Lawschool Journal
My Lawschool Journal covers my first year of law school and isn’t really being updated anymore. These days you are better off reading my blog.
Week 1 10/6/02
Though I didn’t get to start as early as I wanted, I’m still going to keep a journal about law school. I expect I’ll be updating it once a week or more on Sundays.
At left is a picture of the lovely Condon Hall, UW law school. It is hideous, but more on that later.
I find it a little disturbing that we (my classmates and I) were already making legal jokes at a “Thank God it’s Thursday” happy hour. And not jokes about lawyers, rather jokes using legal doctrines we had spent all week talking about. I was reminded of the story Cedar told me in which his friends and he knew they were studying too much when they cracked an organic chemistry joke when studying for a test: someone told a joke whose punch line required that an ionic bond be stronger than a covalent bond (something that is impossible) and they all cracked up, laughing as hard as they could. It is a very “inside jokey” kind of thing. I can see why lawyers can become a little isolated from the rest of the world. I’m glad I have friends outside of law school to smack me around when I become an annoying law student.
So my classes are Contracts, Basic Legal Skills, Civil Procedure and Torts. What is a tort you ask? Well that is a good question. Ask me in 3 months! Just kidding. A tort is some kind of wrongdoing one person inflicts on another over which someone can sue someone else. It can be physical or mental. It differs from a criminal suit in that a tort case is a person suing a person, whereas a criminal case is the government suing a person. There, now you can be a lawyer. They were just kidding when they said law school was three years, it is the week it takes to explain to you what a tort is.
So far my Contracts class has been the hard and harrowing one, though it really hasn’t been that bad. The professor is the most traditionally socratic one I have though, to be fair, she isn’t all that socratic. 
Traditional Socratic method is when the teacher asks questions of one randomly picked student to try and elicit answers that will prove the student wrong (supposedly teaching the student how to think rightly, though most people now think that is a folly). My Contracts professor divided the class into groups, and calls on people from that group. She tells the class in advance what group will be responsible for answering questions, which is much nicer than traditional socratic. Then you would answer her questions until there was a question you couldn’t answer. And she is not trying to get a wrong answer from you, as some old school, intimidation style professors would (if you’ve seen “The Paper Chase” or even “Legally Blond” that is the kind of professor in those movies).
