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Dear Wormwood:
Our correspondence over these last few years, put together, may be the single longest thing I've ever written. For old time's sake, however, I hope you'll allow me to give you one last list, a few things I hope you'll take with you in your own purgatorial journeys.
At long last, Wormwood, our conversation is at an end. Please take with you my best wishes, and may your time in law school bring you every joy possible.
Dear Wormwood:
I promised you two letters that might help your friend Scrimgouge in starting a 1L blog. The first letter focused mostly upon matters that any blogger, legal or otherwise, might find useful, be they technical or stylistic. But both you and Scrimgouge are now law student, which makes your efforts (and yes, dear Wormwood, I really am hoping that you too might start blogging) a bit different. So with the basics out of the way, I'd like to make a few quick notes and observations on what I've learned from law school blogging.
1L year is all about learning the game. 2L year, you merely refine it. By 3L, you're looking for another game to play because you know exactly how much class you can snooze through with minimal effect on your grades. Why do you think Scott Turow didn't write a sequel?
And that, dearest Wormwood, is that. I hope that Scrimgouge finds the next three years as exciting as I did.
Dear Wormwood:
Who is this Scrimgouge whose email address you've forwarded me? It's certainly very flattering that he's asking you to ask me for advice on starting a law school blog. Nevertheless, there's no good reason for him to ask me at one remove. [1] You know full well I'd speak at the opening of a Doritos bag, and give away advice just as profligately.
Since your friend has asked, I'm happy to oblige. This particular project has run for over three years, and I'd like to think that in that time I've learned a few things that might help out a beginner. Of course, with the start of the fall semester, there is currently no shortage of advice for new law students, and I'm sure that similar wisdom about blogs is a dime a dozen. Hopefully your friend Scrimgouge will find one or two chestnuts here that he hasn't managed to gather elsewhere. Sadly for him, however, whatever angels generally look over my shoulder and force me to be brief have taken a tea break. What follows is quite lengthy indeed.
To help out a bit, I've divided the post into five sections that continue after the cut:
First, the commonplace.
Second, decide what you want to do.
Third, learn a bit about the technology.
Fourth, connect, connect, connect (to the Web).
Fifth, connect, connect, connect (to other bloggers).
Finally, have fun.
I hope it helps.
Continue reading "Advice for 1Ls Considering a Blog: A Very Long Part One" »
Dear Wormwood:
I hope you are finding your law school preparations none too taxing and your final summer outside the law enjoyable. I see in your latest letter that you're wondering about the living arrangements at the University Discordia Law School. I'm sure you're already tired of my own travails with a dorm room. Nevertheless, I'd advise that a choice of housing is something into which you should put a great deal of care.
I say this because at least at Columbia, price is no guarantee of quality. Yes, I ended up in a dormitory room, and I suffered from unsanitary kitchens and unwanted visitors therein. But heck, I was paying about $600 per month for 196 square feet of living space in a quasi-nice area of Manhattan, so I couldn't complain too much.
On the other hand, one of my best friends at Columbia lives in the elite law student housing at Lionsgate Apartments with a rent of around $1100 per month. Over the last two years, his eighth floor apartment flooded to the depth of two inches and an area of the floor becomes an artesian spring any time there's a hard rain. One window shows obvious water damage, and the superintendent took two months to replace some broken blinds[1]. Now I learn that her subletter has also complained about mice. This in a building described by the school as a "luxury high rise."
You're quite clever, Wormwood, so you can see the connection: same problems (well, OK, I never had flooding), but for twice the price. And once you're in to these buildings, it's made very difficult to get out. (Whereas trading for a more expensive room from a dormitory is not particularly difficult.)
So my advice to you before heading off to University Discordia is to find some friends among your soon-to-be-classmates and ask for their advice. Nothing substitutes for local knowledge. Then choose carefully.
[1]: In case you're thinking that non-functional blinds are no big thing, it's worth remembering that in New York City, anyone on your floor or above will be able to see straight into your bedroom at night if you have the courage to turn a light on.
Dear Wormwood: [1]
I apologize for the short missive, but I felt this might save you some time in your first few weeks at law school. Check out Google's new home page tool. Instead of the austere and simple Google search page, the homepage allows you to clutter up your desktop with lots of little applets.
Most of these are not worth the screen space. But even if you're an austere minimalist and the thought of burdening Google's simple homepage offends you, it might still be worthwhile to add one tool: the USD Law School Utilities. (You may need to log into Google homepage for that link to work.) The toolkit includes links for looking up cases, bits of the US code, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the UCC. For some of the features, you may have to wait until you're given a Westlaw password, but most of the searches use free online sources.
Hope this saves you some time, dear nephew!
[1]: As longtime readers know, my Letters to Wormwood contain advice for those considering law school. I think it only appropriate now that I've graduated to treat Wormwood as if he has now been accepted to a major school and will start in the fall.
Dear Wormwood,
I've slightly overshot Columbia's 40 hour pro bono requirement for graduation, or at least I suspect I will when I finally fill in the forms. On the other hand, quite a few 3Ls of my acquaintance have complained to me recently of their frantic efforts to fulfill their responsibilities under this dubious virtue tax.
At the same time, I've overheard a number of 1Ls murmuring that, despite a fresh influx of funds from Columbia, there are still not enough positions in the Human Rights Internship Program. Thus many fledgling do-gooders find themselves seeking summer jobs that may not be spiritually satisfying. It seems that while their elders are looking for work, they're looking for money.
