like criminal procedure, which engages questions of what cops and the state can or can’t do when they search your car or house under the Fourth Amendment, there was a ton of participation and getting volunteers wasn’t a problem. Unsurprisingly, opinions about criminal justice and reform of the criminal justice system were held very strongly among myself and my classmates.

For most other classes, however, a very common occurrence has been the professor asking a question and then absolutely nobody raising their hands. This can lead to awkward silences of ten seconds or longer with the professor desperately scanning the room for volunteers. Since I have been a special education teacher for the last five years, I unfortunately know this feeling, and these awkward silences with very long periods of wait time were especially common during virtual learning during the peak of the pandemic. Earlier in my career, I would be impatient and restless and only give a second or two of silence and wait time prior to moving onto the next part of the lesson. It took a lot of practice waiting for five to ten seconds in silence before moving to other parts of the lesson or rephrasing the question in a more engaging way to become a teacher.

I say this to say I know, personally, how professors or presenters feel when they ask a question and are hit with radio silence. Not only does this make the presentation or lecture seem slow or unengaging, but it makes you feel like a failure or a boring person.

There is some truth to the onus being on the teacher or lecturer to make that lecture engaging, but in higher education and beyond, there is a substantial amount of material to get through, and not all of it is the most exciting stuff in the world. As we have all been on the student side, we all know that sometimes it is not the professor’s fault: we can be particularly distracted by online shopping, just be shy, or sit there clueless and just have no clue what’s going on.

During my first year of law school (as an evening student, my first year of law school is divided into two years), I barely participated at all because I fell behind on readings and did not know what was going on in most classes. Once I started to be able to keep up and fully comprehend all the readings, I could engage in a more substantive manner than I had before.

I started to be the person who would try to bail the professor out when there was radio silence for ten or more seconds. I look around the room and see the professor looking around the room, and can’t stand the silence any longer. I am well aware of the pedagogical weaknesses of one or two students participating too much in a bigger class, but from the teacher’s perspective, that is better than no one participating.

Of course, there are many times I want to participate just because I want to participate. I think hard about my answer and opinion and genuinely want to participate, and I like to think my answers are substantive and straight from the source or reading. I don’t ask hypothetical questions that are super out there and not applicable to most other students’ learning, so I like to think I’m a good gunner, and not a bad one.

. . .

Many people are starting law school or have already started law school this week. I am going into what could be my final year depending on how many credits I take. In law school, there is a shared value and expectation that people work hard, but work hard silently and quietly. There’s a shared expectation that grades should never be discussed with classmates, partially because everyone is graded on a curve, but also because it can lead to a cascading of unhealthy comparison. It’s not a bad value by any stretch in terms of valuing humility, but people are all working very hard behind the scenes, and thinking other people are not is a recipe for disaster.

However, I have found that hating on gunners or anti-gunner culture can sometimes go too far. Yes, some people ask hypotheticals that sometimes derail the class or lecture. But I also find that a lot of people don’t participate or engage in lectures as much as they may want to because they don’t want to be “that person” among their classmates. I fall victim to this mindset too, not just out of a genuine desire to scale back when I feel like I have participated too much, but because I want to be liked by my classmates and participating too often might make me not liked.

Others may just have anxiety and not want to talk in front of a class, but this culture also plays a role. Some gunners are just genuinely curious, and if we truly believed there is no such thing as a dumb question, the law school world would not have coined a whole term for people who they perceive ask dumb and excessive questions.

The term also means a lot of different things to different people. Some people see the person who disrupts the whole class as a gunner while others do see someone like me as a gunner. In real life and workplaces, I have seen similar dynamics. Yes, succeeding quietly is a huge virtue and not being flashy or showy about the degrees you earn or your professional successes is a value I subscribe to (at least on Facebook or Instagram).

However, gunners can also exhibit behaviors in the workplace, and Jordan Rothman at Above the Law says gunners in law firms often respond to emails at all times and send emails at all times to prove they are on the clock, violating boundaries of work-life balance. Rothman also says praising the boss in an effort to seek advancement is also a sign of a gunner, as is the tendency to broadcast a person’s accomplishments. These tendencies lead the person to seem annoying and underhanded and less likely to be invited to social events and less likely to be selected for certain teams.

Being a gunner is also not exclusive to the legal industry or academy, or any type of school. Any workplace has people who are unpopular for sucking up to bosses or working too hard in either a direct or indirect attempt to make other people look bad. In education, teachers who make a point and are flashy about excessive social media posting about going above and beyond for students or staying at work until 8 p.m. may be considered gunners, particularly new teachers who have not yet been initiated by the daily grind and burn of the profession.

Reddit’s r/LawSchool seems to differentiate between good and bad gunners — the type who is cutthroat and dominates the conversation with unproductive hypothetical questions, versus the kind who would answer the question whenever there was an awkward silence. At the end of the day, relationships seem to matter a lot more than grades. In a small profession, these relationships in law school will follow you down the line much more than grades will.

The goal of gunner shaming, then, isn’t to discourage working very hard and putting in a lot of effort. It’s not to discourage being a good student or worker. Gunner shaming’s intent is to shame huge public displays of those identities. It is hard to identify why the person who challenges the professor or thinks they’re smarter than the professor can give off such an off-putting vibe, and even if someone is really smart and well prepared, constantly showing how smart and well-prepared you are as a display is a surefire way to get your classmates and colleagues to dislike you.

At the end of the day, however, I wonder if I’m the type of person too beholden to what other people think. If a classmate thinks the frequency of my participation is annoying or a colleague thinks I work too hard, am I really doing myself justice by caving to that fear? Do we really want to compromise who we are and limit ourselves just to fit in?

Of course, it’s a balance between reading the room and doing what’s best for ourselves. Personally, I’ll keep trying to be a “good gunner.”

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This post was previously published on Corporate Underbelly.

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