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WARNING!!! WARNING!!! WARNING!!!

This is the longest post to date, and it’s the most like a journal entry (or an email to my parents, which often looks a lot a like a journal entry). So for those of you marginally interested in my activities, I’d recommend maybe skimming this or skipping it altogether. (To my parental units… yeah, you’ll probably get all this on the phone later tonight!)

BOOLAR VISITS WITH OTHER LAW STUDENTS + GETS GOOD NEWS.

I went to the law school today to check the bulletin boards there to see if my class assignments for the first week of classes have been posted yet. (They weren’t.)

I stopped to check my email on the computers there (ah, high-speed internet, how I miss ye) and while I was there, I was overhearing two females discuss classes and books and summer jobs, so I logged out of my email and headed across the computer lab to chat with them.

K. and H. (who were later joined by M.) were very friendly, and when I introduced myself saying, “Hi–I’m a slightly paranoid One-L who would be greatly comforted by a couple words of advice,” they both laughed and invited me to sit down and talk with them.

[NOTE: 1L or One-L means a first year law student. 2L or Two-L is second year, and 3L or Three-L is third--and usually final--year of law school.]

K. and M. are 3L’s, and H. is a 2L. Turns out that H. had the exact same schedule last year that I have this year! (All law students here have the same classes their first year, but there are different professors for each class.) K. and H. both said that of the the various combinations of professors possible, I got the best one. Yay!! (I did a mini victory dance in my head; I don’t dance for people I just met because it tends to frighten them.)

H. said that she did well in her classes, and that the class she got the most surprising grade in was Torts, which isn’t until second semester. But, she said, she really liked the class, she just didn’t do well on its exam. In fact, one of the classes she’d had second semester (Constitutional Law I with Ivan Bodensteiner) she’d liked so much that she was attempting to get that same professor for other classes she’s taking this year. Again, I say Yay!!

To further make me happy, all three students said that they did NOT brief their cases (or do thorough outlines) like all the “how-to” books tell you you should. They all said that they did better by just reading carefully, highlighting their text and making notes in the margins of their books. That is such a HUGE relief for me, because I have never ever ever ever been an outline person; I have always done the highlight-and-make-margin-notes thing. So it did me so much good to hear that other students were using that same method and doing fine.

Also, all three students described their experiences of summer employment as being “GRADES DO NOT MATTER.” K. said she was usually a pretty solid C student in law school. She said she chooses to spend her time working (she has 2 part time jobs!) and being with her boyfriend (who is now her husband), rather than studying. And she said that she has a better resume than she ever would have if she would have studied enough to be an A student. (And she’s no dummy: she was a Geology major who was going to go on to a Masters degree and later decided to come to law school.)

M. affirmed what K. said. He said that it’s not about balancing your time with studying and relaxing or working: it’s about learnign what’s important to you and what is “crap”, as he put it. He said that he chooses to NOT read (at all!) some of his study materials or text because he has learned what is essential for him to know and what isn’t, and knowing EVERYthing in order to get an A on the exam just isn’t important. That’s not what’s important in his life, so he doesn’t do it.

Basically, all three students said that getting A’s is good, of course. But if you’d rather work or take time for other areas of life, it wouldn’t harm you later in the job market. The employers want you to know how to research, and how to write.

Again, yay!!

M. did say that he’d recommend doing the full case briefs and outlines for a month or two, because he said that would help hone my skills at identifying what’s important and what isn’t in the reading. But K. and H. both said they didn’t do that, and they wouldn’t recommend that–they both advised just sticking to wahtever study methods have worked in the past, and not trying to change them just because you’re in law school now.

This makes me feel sooooo good. I might be able to handle this after all. Which brings me to the second part of this huge post, which I call:

BOOLAR FEELS CONFIDENT, FREAKS OUT, AND FEELS CONFIDENT AGAIN.

