Externship Orientation

Yesterday I endured a grueling six-hour orientation for my upcoming externship. The advice from a bona fide judicial clerk was terrific. The explanation of the rules and procedures of the externship program was necessary. The two-hour ethics lesson was a real drag, given that ninety percent of the attendees had already completed a semester-long ethics course. I suppose the professor needs to have proof that we knew better if one of us commits some egregious breach of ethics.
My externship doesn't start for another week or so, but I can tell already that the workload is no joke. I'm really going to earn these two credit hours.

Orientation Week

There have been several social events in the last few days--a minor league ballgame, a barbecue, etc.--to introduce the incoming 1Ls to each other and warm everyone up for the new school year. Being the gung-ho, all-in law student that I am, I attended three. It was nice to see some familiar faces.
I particularly enjoyed chatting with a few 1Ls about their expectations and worries. That first year is so hyped and so full of pomp and circumstance that nostalgia sets in almost contemporaneously. The new students are probably already sick of us 2Ls and 3Ls hanging around them, trying to soak up their innocence and enthusiasm.

Summer Grades

Summer grades are out. Now that my GPA has the inertia of sixty-plus credit hours holding it in place, grade day isn't the event it used to be. Anyway, the infinitesimal move in my GPA was in the upward direction, so hurray for that.

Associate Editing

I have my first assignment as an "associate editor" of the Law Review, and not a minute too soon. There have been no school-related tests or deadlines in two weeks, and the lack of stress has been causing me anxiety.
I was a little taken aback when I learned that I am going to be (among other things) evaluating other students' cite checks. This repeats a pattern I have already experienced a couple of times in law school: one day you're learning a new skill, the next day you're presented as an expert. It's hard not to feel like a bit of a fraud when I'm judging someone else's performance at something I've done all of four or five times.

Clearing the Bookshelves

I sold a half-dozen textbooks this week--five to classmates and one on eBay. Like any textbooks, law books date quickly, so I was relieved to be able to unload a few before new editions made them obsolete. The student email listserv is positively alive with textbook trafficking at this time of year. When I posted my books for sale, I got my first response in four minutes.

I still have about ten books that I've been holding on to, waiting for a professor to assign them. Now that I've had some success with eBay, I may give up on the local market and see if the Internet wants to buy them.

If you're wondering why I don't save my books to review for the bar exam, no one does that, at least no one I know. Thousand-page textbooks are just unsuited to the kind of cramming that precedes the bar exam. There are purpose-built books for that, and I'll shop for them when the time comes.

What I Probably Won't Be Doing Next Summer

It's time to stop worrying about getting good grades and start worrying about getting a job. Application season for judicial clerkships starts in September. I am very enthusiastic about the idea of clerking for a judge, but those jobs don't come easily. Clerking for a federal judge is right out--I'll apply, but those are prestigious jobs that attract out-of-state candidates with much better academic credentials than I have. That leaves state judges. According to the information distributed by the career services office, exactly one state judge in central Arkansas is planning to hire a clerk next summer.
The upshot is that I plan to spend a goodly chunk of my August putting together application materials for jobs I will never get. I am trying to gird myself for ten months of similar windmill-tilting. Looking for work in a bad economy requires a healthy appetite for rejection.

Criminal Procedure Post Trial Exam

The Crim Pro exam was an odd duck. Hypothetical situations are the bread and butter of law school tests, but this one didn't go that route. I daresay it was the only test I have taken in the last two years on which all of the essay questions were essentially, "Remember this thing we studied in class? Write down what you know about it." There were also a great many multiple choice questions. In sum, the test seemed to favor whoever memorized the most stuff. I'll stand my memory up against anybody's, so I figure I did fine.