It's a pity that Foundations of the Regulatory State is no longer a required class, because in my day almost every 1L covered the obvious solution to this problem. To ensure the maximum amount of happiness among Columbia students while making sure we contribute our fair share--whatever we collectively decide that is--we should institute a trading system similar to that used for pollution emissions. [1]
As you might expect, Wormwood, those who are inclined towards public interest (and not coincidentally, most often the political left) collect far more than the 40 hours they're required to contribute. On the other hand, those for whom the requirement is a mostly unnecessary hassle are swiftly heading towards more or less lucrative careers. The obvious solution is to allow 3Ls to bid for and purchase pro bono hours from overproducers. The funds could then be used to sponsor 1Ls summering in exotic and underserved locales such as South Africa, eastern Europe or the Bronx.
Collectively, there is no doubt this is a winning formula. It's not too much of an assumption to think that those who want to do pro bono work will do it more productively, so our "good causes" however defined will receive better resources. We would be able to guarantee a certain amount of public interest work: after all, there's a floor beneath which hours cannot fall, and we can raise that to much higher than 40 hours per student. At the same time, HRIP receives more funding without having to increase tuition across the student body, producing even more socially enlightened output.
Wormwood, this seems a most sensible course by any tangible measurement. Yet my tongue is firmly in my cheek and I would never expect such a system to take hold. At the end of the day, the pro bono requirement isn't really about making sure that good causes receive useful (or enthusiastic) resources. Nothing so grubbily consequentialist should enter the publicly-spirited mind! To talk to a true believer, it's all about opening our minds, enlightening our souls and making us think that an industry supporting starting salaries of nearly $150,000 at the elite level is being done in a spirit of "professionalism," that is to say in the service of the public rather than the practitioners.
I put it to you that at the end of three years of law school, it is very difficult to avoid the level of cynicism required to say that with a straight face. And if three years of law school doesn't isn't enough, a brief glance at your debt burden should do it.
Ah well. For me it's almost over. As I mentioned to one complaining 3L, don't think of it as enforced charity. Think of it as a virtue tax, in which you take from whatever you consider virtuous and pay to what the Center for Public Interest Law considers such.
[1]: Often called "cap and trade" systems, emissions trading works to reduce a negative externality through a pricing system. What I'm proposing wouldn't be a cap and trade system, as it has no caps. Rather, trading would be used to maximize a positive externality. On the other hand, "floor and trade" seems a particularly clumsy phrase, and so I haven't used it.
Dear Wormwood,
I know it's been quite a long time since I've written you a letter, a dereliction of duty that should have me sent back to the lowest pre-tempter stage. Nevertheless, I've been moved to write by the question posed by Prof. Smith over at the Conglomerate: if I could recommend one book for you, dearest Wormwood, what would it be?
While I gave you some recommendations last year, it certainly wasn't in the context of one book to read before you begin. And I disagree with many of the suggestions given so far. I tried, for instance, reading Glannon on Civil Procedure (suggested by Prof. Kerr) before arriving at Columbia, but while that is an excellent pre-exam study tool, it's not very gripping. Unless Civ Pro is really your thing--and maybe it is--it'll be a hard slog to force your way through. I haven't read Prof. Smith's suggestion of Simple Justice, so I can't comment on that.
But for my money--and yours, dear Wormwood, because I'm afraid I can't be buying books for you--I couldn't suggest anything better than what was recommended to me by one commentor on TYoH when I asked this question way back in the day. And that book would be Chirelstein's primer on Contracts. It's a good overview of what will almost certainly be one of your core 1L courses, while the text is engaging and won't make you feel like you're lost while reading it. As such it's a good cure for both the pre-1L jitters and an enjoyable little tome for a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Well, it certainly didn't do me much harm.
[An open letter to the Damned Fraternity]
Dear Wormwood and Friends,
Some of you may have been reading about how other bloggers have been diligently working on their Notes for the past six months, have their drafts nicely in order, and are now sitting upon thirty to forty typed pages of legal wisdom ready for various stages of submission.
And if you're a member of the Fraternity of the Damned, you know how we feel about those people. [1]
Well, Fraternal Brothers and Sisters, let me say that you're not alone. Some of us have Monday deadlines and have barely started the writing process. Some of our notes have order that could only be divined by mad prophets and chaos theoreticians. Some of us have been absorbed by dread, fear, simple lack of care or a surplus of better things to do with our lives, and thus have shoved this work aside the way like a smelly pile of festering dishes. (Someone else's dishes, a common problem if you live in my dorm.)
Actually, Wormwood, I'm not that worried: this is how the process works for me. Major projects have four or five day period of mandatory work-avoidance which come before a burst of creativity resulting in output of unparalleled adequacy. I know that while I've been playing solitaire, doing laundry, or researching how to defragment a paging file, some part of the back of my head has also been writing the Note.
Now I have merely to get that muse to vomit forth her ponderings into my conscious mind. She's normally summoned by adrenaline (check), lack of sleep (check), and quanities of coffee that swing commodities markets. [2] Today's choice is the fine "Hamilton's Blend," so named because I'm certain that if someone were to check their coffee machine, coffee beans at some point had something to do with the blend of stuff that's in it.
All other projects have either been completed or back-burnered until Monday. Now is the time, fellow Fraternals, for the rough draft to commence. We either get this damn'd thing out of the way, or let it conquer us.
Are you with me?
[Ed.-- There follows an ear-shattering silence and the chirping of crickets.]
[1]: They're lovely people, as we all know. Good as all get out, the type of folks to whom the universe should give only its best at every turn. But when deadlines loom, members of the Fraternity, we all know that there are places of pitch, oil and brimstone that we really wish were reserved for them.
[2]: Someday an enterprising reader is going to ask me about my deadlines and start purchasing the appropriate coffee futures. Whether or not this would constitute insider trading is someone else's Note, and they're welcome to it.
