Brief Law School

As I checked my email before I started in on my heavy studying for the day, it occurred to me that I haven't updated the blog as to what my schoolwork is like, so here is a brief update.

First, I should establish some of the terminology that we'll be using over the next few years (more details about each course in a later series of delightful posts). More to follow, I'm sure, but here's a start:

• 1L - first-year law student (ME!) Next year, 2L, year after, 3L
• Elements - one of my first year courses. Full name: Elements of Law.
• Civ Pro - another first year course. Full name: Civil Procedure. 
• Torts - another first year course. Full name: Torts. (Tricky, I know...)
• Writing - yet another first year course. Full name: Legal Writing and Lawyering Skills.
• Contracts - you guessed it! Another first year course! Full name: Contracts
• Cardozo - my law school.
• Section - my group in law school. Our class is divided up into several sections, and each section has all of its courses together. They do this so it'll be easier to get to know each other and form study groups, I believe.

For the past week or so, we've been in orientation. Each morning, we go to Elements for a couple of hours, and then we have additional activities in the afternoon (lectures, panels, discussions, etc). Monday, all of my other classes will start as well, and Elements will continue through mid-October. Each day, I will spend about three hours in classes, and then have the rest of the day to work on homework and assignments. Since I worked full-time and then went to school for about three hours per day when I was in undergrad, I suspect I'll be able to find a good balance. Of course, I'll probably have to cut back on my blogging, which has already been lacking a bit, but you'll just have to take what you can get.

So far, law school is just fine. Most of the conversations are really interesting, and there's a lot of variety of activities. The people are all really different from each other, so there's a good diversity of views and backgrounds. I'm the only person in my class from Utah. In fact, today a guy couldn't remember my name, and after I told him what it was, he told me that he had wanted to just call me Utah but didn't know if that would be offensive. I told him that as the only person in our class (about 250 of us) from Utah, I'd probably turned around if he called me that, and that'd be okay. When I tell people I'm from Utah, they usually pause and say, "Oh." I'm not really sure what that means (haven't bothered to try to figure it out), but I suspect that they may have some interesting ideas about me. I'm not too worried about it though--I have some interesting ideas about some of them, so I suppose we're all just making assumptions all around!

I have only been in class with one of my professors, and he has been excellent. I've met another one who I think will probably be pretty interesting, and I've heard excellent things about two of the other professors, so I feel like I really got the best schedule. Our section doesn't start class until 10:00 or later every day, but we're always out pretty early as well, and we got some great professors. This probably means that in the spring, we'll have the mean, scary professors and have to go to class at 8:00 every day, but I'm enjoying this semester while it lasts.

I need to get back to my studying, but I'll leave you with one last thing you may not know about law school: they feed you here. All the time. It's great. For the past couple of days, bar review companies have been sponsoring lunches so that they can try to convince us to buy their products. They give us mugs, shirts, and a free meal, so they can try to convince me to buy anything they want. Joke's on them: I'm a broke student!