Tuesday, 01 August 2006

• Currently Reading Law School Confidential (Revised Edition): A Complete Guide to the Law School Experience: By Students, for Students By Robert H. Miller see related

  
  
  

  Last week I had taken a Civil Procedure exam in which when I finished felt that either I had done brilliantly on it or totally bombed it.  The latter being the most likely scenario.  I had finished the exam ahead of what I believe to be everyone by a large amount of time and by essay blue book wasn’t even half full.  I also only used one side of the page and doubled spaced everything…so compared to how much everyone was scribbling away, I wrote hardly anything in comparison.

   

  That very day I hadn’t a clue what was going on in class.  I began studying hard at four in the morning, stopped at five, started again at noon and was even listening to the lectures I had recorded on the way to Long Island for class until I arrived at 6:45PM.  I was sitting in class just thinking that there is no way I will be able to do this exam.

   

  It turns out that I had one of the top five exams in the class.  I guess my straight forward answers were correct and all those who were filling up their blue books were just writing themselves into the ground for nothing.  I had answered the questions as best as I could, but compared to everyone else it seemed I had put down so little that I had stayed an extra thirty to forty minutes after I finished just rereading my exam over and over trying to think of any way I could have done it differently, but nothing came to me.

   

  I suppose the way I am approaching law school based upon all the reading I have done to prepare for it has even given me a head start on this head start program for law school. 

   

  This week we began Contracts.  Instead of a professor teaching the class like in Torts and Civil Procedure, we have a student teaching Contracts.  The reading material is very interesting to me, but I got absolutely nothing out of the class.  It was not only dull, but I didn’t feel the student was even a decent teacher.

   

  I had just gotten home from the gym at 5AM…I’m running a little behind; generally I’m asleep around 4 – 4:30AM.  I have all my reading done for tomorrow but I need to wake up by 1PM to get all my case briefs done.  It also appears that I am one of the only people in class doing the case briefs.  Everyone else appears to just be doing the readings and hoping to remember everything without taking the necessary time and developing the skill of briefing the cases.  Briefing a case means making summaries of the relevant information such as the facts, issue, rules, analysis, etc. that aids in critical thinking and organization of the many different aspects of a case.  It lays everything out in front of you in your own words rather than having to search frantically through the case looking for the answer because the student that was called on did not prepare a brief.

   

  Any how....good night or morning or whatever floats your boat.

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