This week, I am hosting a mixer for 1st Year & 3rd Year law students. The idea behind the mixer is that new and more established law students can come together so that the newer students can learn about the coping mechanisms employed by 3rd Years. It was an idea hatched when I was in 1st Year & felt very adrift in the hyper-competitive atmosphere at school.
Yet, when I think about how I have adjusted to law school, I still feel very dissatisfied. Yes, I have learned how to outline my courses & study in a way that helps me retain the great swaths of information loaded upon me term after term. Yes, I have become involved in community & school projects to a much greater degree than I ever foresaw when entering law school (for instance, as I type this I am waiting for a reporter from a national law magazine to call me for an interview on the future of the law school). All these developments in my life are positive.
But there are many parts of my law school life in which I remain unhappy: 1) I am not an academic: my abilities tend to be more along the line of processing & relating information, communicating and "reading a room." When I am given page after page of legal theory to read, my brain starts to swim. And, unfortunately for me, this legal theory is largely what my term papers are focused (though, in fairness to me, I have been able to do well in my term papers by keeping my subject matter geared towards social justice issues).
2) I haven't mastered the ability to progressively work less as I advance through school. I work just as hard as I did in first year, although the work I direct my effort towards might have changed over the years. Many of my cohorts just don't have to work as hard anymore. It's a bummer that this is not the case for me.
3) I feel disconnected from the faculty. As someone who works closely with faculty and has felt close at different times to different faculty members, it's sad that I still feel so apart from them. Law professors are academics & their priority is to their research & publication. This is problematic for an institution committed to educating future young lawyers. I think the best teachers for most of us would be practitioners, not academics, because practitioners deal with the law in everyday practice while most of our professors have been academics for all or most of their careers. They have an abstract idea of what the law is &, as a future litigator, this is largely unhelpful to me.
So, while I am happy to share with 1st Years how I have coped with law school, the truth is there are still lots of areas in which I haven't found a way to cope. In a lot of ways, being a law student still sucks for me--even though I am only months away from graduation.
2 comments:
I found I worked just as hard and I also didn't really start to get the trick of handling law school exams until the end.
Yay for being almost done! It's exciting just thinking about it.
I always thought one of the most enjoyable things about learning at BCIT was that almost all of my teachers were from the industry that I was entering, and most had multiple degrees in many things, but not PhDs. The ones that were academics didn't seem to be able to reach the students in the same way. They seemed disconnected from the students, not only in what they were teaching but also in the way they were teaching it. One of my favorite classes was the contsruction law class that I took, taught by an architect who went on to get his law degree. It was fascinating stuff.
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