Orientation Week--Humiliation , Experimentation and Vindication!

What a week this has been.

My school has students take a class during orientation week, an introduction to law and legal reasoning. It sort of operates as a mini-class, giving you an idea of what a full-length class is like. We have reading to prepare, we are examined under the Socratic method in class, we learn some substantive and some procedural law (as well as a bit of legal history and a bit about American and British legal structures) and we take an abbreviated exam at the end of it, part multiple choice, part legal essay/short answer.

I am so glad they have us do this. It has given me some time to sort out exactly how I want to learn this year—because it is not like anything I have done previously. We’re students and, of course, we read and study written material. But from here on out, our reading is pretty much going to be confined to case law. There will not be a lot of exposition and we will have to derive principles of law from the cases themselves—they will not be laid out for us. This class has been essential in giving us a conception of what that’s like. It has also been crucial for sorting out the mechanics of how I’m going to work. I mentioned earlier how I’ve been using OneNote. At first I was loving it and I loved that you could make lecture recordings right alongside your note-taking. Now that I’ve finished this little class, I’ve decided I probably won’t use OneNote anymore. (There are certain inconveniences about it that mean it would be easier to just use Word. And... like anyone is going to want to listen to their lectures one more time, right?) But at least I’ve decided definitely to use the computer for note taking. I also think I have a strategy for how to prepare for exams, which is the most important thing. Everything depends on exams in law school, so you’ve got to get your strategies down. I’m glad I had this small class to experiment with before the real classes start.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We did our volunteering one afternoon early in the week; it had rained all morning. A group of 40 of us got bussed out to a nature trail where there were some park rangers waiting for us in the parking lot. They told us that they had cut down a bunch of baby trees from the forest—because they take nutrients and light from other trees?—they had all been piled up about a quarter mile down the trail. We were to bring them up to the wood chipper parked in the parking lot. Pretty simple. So we just did trip after trip after trip. Of course what happens when 40 people march up and down in a moderate rain on a woodland path—oh—by the way—dragging trees behind them? It turns into a mudslide and everything gets filthy, including the people moving the trees. Despite which it was actually kind of fun. My mood was significantly elevated by a particular circumstance, which I will relate now!

The dean of admissions was in our group (also getting filthy, he’s a nice guy) and, seeing my name tag, he told me that he was sorry if I had suffered some distress over the confusion with the deposit because, in fact, the IT people had looked into and it turned out that I had NOT made a mistake! The online program logs people off after 30 minutes without their knowing it. They have since fixed this problem. And there was actually one other person whom this defect effected. He said that if it had been just one person who reported this problem they might not have believed the story and they might not have looked into it. So I must thank that poor other person who went through the terrible time I went through. I wouldn’t normally wish it on anyone else but thank goodness it happened to just one other person!

Oh sweet, sweet, delicious VINDICATION!

I hope that takes me off the shit list, but I don’t think it does because all the admin people seem to know my name, and not in a good way.

Moving right along...

My class has been really interesting. I made some serious studying mistakes, which I will not make again, thanks to this class. (More on that later.) I have been really enjoying the material and the work—the mental processes are... I hesitate to say it because it’s so nerdy... but it’s fun. After taking this exam, I was embarrassingly thinking, I wish I could write more! I may not think that if it turns out I did really poorly. I don’t know what it is. I’ve always enjoyed studying law.

In class, I felt I should sit tight for the first few days and not try to volunteer, lest I make a fool of myself early on and develop a reputation as a dolt. But on the second day, I did volunteer. HINT: If you don’t want to get called on, just volunteer when you have something worth saying. I thought I had this whole case figured out and I was thinking no one else was getting it but me, and I’d just sort them out by stating the obvious. So I volunteered. And I was promptly shut down. My cheeks burned for a moment, but then I decided others had said dumber things and that we would all say some dumb things this year. And if anyone was thinking I was stupid, well they were stupid! Let’s just give everyone a break, shall we?

Anyway, the next day I said something really smart that no one else knew and felt totally awesome, until I got over confident, volunteered again and said something sort of moderately stupid. I do not think I am one to go on the law school emotional roller coaster, so I’m letting these roll off my back and will just do the very best I can and hope everyone else does the same

There are those who are making nuisances of themselves in class... yes—the gunners have announced themselves. Now, how do you know if you’re a gunner? It seems that gunners don’t really seem to know they are gunners, so here is a little checklist:

1.) If you are quoting Kant and no one asked you to, you’re a gunner.
2.) If you are asking questions about substantive due process, and we’re working on ‘what is a statute?’, you’re a gunner.
3.) If you think you’re at the head of the class because you were a philosophy major and did pretty well on the LSAT, and you want everyone to know it, you’re a gunner, and you’re an idiot.

We had an orientation session with upperclassmen with no professors or administrators around, for the really candid questions. The best piece of advice was, ‘Just calm the fuck down.’ So much of law school stress is self-induced and really, you must just calm the fuck down. This was also the primary message I got from Scott Turow’s book, One L. I meant to post a proper review of One L but, heck, I don’t have time to do that anymore. So I’ll just say that One L was really interesting. He talks a lot about the stress and the oppressive workload, but he never explains how he got through it. It would have been useful to learn how one person managed to handle the law school workload, especially at Harvard Law School. So don’t go to One L looking for study tips. Do look at 1L of a Ride by McClurg (can’t remember the first name). It’s full of useful information, and I think it even helped me during the introductory class and certainly on the exam. So many people at the law school don’t seem to have a clue what is going on. Do some research before you go to school, because you don’t always have to learn as you go, especially when that has such high-stakes consequences.

Other random tips I learned this week:

--Read footnotes—they’re interesting and sometimes hold key information.
--Brief every case, but brief it keeping in mind what you’re looking for—know what you’re supposed to be getting out of it by contextualizing it. I went to bed the night before the exam feeling okay about how I reviewed. Then, at some point in the night, I realized that I had been studying all the wrong things. I had been studying the substantive law, when actually this course was about and I should have been studying the legal reasoning and basic legal principles in the judgments. I woke up early in the morning (as I had been doing all week actually) and made a quick cheat sheet (open book exam) of some basic legal principles and the development of some legal reasoning in lines of litigation. And this cheat sheet was absolutely crucial for me in the exam. Of course, I could not rely heavily on it, it was just to have the exact language laid out and in one place. But it was crucial.
--DON’T just highlight in your book without going back immediately and extracting the main points in a note format. I read and highlighted everything for my introductory class the week before and it was a complete waste of time because I did not retain any of it and I had to go back and take actual computerized notes on it anyway. It was annoying. Particularly with cases, because they’re so dense, highlighting just will not do. You have to extract the facts and rules and, very important, put them in your own words as much as possible.

I think it’s going to be a difficult but rewarding three years.