Dearest Wormwood:
I know that most of the time I write you with advice on surviving law school. Just this once, however, I'd like to give you an advice on survival of a different nature, it being the holidays.
Sledding down hills on dubious pieces of foam and plastic is a great deal of fun when you are between the ages of three and, perhaps, twenty. The pleasures can vary from the innocent to the dubious: at the age of seven, one can wonder at the pure joy of speed and the illusion of escape from gravity. Towards adolescence... well, let us just say that sledding downhill with members of the opposite sex has long been a source of amusement for northern teenagers. Even above such an age, it is great fun to go watch young children sledding.
However, getting three grown men averaging over two-hundred pounds and thirty years apiece on a flimsy piece of unpadded plastic, and then hurtling them down a barely snow-covered hill at high speeds towards a very large bump... this is not a good way for said men to behave. It leads to bruises and pain, although the resulting jumbled pile of limbs at the bottom of the hill does seem to provide amusement to the younger children at the top.
As a circus performer once said to me when I was heckling him, "This is why animals in the wild eat their young."
My Dearest Wormwood:
Once again, so sorry you haven't heard from me in a while. What they tell you about 2L year is completely true, so long as what they tell you involves mind-breaking amounts of work and hellish stress. Of course, when your time comes you will have the benefit of your uncle's copious mistakes. (In)human nature being what it is, this merely guarantees you'll make new ones. Nevertheless, here's a few strategies that might make your life easier when you're choosing courses for your 2L fall term.
The joy of 2L classes is that you get to choose the particular brand of torture you will undergo over the course of the semester. Unlike the 1L year, when all students are squeezed into the same Procrustean bed (with the same Socratic pillows), you can now choose seminars, clinics, or more giant lecture rooms. This gives you a couple of strategic choices.
Strategy 1: Misery in November
You know how I've been complaining so highly about my workload, Wormwood? Well, this is because I chose the Misery in November strategy for this term, albeit without much strategic thought. This involves getting most of my credits this term from seminars and a clinic. With the exception of my Property course, I've had no "traditional" classes, and almost all of my work this term has involved the writing of a paper, the creation of a legal database, or translation of Japanese court documents.
The downside of this has been a very rough November. Trying to balance clinic work with translation, preparation for papers with job searching, or any of the other medium-term deadlines in my courses has probably done more to make my hair salt-and-pepper than any other experience. Misery in November invovles a "here a deadline, there a deadline, everywhere a deadline" life from almost the beginning to the end of the term.
The payoff to this strategy comes in December. Sure, I still have endless hours of work to do before the clinic project is finished and I've not put a word into the seminar paper yet, but for the most part these deadlines are semi-flexible. As you can tell by looking at Exam Watch, I've only one exam coming up. Due to the vagaries of Columbia exam scheduling, I even have a study week: my Property exam doesn't sit until a week after the course ends.
Strategy 2: Misery in December
I'll admit, Wormwood, that I can't tell you as much about this strategy first-hand. We each get to go through this process once, and adopting one strategy would seem to foreclose all others. Nevertheless, I think the experience of Buffalo Wings & Vodka may be typical here:
When I made myself a t-shirt that said "I Am the God of the Course Schedule--Wanna Make Out?" I felt that I was completely justified. No classes on Thursday or Friday. Nothing before 10:30 am. All efficiently located. A well-placed lunch break. Hot 2L's in every class. I did a good job. But one thing I didn't pay attention to was the finals schedule that went with that classload.Next week, I have four finals in three days, two of which are at 8:30 am. I am a goddam fool.
Again, my impression is that the payoff, and the pitfall, is the flexibility in scheduling. It's much easier to miss a lecture course for the sake of an interview than to miss a smaller clinic or seminar session. If you get behind, there aren't as many interim deadlines to catch you up. On the other hand, you can get very behind.
Meanwhile, 2L exams aren't preceded by any set study period: I know people who are facing a Monday exam following a final class the prior Thursday. This back-loads the stress.
Legal Journal Strategic Modifiers
The last thing to consider, Wormwood, is the ebb and flow of 2L workload. During August and September, a good deal of your time will be spent convincing firms to give you offers of summer employment, and then choosing from the offers you've received. Ideally you'll get most of this out of your schedule by November, but if you're like me it'll bleed over into later months. In the meantime, if your journal requires a Note, you're likely to have a number of interim deadlines during October and November. If you've chosen Strategy 1, these deadlines won't make things any easier.
So how should one decide? I can't give you any more than what I've written above, advice that I wish I'd had when I was choosing courses for this term. In addition to this, I have only one more piece of advice. The clinic work I've done this term has by far been the most fulfilling experience I've had as a 2L: it's good work in and of itself, of course, but it's also taken me outside the law school and given me things to talk about in interviews. However, if you are thinking of applying for Law Review and think you'll make it, I'd consider delaying your clinical experience until at least the 2L spring. Managing the project and the note have taken me very nearly to the limits of my time management skills.
In the end, Wormwood, it is all about borrowing time from Peter to give Paul the attention he deserves. I don't think anyone has enough to make adequate preparation for everything they're doing: it's a choice of what goes by the wayside.
My Dear Wormwood:
October is upon us, leaving memories of warm days of summer and forcing our cold-weather clothes out of their hibernation. And all over the country, 1Ls like Will Baude are either writing their first legal memoranda or receiving their first batch of criticism. And with that comes moans of complaint about the tedium of IRAC.
Far be it from me to go against the pack, here, Wormwood, but I'm going to make a guilty admission: the more I've thought about it, the more I'm enamoured of IRAC as a part of legal writing, legal training, and even legal exam writing. Certainly, it doesn't turn out the most elegant prose, the most dramatic language, or the most gripping reading. Done skillfully, however, it turns out prose which is efficient: both quick to write and (just as important) quick to digest.
