Worst. Week. Ever.

Here is my schedule for next week:

Monday: 5-page outline of my law review paper is due

Tuesday: Family Law midterm (Of the eighteen classes I've taken in law school, this is the first with a midterm exam. It's 20% of my grade.)

Wednesday: 15-minute oral argument for moot court (25% of class grade).

Thursday: Written assignment for Lawyering Skills is due (nothing unusual about this--there's an assignment due almost every Thursday)

Friday: Business as usual

On top of that, I have a research assignment from the professor I'm assisting that I haven't even started. No firm due date for that, thank goodness. The upcoming weekend will probably be my busiest until Thanksgiving, when I have to finish a draft of my law review paper.

Damocles

I've been complaining a lot about assignments and deadlines, but it occurs to me that one shoe still hasn't dropped: I have yet to get a citation checking assignment from my law review overlords. Many of my fellow law review apprentices got assignments way back at the beginning of the semester, but a few of us are still waiting for our numbers to come up. Surely the editorial board wouldn't ask us to take on a cite check now, while the paper-writing deadlines are coming hot and heavy. Would it?

Class Cancelled

I showed up for class at 11:00 this morning only to learn that the professor had announced by email at 9:45 that class was cancelled. This is typical. Sometimes we get no notice at all: we'll show up to class and there will be a sign on the door. I'd say this has happened to me five or six times in my year-and-a-half of law school. That isn't a whole lot, but it's annoying as heck when it happens.

Constitutional Interpretation is Voodoo

A frustrating pattern has emerged in my Constitutional Law textbook. Nearly every chapter presents a few excerpts from Supreme Court cases followed by something like this: "Why do you suppose the Court treats commercial interests differently from private citizens in this context? Consider these six possibilities put forward by legal scholars . . ."
Apparently, there are no facts about the Constitution. There are only debates. The Constitution itself, with all its amendments, occupies eighteen pages of the textbook. The rest of the book, an ostensible illumination of those eighteen pages, is another 1671 pages. It's hard to tell just what I'm supposed to be learning. On the plus side, there ought to be no wrong answers on the exam. If I write anything plausible about the Constitution, it's sure to be the position of some celebrated professor or Justice.

Reading Without Reading

I've noticed a big change in my reading habits this semester. Last year (and throughout my academic career to date), I was a slow reader. I read things very closely and retained everything. This year, I don't so much read things as look at them. I pick up a couple of sentences from each paragraph, take a few notes, and move on. My reading comprehension definitely suffers, but time permits no more.

I worry that this is a preview of what it's like to be a lawyer: time and budget constraints probably force one to throw together a lot of work that is good enough, but not the best one can do.

Assisting

I finally scored a paying gig of sorts: a professor took me on as a research assistant. Being a research assistant is probably the easiest way to make a buck around the school. The library keeps a pool of them and professors occasionally put out mass email calls for assistants on top of that. I got my assistantship by pure luck: a professor I've never met emailed me on the recommendation of one of my professors from last year. I have no idea what I'll be doing or even what it pays, but it's nice to look forward to getting paid for legal work.

Deadlines

This time last year I was taken aback by how few graded assignments I would have before final exams. This fall is quite the opposite: I'm appalled at the amount of text on paper I'm being asked to produce. Family Law, Lawyering Skills, Moot Court and Law Review all march unforgivingly from one deadline to the next. It's a rare week that I don't have to turn in at least one written assignment.

As a result, it's a rare week that I finish all my reading assignments. It's as if I'm taking two parallel curricula: a full-time reading load and a full-time writing load. When I have to choose, the writing always wins because that's where the deadlines are. If I can't find a way to cram all of this work into my schedule, I'm going to be picking up a lot of slack when exam cram week comes around.