Yesterday, I took a couple hours out of my day to read the next (and last, for now) in a series of “How To Succeed In Law School” type books that I’ve been reading as a way of taming (or feeding?) my obsession with being as prepared as humanly possible for my first year of law school. The book is called Getting To Maybe, and it discusses methods for doing well on law school exams. The two law professors who wrote the book give details on what to look for during your class studies, what to avoid, how to better take notes in class (and how many students mess up in attempting to take notes), how to put together a good law school exam answer, common foibles (and why they’re wrong and how to avoid them), etc. It’s a great book; very informative, easy to follow their ideas.

Here’s the part that got me excited, and then freaked me out: I think I can DO this. As I started reading through the book, I realized that much of what they’re discussing as the “what to do” and “what not to do” is very closely tied to the methods I used to do well in my religious studies classes in undergraduate work. I know it isn’t a perfect parallel, but that line of study requires you to do more than memorize facts: I had to learn the facts, but also learn how they fit into the structure of both modern and ancient societies, how the ideas of the religion’s text(s) shaped the societal culture, laws, etc. and how the development of society then turned around and shaped the way the texts were read and interpreted, which then turned back around and shaped society again…

What I learned very quickly in my religious studies classes is that, in your studies, if you write an essay in which you come to one solid conclusion without sort of “branching off” to explore various ideas posed in the question (e.g., “if you interpret this action using this text, then…” versus “if you examined the action through a purely societal/secular viewpoint, then…” versus “if the action is interpreted using the text but placed into a modern secular setting, then…” ) then your essay probably would only rank at a “C” level.

I learned that the point of the study was not about learning “The Answer”, but was about learning how certain actions or philosophies fit into a setting, and how various actions and ways of living related back to it. It was all about taking issues and figuring out what sorts of philosophies applied to them, and how they might be interpreted differently by different people in different societies at different times, using different parts of a religious text.

This is very similar to what the authors of Getting To Maybe say a good law student must do to succeed in law school.

Yes, there will be lots and lots and lots and lots of facts and terms and dates and names to memorize; that’s a given.

But it’s the application of all the cases I’ll read and all the memorized facts that will count. And I really think I can DO this.

I think I’ve done it before in my religious studies classes, and I think I’ve done it before when I worked for an attorney. He would had me a file and tell me the base outline of what our client gave us, and would then let me go through the file and dig up various issues, find out how the opposing counsel might approach these issues and how we might approach them, and how we might support our side and how the opposition might support theirs, and he’d let me speculate on “if the opposition approaches this issue from this Standpoint A, we would do well to approach it from Point B, because if we used Point C, then the opposition could well bring up Sub-point A2, which would lead us down this path…” In other words, I think I was sort of creating (in much less formal terms) the exact sort of answer that I would use on a law exam. Except I was doing it on a real case (which, oddly enough, real cases are often less farfetched and complex than law school exam questions). And my attorney boss told me I was good at this.

That means… I just might be able to DO this law school thing.

And then, the idea that I might have a tiny inkling of confidence relative to law school kind of freaked me out. As if the laws of Karma would suddenly dictate that because I’d felt confident I would be doomed to failure to make up for such a transgression.

But the more I read through that book, the more I became convinced that I think I “get” what the authors are saying. There is no doubt in my mind this will be hard. I know I will study like I’ve never studied before, and I’ll have many evenings where I’ll want to run home and never open another law book ever again… because all law students go through those feelings at some point. But the way I have to think, and the methods I’ll have to use to do well, from what I gather, are not foreign to me. I’ve used them for many years, and I drive people crazy when I use them to discuss political issues.

[Speaking of which, Alex: you can do this law school thing too, I think. You already think like this (I know because you're the prime person to get me goin' on political or social issues and you argue alongside me step for step), and from what I understand, that's half the battle right there. Just in case your police plans change...]

Anyway. I know this has been a long, rambling post. And I know that I’ve probably written it more for my benefit than yours. But, I guess that’s the peril of an online journal. I’ll bore you sometimes. But it’s good for my soul, if that counts for anything.

Holy banana peels, Batman. I just might be able to do this law school thing. I just might.

Apefully yours,
Boolar The Ape

Labels: law school, the boolar posts