(For a contrary view, see Heidi Bond's "Why IRAC sucks.")
[Note to my Columbia Readers, especially in my 2L class: This is one Letter to Wormwood that needs your help. I'm not certain I got all of the marketing items listed at the end of this entry precisely correct, and I'm sure I left some off. If you happen to have any to add, please be sure to comment.]
My dearest nephew Wormwood,
Your churlish complaints that I've stopped speaking about law school cut me to the core. Certainly you realize that classes don't start for another week? And besides classes, there really is nothing to write about that I can write about.
I mean, what can I say about Law Review? No one applies for a job on a law review because they figure days cite checking in a library will be a spiritually rewarding experience. Heidi expresses some of the exasperation well, but really, one can't complain. The job is what we all signed up for, and we knew what that meant when we started. And were I to speak of any of the articles, I'd probably be breaching some blood-signed confidentiality contract and invoking the wrath of professorships everywhere. No, Law Review will have to wait until I have more significant advice for you.
And of course, there's Columbia's Early Interview Program, which finished last week. Twenty-four interviews over five days, with barely a weekend in the middle. Fortunately I love my suits and managed to find enough ties to match together. (How did I leave all my ties in Michigan?)
Now, Wormwood, you may be wondering exactly what this hiring process is, and why I am interviewing in August for a position starting next May. Let me explain, as if you were an untutored innocent, exactly how a larval lawyer goes from 1L to employment. In the first term, or early in the second, of his 1L year, the young lawyer searches for a summer job which will be fulfilling, rewarding either pecuniarily or mentally, and thanks his stars for what he gets. This job may have little to do with his eventual future, except that it should look good on a resume. (Indeed, I suggest you look for something broadening instead of lucrative, that you choose experience over salary: this is one great opportunity.)
No sooner has the soon-to-be 2L returned from his summer employment than he begins interviewing with as many law firms as he can to secure a position in his subsequent summer. Most all of these interviews will occur in the context of some "on campus interview" (OCI) program. Columbia's is called EIP. Over five days, you go from room to room in a vast hotel, having twenty-minute sessions with lawyers from a number of firms of your choice.
These interviews will hopefully lead to 'callbacks,' in which the lawyer-to-be visits the office of a more limited number of employers, hoping to garner offers of summer employment. From these he then chooses a firm. The expectation is that after he has completed a meritorious 2L summer, that firm will offer him a full-time position.
Yes, Wormwood, you're cunning enough to have seen the implication of this. When the budding 2L is interviewing, all he has to show his future employer is a resume with a bare summer of experience; the possibility of having been accepted to a journal; and his 1L grades. His subsequent employer is likely to choose him based on a mere third of his academic experience. For this reason, some have questioned why there is a third year of law school. Others have questioned why firms and schools use a system that ignores two-thirds of a student's academic credentials, and that puts almost unseemly competitive pressures on 1Ls. Wormwood, if you find out, please drop me a line.
Others have covered the EIP process in more personal detail. (UPDATE: Link and commentary here removed at target's request.)
So what are my tips on interviewing, choosing firms, and securing a job? Why would you want to ask me, dear Wormwood? I don't have a job yet, so certainly you should wait until I've proven that whatever advice I might give works. And as mentioned, I'm not going to discuss any of the particular firms I interviewed with: they may very well read my letters to you. But certainly, I hear you cry, I should give you something. Why else do you read all the non-law screed I write?
You have a point. So what can I give you to help you light your way as you consider your choice of firms? What can I say about each organization which is completely in the public domain, about which no firm could begrudge me reporting? How might they consider this letter to be free advertising?
(Oh, Wormwood, remember that in my past life I was partially a marketing man.)
Over the period of EIP, almost every firm had some literature to distribute to potential employees. Many had hospitality suites in which tired law students wishing to rest could sit, sip coffee, and discuss options with human resources staff. And quite a few handed out what I can only term the swag of the legal seas, the catch of the candidates, the booty of the potential breadwinner: marketing goodies. Part of the public face of each firm, I give you the following (certainly non-exhaustive) list of what I and others picked up.
Yours,
S.
My Dear Wormwood,
The year's over.
It's been a long trip. And at this time of year, a lot of blawgers (for instance, Heidi and Jeremy) are trying to condense everything they learned over the year into an 'advice for others' post. It's a noble gesture, trying to calm the panic of those who are about to step into our footsteps. Heck, I remember reading Waddling Thunder--and come to think of it, Jeremy--in an attempt to silence my own nerves last year.
One year ago, I had just gotten back from England. I'd moved back in with my parents in the sleepy little town of Big Rapids, Michigan. There wasn't much point in getting a job, so I was supporting myself with freelance translation, sailing a small sunfish, and practicing for a half-marathon. (I chickened out of the last when Legal Methods started.) And what I really wanted to know was: what should I be doing with my summer?
The traditional 1L answer is: nothing. Spend your time enjoying your freedom. Catch up with friends and family. Laugh, watch TV, do all the things you want to do before you get to Columbia. All of which was good advice, but at the time, it was deeply unsatisfying to me. I'd just emerged from a relatively high-pressure job, and this was dead time. Obviously, I was doing something wrong.
So for you about to step into my inadequate shoes, here a few things I think you can do with your summer to make the entire 1L process easier. The advice below is most appropriate for those going to Columbia, but it's not useless for others. It's not going to put you ahead of the pack unless you're the kind that's already there. But if you think you've got to be doing something, otherwise you're wasting your precious time, you could do worse than the following.
