September 6, 2010 – 9:06 am
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One of the primary difficulties of being a One L is that for most of the semester the only graded items—exams—are far off, in the distance, at the end of the semester. As a result, there are usually about 16 weeks in a semester during which there is very little guidance on what is important to do with your time. Worse, there seem to be about two dozen things you can be doing with your time, and being the cave dweller that you are, you have no perspective from which to judge what are good things to do, and what aren’t. A good place to start on the One L year is right here: what do I do all semester? What matters, and what doesn’t?
What Doesn’t Matter
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September 5, 2010 – 9:00 am
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You need to be very careful who you take advice from about how to succeed in law school. It never fails: One Ls are scurrying about in the first weekend parties asking every Two L they see for advice about how to excel in the One L year. Or, they read every blog from a Two L they can find on the World Wide Web.
But think about this for a minute. The chances are good that virtually every Two L you are asking for advice on excelling in law school ended up in the middle of the class. Why? They don’t know how to excel in law school. They know how to be average, and we can give them that. But are you trying to be average?
Here’s a tip: If you are going to ask advice from someone, make sure that they know more than you do about excelling in law school. Otherwise, keep your own counsel and keep following the plan in my book.
September 2, 2010 – 12:11 pm
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One of the staples of law school life is the study group. After all, what about a study group is not to like? Eight people, sitting in a circle facing each other, doing a sort of Socratic method Q and A with each other, in their best imitation of Mr. Chips. Everyone is surrounded by piles of paper everywhere. Spent beer cans and coffee cups abound, there are half-eaten pizzas at everyone’s feet. Some guy in a college sweatshirt is in the middle with one hand holding a casebook and his university Polo® wire-rim glasses in the other, while grasping a big clump of his hair in confusion. Bafflement is on everyone’s faces, and no one seems to have any clue what is going on in the next day’s class, or the class as a whole.
Ah, the One L study group. Isn’t it glorious?
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August 31, 2010 – 9:00 am
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If you have the problem I had before I became a serious student—the sitting still five minutes problem I have been writing about—You need to do it exactly like I tell you. Unless there is something wrong with you, it will solve your sitting problem, and you will be able to do what law school requires. If there is something wrong with you and this doesn’t work, I am sorry. Withdraw from law school before the tuition refund rate starts going down.
My guru had been to law school, and at the time he was pursuing a Ph.D. A real smarty pants. He told me that he had the five-minute problem before he went to law school. Someone had told him what he was telling me.
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August 27, 2010 – 1:10 am
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Shortly after I finished my undergrad degree I somehow managed to get into the University of Chicago for graduate work. Looking back, I am not sure how this occurred. Someone with authority got a little reckless, I think. But I digress.
When I got my acceptance letter from Chicago, I was thrilled. I thought “this is the greatest day of my life.” After all, it was the University of Chicago and that is where all the smart people like me go to grad school. Right? “Congratulations! You have been admitted. . .” That is what that letter said. It must be true. I called everybody. “Mom, I got into the University of Chicago. I must be a genius.”
What a joke. Nothing against the U of C. It was and is a great, great university. But, at the point I was at in my academic life, I can tell you that it was not good for me to get into that school. At least at the moment I got the letter. You see, I didn’t understand what had actually happened to me. I didn’t realize that I had just been accepted into a school that would totally expose me. The University of Chicago is the intellectual equivalent of a full body search at Leavenworth prison.
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August 24, 2010 – 10:30 am
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I am guessing that a lot of the people reading this blog are a lot like I was after finishing my undergrad degree. I’ll bet that the real problem with a lot of you was the real problem with me before I went to law school. It is not that you don’t know how to study. If you have the basic brainpower and can read, you can study. The problem for me was that I could study—read things carefully and thoroughly—but for no more than about five minutes. I am guessing that for many of you, your real problem is not that you can’t study. Your real problem is that you can’t sit still.
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August 22, 2010 – 10:00 am
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Sit in a law school class for very long and you will know there is good reason for One Ls to fear the Socratic method. I will grant that. Even so, if you think that the Socratic method should be abandoned because of its brutality, or that it is autocratic, or its Eurocentric, or whatever. . .you need to reevaluate that opinion. You are plainly wrong. Here is the great beauty of the method: Professors who practice it faithfully spend each class—an entire 50 minute or one and a half hour class—on one concept. Usually two cases, maybe three, all about the same concept.
Think about it: the poor jerk who actually slogged through real classes in college, and who ended up in med school—mom and dad were very proud—well that guy is sitting in advanced organic chemistry about now, and the professor is covering about 60 concepts a class at light speed, and our poor sap is going to be responsible for it all when exams come. You? One concept, maybe two a class.
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August 19, 2010 – 10:48 am
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Law school classes are typically built on the Socratic method. By now you probably know what that means: Everyday you go to class, and the professor calls out a name—presumably randomly—and that person is on the spot for the entire class. There is no way out. The professor then starts grilling that student about one concept—the key concept—in one lousy case that was in the assigned reading for the day. What proceeds is a brutal Q and A session on that case with the lucky student of the day, who, no matter how well prepared she is, will end up looking like a total moron.
At the end of this ritual sacrifice the bloody student stumbles out of the room with everyone else, who are grateful that today, at least, their number didn’t come up. That is the Socratic method in a nutshell.
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August 17, 2010 – 10:43 am
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One thing about law school: If you have never had to digest large amounts of material before, you are going to have something to get used to. If you don’t keep up you will fall behind, and about five weeks before exams—when you should be doing your outlining—you will be in serious trouble.
Now that is the bad news. The good news is that, in fact, there isn’t that much reading to do. It seems like a lot to the ordinary One L, but that is only because the ordinary One L is soft. The ordinary One L skated through high school because, well, high school is easy to skate through if you are smart enough to eventually get into law school. College? Sheesh. There are very few truly demanding college programs anymore, unless you are in the hard sciences or engineering. But if you were in one of those programs, you probably aren’t reading this blog.
Most of us came to law school from the law school ticket degrees: Poli Sci, English, Sociology, Criminal Justice, or History. Frankly, unless you went to a handful of super-rigorous schools, you never really learned to read and digest anywhere near the amount of information you are going to take in during the One L year. But here’s another dirty little secret: it isn’t that much.
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August 13, 2010 – 10:05 am
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As I mentioned in my last blog post, most people that finished well behind me in my law school class worked a good deal harder than I did. My experience as a law student and as a teacher has led me to the opinion is that the reason most people end up in the middle is not primarily related to the amount of work that a person is willing to do. I think it is something else.
If you go to a law school orientation meeting at your school on how to be successful in law school, what are you told? The conventional wisdom about law school. This includes advice about reading your cases, briefing, outlining, and so on. And everyone that is in those workshops nods their heads and tries to implement that advice.
But consider this: if everyone is implementing the same conventions to succeed in law school, where is everyone going to end up? Where the conventions say they will: in the middle, along with everyone else.
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