The First of Many Lasts

Yesterday I attended my last law school class. Ever. The professor knew he had a room full of graduating 3Ls, so he gave us a lovely pep talk about passing the bar and being a force for good in society.
I like school a lot, and I'm a little sorry I won't be back in the fall. Hopefully I'll be doing something else at least as interesting.

Senioritis

The post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about using spring break to reset my study habits was naive. Spring break is over, and I'm more ready than ever to put school behind me and start worrying about the bar exam. These days I'm feeling a lot of sympathy for the disengaged 3Ls that seemed so lazy to me this time last year.

Long Day

One of my classes met tonight to make up for a day we missed during last month's snow storms. That meant working from 8:30 to 5:30, then sitting in class from 7:00 to 9:00. Also, it's my birthday.
I would complain, but some part-time students might read this. For them, this is a normal schedule. For four years. Ouch.

Tax Policy

Tax policy is going to kick my butt. I registered for this class more or less as a lark, because I really enjoyed the professor's Federal Income Tax class. I have since learned that the credit is also good toward an MBA, so the class is packed with dual JD/MBA students. It's very heavy on economic theory. I know nothing about economics, having taken exactly one undergraduate macroeconomics course some fifteen years ago, so I'm starting Tax Policy at a terrible disadvantage. I figure I'll learn a lot, but this class probably won't help my GPA any.

Last Day of Classes

The semester ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. Both of my professors went easy on us with lecture and review on the last day of class.

This fall was a lot like last fall for me, in that I put in a lot of time on extracurricular activities and gave my classwork short shrift. Last fall, the result was terrible grades. Now we'll see if I learned anything from that experience. My first exam is in ten days.

Code Blindness

In chess, there is a phenomenon one grandmaster waggishly dubbed amaurosis scacchistica: "chess blindness." It is a player's unaccountable inability to see the obvious, such as a rook bearing down on one's queen.
This week I witnessed an example of what you might call "code blindness" in the form of approximately this exchange about the Internal Revenue Code:

professor: "When does section 307 of the code apply?"
student: "When a transaction is governed by section 305(a)."
professor: "Does section 305(a) govern the transaction on the board?"
student: "No."
professor: "Does section 307 apply to the transaction on the board?"
student: (long pause) "Yes."

This colloquy was repeated a couple of times, with lengthy explanations in between, before the professor got the answer he was looking for. It may have been the most awkward moment I have experienced in law school since my first semester.

Schedule Conflicts

About half of my credits this semester are coming not from classes but from "co-curricular" activities: externship, moot court, law review. You would think that would make my schedule very flexible, but I am starting to see that it is going to cause some problems.
This week, for example, the judge I extern for wanted to take the office to lunch. I wasn't about to pass that up, so I missed Decedents' Estates. That would be fine if I weren't already scheduled to miss Decedents' Estates twice in October when I travel for my moot court competition. The DE professor will summarily drop anyone who misses more than four classes, so I only have one more absence to spare. My calendar is going to be pretty hairy before this semester is over.

I'm Gonna Flunk the Bar Exam

Decedents' estates is already serving as a terrifying reminder of how little I remember about property law, a subject tested heavily on the bar exam. Interesting stuff, though.

Decedents' Estates

My semester of Decedents' Estates began inauspiciously. The professor asked me a couple of questions I didn't know the answer to, leaving the impression that I was not prepared for class when in fact I had prepared quite thoroughly. The worst case scenario, really. I'll be spending a few weeks working my way back from that one.

3L Officially Begins

Today was the first day of classes, but I only had to dip a toe into school life. I had one hour of class today and won't be back at school until Monday.
One hour isn't much to judge by, but so far my Federal Income Taxation professor seems like the best kind of professorial cliche: rumpled suit, oversize glasses, waving arms, quirky vocal delivery. He was a very entertaining lecturer (he has obviously had plenty of practice--he was reading from a stack of notes so yellowed and brittle that they might have predated the income tax itself). Here is (approximately) the line from his introductory lecture that I thought was pithiest: "Everyone supports tax reform. Saying you support tax reform is like saying you support justice. It's just a question of one's definition."

Stress and Relief

Today I was called on in the first thirty minutes of a three-hour class, which is about as good as it gets. After answering some questions about Echols v. State passably well (yes, that Echols: this was Criminal Procedure, and his case features pretty much every procedural move there is), I had two and a half hours to rest easy in the knowledge that the professor was done with me.
You would think that after two years I wouldn't mind talking in class, but the fear of public failure is evergreen.