Read Some Books: In your 1L year you may read more than you've ever read in your life. If you're assigned my particular Prof. Con Law, you may read more than you or your immediate family has read in their lives. Still, you didn't apply to law school because you dislike reading, and you might as well warm up.
I'd really recommend you read something like Quicksilver or The Diamond Age. Nonetheless, you're going to want to read something about law, because otherwise you're wasting your time, right?
So, here's some options. First, Professor Chirelstein's treatise on contracts. In your first semester you will take contracts, and no matter who your particular Prof Contracts ends up being, you'll feel a lot more comfortable if you've read this. Besides, someone forgot to tell Prof. Chirelstein that when you become a law professor, you have to start writing in a style that's either dry or incomprehensible.
My second suggestion would be either Constitutional Law Stories or Torts Stories. This series of books takes major cases in law and puts them into historical perspective. Since each chapter is written by a different author, some are more approachable than others--don't worry if you can't make it through a chapter or two. But if you've read these, your 1L Contracts and Con Law courses won't be completely terra incognito.
My final suggestion, however, would be to remember that you got into law school because you were passionate about something: read about that, particularly in how it relates to the law. If there's a particular area you're interested in, leave a comment, and maybe some of my readers can make suggestions.
Buy Your Computer: First, check to see how much financial aid you can get to purchase a notebook. Then determine how much you love technology. There's a lot of notebooks out there, and I'm not going to take it upon myself to give you definitive advice on a specific model. But here's a couple of things to look out for:
Get Your Work Style in Order: Time pressure is going to be your worst enemy in your 1L year. The quicker you settle into an efficient method of working, the quicker you'll be making progress in your studies. There's a lot of good books out there about efficient 1L work processes, most of which I never read. (These would include Law School Confidential, which apparently advocates a system of 'book-briefing' that involves a bewildering color-coded highlighting system. Some swear by it, I never read it.)
I can't give a lot of help here, except to tell you what I did. After several years in business, I will almost certainly live and die by an Outlook task list. Probably the most useful trick that I learned was to categorize my task list by class, and assign myself tasks for each day's worth of reading.
Also, it helps to look at each course as a project, with a definite output (generally an outline) to be accomplished to a definite schedule with a hard deadline (the exam). If this means nothing more than remembering to add the exam schedule to your calendar as soon as you get it, it's still worthwhile.
I'll add a little more as I get to it. In the meantime, I hope all you rising 1Ls have an excellent summer.
Dear Wormwood:
As my final hurdles of 1L-hood seem ever-closer, the school is gearing up for exams. Or rather, some of us are gearing up for exams, while others have already retooled, refueled, repainted, geared up, and are actually threatening to push that big button labelled "NITRO." As my last class in Foundations of the Regulatory State (read 'Law, Econ, and Policy') was today, I'd like to cast a critical eye over the market that's emerging here: that in outlines and notes. The market is characterized by three classes of individuals:
Non-Market Participants: These are the people who have their notes locked in small safes hidden in their floorboards and their outlines under guards moonlighting from the Federal Reserve. Their study groups started the semester with blood-pacts never to share group work product, and probably had several pages worth of contract defining what was 'shared group work product' and what was 'acceptable personal trade collateral.'
Some of these folks have put immense amounts of effort into creating the ideal outline, and have done so in all their classes. From a Reg State point of view, they're not participating in the market because it's unlikely that any item on the market could be worth the polished jewel of legal knowledge they've managed. The less benign Non-Market Participant, however, has accepted the zero-sum nature of the grading curve and figures that anyone who needs his help must perforce be destined to a lower rank than he--no point in helping.
Note that any outline wrenched, stolen, or otherwise acquired from a Non-Market Participant is, to their credit, likely to be very good indeed.
The Jawas, Pokemon Masters, Poker Sharks, Market Makers, Influence Peddlers, and Other Related Traders: It's here that the market for outlines is made. Individuals in this group have either a single great outline, or a number of 'working copies' that they can share around. These individuals belong to multiple study groups--sometimes ignoring the blood-pacts--and are perfectly willing to swap information with you, so long as you've got what they want.
Quality of these outlines will vary, as will their heritage. Jawas who have garnered premium outlines may hold out for 'complete sharing' agreements, in which counterparties offer to share all their information; others may be willing to make one-on-one trades. Trading often occurs more aggressively towards the end of the semester: more product is available on the market, making for higher liquidity, and many Jawas want to 'hold out' to make sure they don't get cheated or lose out on later deals.
I've not seen it yet, but I'm waiting for the ultimate Jawa to evolve: the person who doesn't actually read any of the outlines, but just wants to see if he can collect whole sets in order to trade them.
Freeloaders, Freelovers, and Butterflies: I group these together because they're often indistinguishable. The first two either do no outlines and try to snag them off others, or are perfectly willing to share what they've got with whomever. The 'Butterflies' treat outlines as cocoons: the real benefit of an outline is the effort put into creating it, which can't be transferred. They really don't care what happens to the shell after they've emerged from it.
The quality of outline from this group is varied, but higher than you might think. A good Butterfly may have better notes than a Non-Market Participant, but simply not buy into the zero-sum game.
Anyway, Wormwood, this is a rougher taxonomy than I might otherwise construct for you, but I want to get back to writing up my Con Law outline. I'm sure I've missed one or two subspecies, and maybe my readers will fill out the evolutionary tree. Please don't take any of my words above as ones of condemnation or approval: each member of the Law School ecosystem has their own little part to play, and I'm sure they're all a valuable part of the Circle of Life as it exists in law school.
