Reply To: Know anything about getting into law school?

Thank you everyone for responding. I really appreciate it.

RSRH-

I agree that many yeshiva guys who hold a BTL are not well prepared to study law, however in my opinion that is because they haven’t excelled in gemara and poskim either. Someone who truly understands how to dissect a sugya properly may technically be learning in order to “to know what to do”, but he employs means very similar to those you mention in regard to the study of law. For example, say you have three rishonim with different pshatim in the gemara. Now you need to figure out how each of them, with all their implications, can fit in with all the possible inferences which can be made from the sugya and any related one. After an exhausting process which ends up with you believing one of them is really much more reasonable than the others, you open a Tur and see the Beis Yosef doesn’t even bring that pshat. So you say hey, the Beis Yosef wasn’t stupid, so what did I miss? So you analyze and reanalyze until you realize that – three steps down – there are implications in this pshat which are not viable with something implied in a mishnah in another masechta. In which case you concede that what you thought was the best pshat really wasn’t – but now you’re left with nothing. So now you want to find support for one of the other possibilities, which leads you to a lot of analytical gymnastics while you attempt to prove that the inferences you made that you thought contradicted these options are in fact not necessary. And I could go on and on. Point is, that which you write that the study of law is more “to see how we can use the existing state of the law to support a particular position”, is very similar to what I do every day during seder.