I started my first year of law school in August 2008. Prior to the beginning of the semester, I went to the public library and checked out two law related books: Constitutional Law in a Nutshell, and some book on why lawyers write the way they write. I had no idea of what to expect from my law classes; I didn't know if I was expected to read the US Constitution prior to my first classes or whether I was supposed to have already memorized the Bill of Rights. As it turned out, I didn't even get Constitutional Law as a class until my second year. Full-time students on the 3 year path took Con Law their first year, but the part-timers, like myself, were off the hook.
I went into my first year of law school blind, and I came out of it with 20/20 in retrospect. Before I started law school, I had a plan to blog about my first year in law school during my actual first year. Obviously, that didn't happen. The reason it didn't happen is because I didn't have the time to blog; I barely had time to sleep. At the first year law student orientation, a professor warned that law students had to schedule in free time. I thought that the professor was laying it on a bit thick, but as it turns out, she was right. Full-time law students take five classes their first year; they are under an agreement to work no more than 25 hours a week; and, they don't have to take classes during the summer. A lot of the full-time students, if not most of them, do not work at all. Yet, because they take two extra classes, they think that they have it so hard. Part-time law students take three classes a semester during the regular school year, attend two classes during the summer, and the majority of part-timers work full-time jobs. If I had my vote, I would say that the part-timers who work full-time have it a lot harder than the full-timers without day jobs.
My first year of law school, I worked as a high school English teacher from 6:50 a.m. to 3:30 Monday through Friday, and on days that I had law school, I went home for two hours before heading to class from 6:15-9:40 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays, and 6:15-7:40 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays. I found myself looking forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays because those were the days that I might actually be able to get some extra sleep at night. The weekends were supposed to be a reprieve, but how could they be when there were over eight hours worth of reading to cover and on top of that research to be done. The weekends were my only real time to study and work on my law school assignments. I had no free time. Over the course of my first year, I took Civil Procedure 1 & 2, Lawyer Process 1 & 2, Contracts 1 & 2, Professional Responsibilities, and Family Law. The hardest classes were the Lawyering Process classes. Lawyering Process is a legal writing class that teaches students how to write memos, how to write briefs, and how to research the law and apply it to legal problems, amongst other things. The class required hours and hours of research before any writing could be done. The research process was laborious to say the least. With only two hours to spare between work and law classes, the weekends were the only time that I had to work on LP assignments, and with those assignments went my social life. Free time meant compromise; the comprise usually amounted to me staying up late hours on a work night to finish assignments at the last minute. I can honestly say that the Lawyering Process classes really helped me in the long run. Everything I learned in those classes will help me as a lawyer in the future. I'm sure that Contracts and Civ Pro will help me in the future as well albeit not as much as LP. And, that's the beauty of law school- all of the classes, all of the assignment, all of the lectures, they're all relevant to what I'll actually do as a lawyer. Most of the classes that I took during my bachelors and my masters degree were completely unnecessary. Law school has been the best educational experience of my life.
I am now in my third month of my second year as a law student. What I know now about law school is that it requires all of my free time if I want to do my very best. I also know that if I don't want to give up all of my free time I can still do okay. The reading can't all be done before class in two hours, and a research paper for law school cannot be done in one night, even if it is all night, not even two nights. Professors don't expect you to memorize the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. But, professors will expect you to memorize a bunch of legal rules and the facts of a bunch of cases. Professors will call on you unexpectedly and ask you to provide the facts of a case or your analysis on a legal issue. The work in law school is not hard; there's just a lot of work to get through. It can all be done. It just takes time.
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