I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: if you're a Columbia 1L looking for a good overview of Perspectives and Reg. State terminology, you could do far worse than Lawrence Solum's Legal Theory Lexicon. Besides covering the basics, like what positive and normative mean, in the past few weeks he's covered an awful lot of territory that is useful review as exam season approaches. For instance, he's given good summaries of the following terms for Perspectives:
Dear Wormwood,
Once more I've been failing to give you advice with regards to your law school future. For some reason, the 1L blogs are blossoming with wisdom to give to you, while your Uncle has been falling down on his job.
Unfortunately, there's not much useful advice I can give you. If you're a JD2B looking at multiple offers, choose the one you like best. When you started applying, I'm sure there was a school you had your heart set on, and if you were lucky enough to make it in, you should say yes. Beyond that, it's a very complicated decision which I'd hesitate to advise you on.
The one thing I can give a bit of counterintuitive advice with is outlines. I think having a good outline is very useful, don't get me wrong. But I'm all for procrastination when it comes to law school review.
Basically, law school is as much time management as any great skill at anything else. And time management is the realization that you have a certain number of tasks you have to accomplish, a limited amount of time, and a point of maximum efficiency. And I don't believe you can outline a course efficiently until you're at least halfway through.
I'd have given you exactly the opposite advice several months ago, but I've found that Sherry's words have rung true. It's not until you're already immersed in the subject that you'll start to see how things hang together. Not until you have a mass of data do you start to understand how it all hangs together. If I'd started my outlines two months ago, I'd be rewriting them now.
There's some exceptions to this. Prof. Perspectives told us how the course would hang together on the first day of class, and he's been completely true to his word. But that class isn't being taught by a case method, and the case method doesn't really lend itself to up-front structure.
So, my concise advice about outlining? First, wait until you have that burst of insight as to how the the course hangs together. For me, that was my Con Law TA session today. My TA said something about how the exam was structured, the evolution of Supreme Court doctrine, and the relationship between equal protection and the dormant commerce clause. Suddenly the image of an outline appeared full-fledged in the mind, with issues sorted into key cases followed by a short history of evolutionary cases, and a column for cross-referencing between issues.
This brings us to the next point: don't outline until you've studied past exams and know what you'll be allowed to bring into the exam room. Preparing an outline for use in an exam is very different from preparing one for memorization, and you should know what you're trying to do.
In any event, dear Wormwood, I'll do my best to update you more often. It's only now, after Moot Court is a fading memory and the Exam Watch counter flips T-40 that my mind has had a chance to focus its wandering.
Dear Wormwood:
This is probably the longest break from blogging that Three Years of Hell has seen since its inception, and I probably owe you an apology. This week has been the roughest I've had at law school, and it may only get worse.
Following my Moot Court brief, I managed to come down with a pretty horrible head cold, which settled in and made itself comfortable for most of the week. Thus whatever happened in the last five days was seen through a perpetual scrim of NyQuil and DayQuil, and was only half-real to begin with. I found myself walking away from conversations with friends and colleagues wondering what I'd said and why I'd said it. There's a good reason for me never to become a drug addict, I guess.
As a result, I'm probably a week behind in my reading, a complaint common to a lot of the Columbia 1Ls. (The terror of the first semester must be over, because I'm finding that class attendance is down in general: you know the sessions that will help you on your finals and the ones that you might as well spend the hour at home reading.) My Reg. State paper was finished just before the deadline, there's an ocean of Perspectives to catch up on, and even my task list hasn't been updated in a week.
The good--or bad, depending on how you look at it--news is that next week is spring break. I'm always bad at planning for vacations, and since it's been years since my vacations weren't taken at my discretion, spring break kind of snuck up on me. New Orleans or Florida seem to be
I'm going to a wedding in England in a few weeks, so there's no money for another plane flight, and that and my workload convinced me to stay in New York and just get caught up and ready for the sprint to exams. But as some advice, Wormwood, if you're in this situation next year, plan ahead. Knowing that you won't have Spring Break to catch up will keep you on your toes, so you don't fall behind beforehand.
In any event, I'm not that concerned about staying in New York. For once I have a reason to spread my wings a little and go see this strange and curious city in all its glory. At the moment, I know little more than what goes up and down Broadway and the cloistered campus that is Morningside Heights. With any luck, I'll start correcting that soon.
We live in an age disturbed, confused, bewildered, afraid of its own forces, in search not merely of its road but even of its direction. There are many voices of counsel, but few voices of vision; there is much excitement and feverish activity, but little concert of thoughtful purpose. We are distressed by our own ungoverned, undirected energies and do many things, but nothing long. Woodrow Wilson
Wilson spoke those words in an address about pre-war America, not about a 1L searching for jobs, but the feeling translates.
Note for future 1Ls applying for jobs: read the directions.
We had a big presentation last term which included the fact that we weren't allowed to write GPAs on our resumes. "Fair enough," I figured, "they want employers to make their initial selection based upon resumes and not GPA or class rank. We can send a transcript if the employer requests it. That makes some sense. Not sure if I disagree with it or not, but I can make heads or tails of it."
So I've sent out a bundle of resumes, sans any information on grades. Today I talked to Careers Services, who told me this was a mistake.
Apparently the policy is that you can't send out a GPA. You can, however, give a highly-skilled recruiter your transcript, with three letter grades that they can turn into a GPA whenever it suits them. Try as I might, I really can't find a justification behind that policy. I presume one exists, but it doesn't pop into my head.
Moral of the story: don't assume that something's so just because you figure it makes sense. Check with the folks who know the rules. (Which means, incidentally, don't take my word for it. I'm giving you the benefit of my mistakes.)