The Illusion of Extra Credit

My Criminal Procedure professor has given the class the opportunity to write a short paper for extra credit. But in an environment where grades are curved--that is, where the students are graded against each other, not the test--can there be such a thing as extra credit? If my neighbor does the assignment and I do not, surely she won't just drive her grade up, she'll drive mine down if she passes me in the class ranking. I have to do the assignment too, just to keep up. For this reason, anything labeled "extra credit" smacks of graded work in disguise.

Advanced Torts

I just can't get enough of Advanced Torts. So far it's all about libel and slander, which is just as interesting as it sounds (next week we're going to study Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, could you ask for more?). Add the lively classroom dynamic, and it's like a twice-weekly party.

Crim Pro Could Get Political

The Criminal Procedure Post-Trial professor is a bit of a crusader. She's a criminal defense attorney who teaches on the side, and she's easily side-tracked into holding forth about the sorry state of defendants' rights in this country. No one has challenged her views yet, but I'll be surprised if we get through the summer without some law-and-order conservative picking a fight with her.

My Enthusiastic Classmates

Advanced Torts must be the chattiest class I've ever been a part of. I think the students have done more talking than the professor. Part of it is the professor's style--there are some twenty students in the class, and the professor calls on pretty much every student at least once in the course of a two-hour lecture--but mostly, I think a handful of the school's most gregarious students have just coincidentally converged on one class. Mind you, I'm not accusing my classmates of being what are pejoratively called gunners (students who volunteer in class just to flaunt their own intellect). These are just that unusual breed of student that isn't too intimidated to ask the professor for clarification.
So far, I like it. The constant back-and-forth makes the time trot, if not fly, and the professor's classroom management skills are such that we don't get bogged down in one subject for too long. It's going to be a nice summer.

Okay, one or two of them are what I'd call gunners, but I'm not here to judge.

Mock Trial

We finally had the mock trial that Lawyering Skills has been leading up to all semester. It was surely the most fun I'll ever have taking a final exam. I bullied witnesses, I drew diagrams, I pointed accusingly, I marched up and down in front of the jury box. My performance might have been a little over the top, but my classmates were entertained. Later this week I'll serve as a witness for some other students' trial.
After two years of law school, I still have yet to go to court and watch a real trial. I should make that a summer project.

The Law is a Moving Target

I don't remember this ever happening in undergrad: Today in Advanced Civil Procedure, the professor started off class by saying something like, "I know you had an assignment for today on the syllabus, but two days ago the Supreme Court delivered an opinion that changed a lot of what we learned in chapter six, so we're going to revisit that material instead." Indeed, Perdue v. Kenny pretty much put four or five pages of the textbook into the shredder.

The experience goes to prove something we're told by our professors all the time: we're not really in law school to learn the law. The law changes, so we're always going to have to look that up no matter how well we think we know it. What we're supposed to be learning is the methods of legal research and analysis. Then again, if we don't pick up a little law along the way, we won't get very far on the bar exam. Back to the books.

Always Read the Directions

Last week being spring break, I had plenty of time to work on this week's Lawyering Skills assignment: a closing argument. It was a good one, too. Unfortunately, when I double checked the syllabus today I realized that the assignment was a closing argument not for the case we've been working on all semester, but for a new case that was distributed just before spring break. I guess a little extra practice never hurt anyone. I still have two days to do the right assignment.

Judges With Unfortunate Names

For tomorrow's International Criminal Law class, I have been assigned to read an opinion by Judge Sayeman Bula-Bula of the Congo. The Congo has a Judge Bula-Bula? Really? Really?

Incidentally, International Criminal Law is, as I hoped, much better than the Intro to International Law material that preceded it. Intro to International Law was basically a philosophy course about the nature of law and statehood. Zzzz . . . In International Criminal Law, by contrast, we are learning about what happens in the real world when people are prosecuted for war crimes or apprehended in international waters. Great stuff!

Legal Stagecraft

In my lawyering skills workshop, we're starting to concentrate on the formalities of the trial ("Your honor, I move that the photo marked defense exhibit fifteen be admitted into evidence," and the like). I'm surprised by how hard it is to consistently get all the procedural minutiae right, even in a controlled classroom setting. As laid out by the professor, showing a piece of evidence to the jury is a seven step process.
In practice, of course, the courtroom formalities are mostly empty show because the attorneys know each other's cases and aren't going to be surprised by anything that happens at trial. Even so, our professor warned us to learn to say all the magic procedural words smoothly and with confidence. If you come off as a bungler, he said, the jury won't take you seriously. Good advice, I'm sure.