Lawschool Journal
Week 4 10/20/02
Whoops! I haven’t really gotten my journal going. I’m gonna do it darn it! So I told you a little about a couple of my classes last time.
Last week I got my first paper back in my Basic Legal Skills (BLS) class. (It wasn’t really a paper, it was a 5 page “memo”). BLS is the class that we write for. I liked writing the memo. It was to advocate either taking or not taking a ‘false imprisonment’ case for a fictitious firm I was “working” for. Read it here if you like, but it is not a page-turner. 
It wasn’t graded, my prof just made a few comments. But her comments were positive, so I suppose it didn’t suck. She said “Excellent!”. A couple times now I’ve heard that English majors have a hard time with legal writing, but I love it so far! To me it is so similar.
So I’m about to start my 4th week of law school. Reading quantity is starting to pick up pretty quickly now, but in terms of getting the reading done I feel good about that. The thing that I’m a bit apprehensive of is whether I’m actually learning anything I’m supposed to learn. I know I’m learning things, but it’s all kind of a jumble in my head. Well, no it isn’t a jumble, it is more like a very incomplete jigsaw puzzle. I’ve read and heard a lot about how Law school leaves you feeling kind of lost the first year, and I see what they were talking about.
One book I read about Law School talks about how no one really seems to know why they did well or poorly. The cynical view this author (a lawyer) took was that people explained good grades by saying they had “what it takes” as though it were an innate quality. Fortunately this author maintained that it wasn’t necessarily that some people had “it” and others didn’t, but rather that it was a way of thinking and studying that some naturally took to, while others had to make a conscious effort. (One of the new skills to learn was “examsmanship” or the ability to do well on Law school exams.) The reason Law school is such a trauma (according to the author), was that was very little explicit teaching of these skills happened. Learning you hadn’t gotten “it”, only at the end of the class, after you had taken the finals that counted for all of your grades, was rather demoralizing.
What this means is that though things have gotten better since that book was written in 1996, there are still some problems. Exams used to be the whole grade, but my first exams only count for 10% of my grade. I’m not really sure, but I think the books and professors could use more conventional teaching styles to help us get going. For example they could 1) tell us the basic law 2) give us examples 3) give hypotheticals that change the facts of the examples 4) ask questions about the hypotheticals 5) give us some sample answers, or have us turn in some answers occasionally so we can get feedback. Right now steps 1), and 5) are missing, and these are really useful steps.
But I’m enjoying reading the cases most of the time. Except I still get ornery when reading verbosity. It is a pet peeve of mine when people use really long convoluted sentences to say things. My take on it is that they are trying to sound smart and educated by using esoteric words and a billion modifying clauses in their sentences. It is harder to make a compelling and subtle argument using simple, clear structures, but it makes the argument stronger. That is my goal, is to write in plain English as much a possible.
Well it is time for my bed time, but next week I’ll tell you about my class mates who are great and some of the extracurriculars I’m doing.