Dear Wormwood:
Please do not think that I've not heard your plaintive moaning with regards to our correspondence. "Yes, yes, we understand you like the technical aspects of blogging, and RSS is nifty tech. True, true, a postmodernism generator is cute. But you do remember, once upon a time, that you promised to blog about law school, correct? Have you really grown so big-headed that the point of our project has escaped you?" And your complaint has a great deal of merit, for which I have to apologize. My heart really hasn't been in it.
Partially, I think it's just the glumness one gets from attending a law school in a city with a harsh but graceless winter. New York doesn't have the Januarys I've loved in the past: cold, clean snows blanketing the horizon, wind whipping white 'dust' devils over ice-topped lakes.
Winter in the city is summer in the city with the annoyance of cracked lips and muddy boots. Even in a blizzard, it's almost as if snow falls from the sky pre-grey. Walking outside at night is an education in natural selection: oil-black rats are much more visible hopping through drifts of white. Frozen landscapes in the countryside are accompanied by a clean, almost filtered scent to the air, but here winter's only mercy is that large bags of trash left out on the street are too frozen to rot.
As I said, Wormwood, I've been writing about technology largely to spare you in case what I'm suffering is some seasonal depression. No point in inflicting upon you what is probably more vitamin deficiency than rational thought.
With that in mind, what has been happening?
Classes: I think most of my classmates would agree that the classes in the second semester at Columbia are much more theoretical than practical. Of the four major classes, Regulatory State and Perspectives on Legal Thought remind me more of undergraduate lectures in economics and philosophy. Not that this isn't interesting in itself, but it's territory that many of us have covered before. Indeed, my 12th grade government class read Hobbes, Locke, Aquinus, Rawls, Bentham. [1] Even in the face of good lectures or interesting reading, there's a certain 'been there' feeling that keeps me from feeling the same degree of excitement I felt when this was all fresh. (Then again, perhaps I'm temporarily jaded.)
Don't get me wrong: there's a good and solid argument for these courses, and I'm sympathetic to it. Given the role of lawyers in our society, as not only advocates but judges and politicians, it's for the good that we get a broader historical view, and that this is informed by economics. But they're not the 'classic' law school courses: property, evidence, etc. They're more familiar, and they don't inspire the same feeling of terror. (To be fair, that one is a lecture course, and the other rather kind in its Socratic method, goes a long way to explaining this feeling. I imagine that as exams get closer, the trepidation level increases.)
That said, there's still Crim Law and Con Law, with plenty of reading for them, particularly the latter. I'm certain that Con Law will become more engaging as the semester progresses. No matter how important Marbury v. Madison or McCulloch v. Maryland may be, they're difficult to read with any passion. So much seems so settled. [2] Still, these courses remind me more of last term, so that's good.
Grades: Finally all my grades are back. All I can say on this is that overall I'm pleased, and that so far the great law school maxim is true: you do best in the classes you were sure to do worst in, and vice-versa.
Job Search: A task on which I should have spent far more time already, I'm getting a few resumes out the door every day. One thing I'd advise, Wormwood, is that you start the process far more quickly than I did, because otherwise it will become that nagging task that you leave at the bottom of your list, buried under a huge pile of reading. It's just as important, and you should treat it as such. Progress on this front remains hopeful: I've had my share of interviews, and we'll see how it goes.
I hesitate to go further, Wormwood, as already I wonder if the blizzard that is rumoured to be arriving tomorrow and my chronic lack of sleep are combining to make what I'm writing less encouraging than it ought otherwise to be. In any event, I'm glad I did bring myself to mention a few of the things happening here at law school, before this descended into a purely political blog.
Yours,
AR
[1] Admittedly, my high school government teacher was a bit unusual: he taught a 'great books' curriculum and used Socratic method at least as well if not better than many of my professors at Columbia. But then, I'm not criticisizing the Columbia program as much as I'm explaining why I'm not feeling as engaged as in months past.
[2] At this point, I'd like to break with my common habit of not being overly critical of my courses to be scathing in one respect: the textbook Constitutional Law by Kathleen M. Sullivan and Gerald Gunther should never be inflicted upon any student, anywhere, possibly under 8th Amendment restriction. First, it has all the weaknesses common to the University Casebook Series. The book itself is a physically unhelpful size, nearly 8 1/2" x 11", impossible to fit alongside a notebook on a classroom desk. The formatting of the text is diabolical: it's extremely difficult to figure out what is a heading, a sub-heading, or what is not within a hierarchy of headings to begin with. By the time you get to the fourth or fifth levels, there is no way to keep things straight. A simple table of typefaces would go a long way to curing this defect. If a single effort was made in terms of helpfulness to the student, it certainly doesn't show.
While the weaknesses of the series aren't helpful at the best of times, the writing in Constitutional Law makes no effort at all to be accomodating. Even outside the cases (Con Law will never be for those who like plain language), the wording is unnecessarily prolix (two uses of 'exegesis' is sure to please wordhounds like me, but it's sadistic for a casebook), complicated, and in some cases just downright confusing. For anyone who has the casebook at hand, I put forward the second full paragraph of p. 78 of the 14th edition, a paragraph which would be better structured if the order of sentences within it were reversed. I'll concede that Constitutional Law is almost certain to be cryptic in many respects--no one who ever read Gasparini would accuse Supreme Court Justices of silver-tongued clarity, and their task is often more one of precision--but shouldn't a good casebook help, not hinder this?
Perhaps I'm missing something and the book will grow on me, but after 150 page, it's easily my least favorite casebook thus far.
Spent fifteen minutes wandering Lexis in between chapters of contracts outline. The two gems I found?
Entertainment for Hours
A Compendium of Clever and Amusing Law Review Writings: An Idiosyncratic Bibliography of Miscellany with in Kind Annotations Intended as a Humorous Diversion for the Gentle Reader, Baker, 51 Drake L. Rev. 105.
The title says it all. Any six of the articles here should waste away hours of study time.
Enough to Make the Most Diehard Marxist Love Richard Posner
No, really. I'm serious. Whatever you think you thought of Posner, read Goodbye to the Bluebook, 53 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1343. OK, he's nakedly partisan for his hometown Chicago manual over that interloper from Harvard, but after your 1L memos, this should be music to your ears:
The time that law students and lawyers spend mastering and applying the manifold rules of the Bluebook is time taken away from other lawyerly activities, mainly from thinking about what they are writing. It is so hard to get the citation forms right that the writer or editor who has done so is apt to feel that he has acquitted himself of a difficult task and should be allowed to rest his brain. Less attention can be given writing and rewriting because so much is devoted to forms most of which don't matter worth a straw to the reader. Instead of learning the Uniform Commercial Code the student learns the Uniform Citation Code, which is almost as long, and far more arbitrary.
Update: Using the first article and links therefrom, Will Baude has proven that Judge Easterbrook is a videogame fan. You can probably score some points with the esteemed judge by introducing him or his law clerks to the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME).
Dear Wormwood,
Since I've worn myself out today studying for this year's exams, I want to give exam advice. Unfortunately, I know nothing about how to take a 1L exam, since I've not really taken one yet. (Yes, there's Legal Methods, but I'm not sure it's typical.) So, dear Wormwood, I figured I'd write a little about what I found useful preparation for the LSATs, and what makes good pre-law reading.
All of this, of course, is just my opinion, and your mileage may vary.
LSATs
I only took the LSAT once, because I started applying late in the game: one of my best friends challenged me to apply to law school with her in September, and I didn't start prep-work until late that month. (She then backed out on me, and is spending the next year with her boyfriend in South America. You can keep comments on who had better judgment to herself.) I can only recommend the following:
The Obvious
Get sleep the night before, eat well, and don't stress about it any more than you have to in order to do well. This is probably more valuable advice than anything below--but it's also something anyone could tell you.
Study Aids
Everyone will have their preferred study aids, but I only used two. The first was a used copy of Barron's How to Prepare for the LSAT from my aforementioned study partner. It was pretty good, but pretty simplistic. After reading a few of the pointers, I found that I was only really interested in the stuff I kept getting wrong.
For this reason, probably 80% of my studying was done with Kaplan's LSAT 180. Basically, it's a compilation of real brainteasers. When I started feeling OK with these questions, the standard practice tests held much less fear. Of course, you may not need either prep-book: some people say you don't. I think they probably helped me, but again, your mileage may vary.
Logical Reasoning
I didn't do all my LSAT prep in the books above, though. One of them recommended an exercise that I think really helped me with the logical reasoning: read the newspaper. Specifically, read the opinion pages of at least one newspaper a day, and pick apart the articles.
Logical reasoning questions on the LSAT tend to deal with logical inconsistencies, assumptions, and fallacies. Op-eds, from authors on both sides of the aisle, are peppered with these by their very nature: deadlines, word-limits, and partisan appeal keep Maureen Dowd or George F. Will from fully fleshing out their arguments. I found that reading an op-ed page every day and underlining anything that was an assumption, leap of logic, or outright contradiction made the habits I was 'learning' for the LSAT a little more second-nature. Especially if I agreed with the article, it was a worthwhile exercise: I'd spot my own assumptions, and those pop up more than I would have expected on an LSAT.
Applications
For me to give you advice on law school applications would be insulting: I only applied to three places, and got rejected outright by one and waitlisted by the other. I also committed possibly the most chronic mistake: I waited until the last minute to apply. Let me tell you, near as I can tell, the earlier the better.
Likewise, find a bulletin board that lots of JD2B applicants are on, and chat to them. The one at the University of Chicago is pretty good. You may not learn anything you need to know, but it's good to have co-sufferers as you're waiting for applications to come back.
Anyway, that's all I can think of for now. Hope all of you studying up for that test I was so nervous about last year get everything you wish. A few months from now, I'll post my recommended reading list for your summer. God knows that after I spent so much time wondering about what to read last summer, I owe that to you, dear Wormwood.
Dear Wormwood:
As the semester grinds to a close (or rather, closes with the cacophony of screeching steel, burning coal, and cries of the dying and injured suitable to a train going full-tilt off its tracks [1]), I can give you but one piece of advice. Schedule your day, and triage.
My brilliant plan for the week was to do what reading I hadn't done Sunday on Monday night, reserving Tuesday and Wednesday night to write up the memo due Thursday. Unfortunately, I worked almost all of last evening up to 1 AM. At that point, my brain just refused to sleep: having been concentrating so long and so hard, there was just no way it was going to rest. My eyes finally shut around 4 AM.
Did I mention I have 8:30 Torts classes?
Consequently, I'm prepared for today, but I'm stumbling around in a blind fog. I'll get most things done to schedule, but the idea of writing the memo tonight is now contingent on me finding an hour or two in which I can catnap: I'll never keep my concentration together. An Thursday is a 'hard' deadline not to be missed, so there's no choice but to suck it up.
Wormwood, keep this in mind as the semester draws close: there are things that are important, and things that you just get done because you have to, not because they matter. There are also things that you should just put aside, because they don't matter. Triage. It's the only way. (Sleep, incidentally, does not fall into the third category.)
I've disturbingly misjudged the week. If you don't see much from me on the blog, this is why. I can't write anything entertaining when my mind is this tired. Indeed, I don't think I'm writing anything lucid.
[1] What torts?
