Bad Glacier

The pre-grade nervousness is spreading. Judging by the people I’ve talked to recently, the entire 1L class has done nothing other than go to firm receptions, attend classes, and worry about grades for the past week or so (for the record, I have no qualms about generalizing from a small group of people to the entire 560-some class–this is a blog, after all–logic is optional!).

Everyone is pretty sure that professors were supposed to submit them to the registrar on Friday. But what about the possibility of extensions for busy professors? And what about the real question: when will the grades be posted online? Rumors are flying, but no one seems to know for sure. Will grades show up in 2-3 days, like they supposedly did last year? Will they come out next Friday at noon? Valentine’s Day was mentioned, but someone else heard that grades won’t come out until the day after, in deference to couples. (If this is true, what is worse: that the administration put off posting grades so as to not ruin Valentine’s Day, or that we all think this would be an eminently sensible idea?)

I’m trying not to worry and doing a fairly good job of it. I know I could have done better on my exams, and I’m annoyed at myself accordingly. But once they’re turned in, there’s nothing more you can do. Grades, on the other hand, were never in my control. I tell myself that I’m expecting average grades–maybe one slightly above average and another somewhat below–but if I were honest I’d admit that I’m hoping for something better, even though I feel guilty because that means pushing someone else down the curve.

Grades aren’t important.  They aren’t indicative of your intelligence or of your worth as a person.  They’re just a symbol corresponding to a range of scores on a three-(or eight-)hour slice of time in January.  They won’t significantly harm your future or impair your career options.  I know all of this, but I’m not sure I fully believe it.  I’m even less sure everyone else believes it.

Carey Cuprisen, a 3L at Michigan, posted his first-semester grades a couple years ago.  I wish I could be that awesome.  I can’t think of a better way to say, “grades don’t matter.”  But I can’t.  Not even if I get good grades.  Especially not if I get good grades.  Or bad grades, or average grades.

It’s too bad.  It would be fun to stir things up as much as Carey did.

First semester is over. I’m happy. I’m also very, very tired. It’s break now; we get ten whole days of rest and relaxation before the cycle begins again.

My impressions of law school exams:

They’re rough. I’ve had bad exams before, but never a set of them that so thoroughly kicked my ass from start to finish. At the end of the semester, I felt the most comfortable with Criminal Law and less so with Property and Civil Procedure. This reversed itself for exams. I felt okay about the Civil Procedure take-home, Property wasn’t as bad as I expected, but I ended the semester by spending three hours flailing around in the oddly-warm Criminal Law kiddie pool, just trying to keep my head above water.

I like the eight-hour take-homes better than three-hour in-class exams. (Yeah, I’m crazy…) And I like open-book exams more than closed-book. (…but not that crazy.)

On policy questions, there’s a thin line between complete BS and saying something interesting and non-obvious. I have absolutely no clue which side my answers ended up on, which suggests that it’s probably not the right side.

They say you get the best grade in the class you felt worst about, and vice versa. Everything’s curved, so your feelings probably have little to do with your grade. We’ll see.

Anyways. Off to relax. Rock over London, rock on, Chicago.

Civil Procedure is over. Those eight-hour take-homes are rough. Especially when you waste a bunch of time trying to fit Erie into an answer, then waste another bunch of time worrying about whether you’ll be the only one who wasn’t able to see the Erie issue , then a third bunch of time wondering whether the circus would take a law-school dropout.

Ugh. Thinking about the test any more will just make me nervous, so I’ll go play video games now. I promise I’ll wait at least half an hour before I start studying Property.

You have all break to get your heat fixed, but you wait until the day before my Civil Procedure exam to have people come and fix it. With hammers. And drills. And possibly a metal saw.

Not funny.

Why did I spend multiple hours yesterday watching the World’s Strongest Man competition?

Oh, right. Because I HAVE EXAMS IN FOUR DAYS. Crap.

Okay. I just saw someone walk into the bathroom reading a study guide. Maybe Glannon, maybe not, but the same kind of thing. Softcover, fairly thick, non-intimidating cover. That’s not the point. The point is, he was reading it in the bathroom.

But here’s the bad part. He walks in, takes a standing pee, and walks out of the bathroom, still reading the book.

Seriously, what kind of serious legal scholar uses the restroom at this point in the year? Even the average students have been skipping showers and using chamber pots for weeks, and the gunners are now sporting IV drips and Depends. I’ve been living off of peanut butter, Triscuits, and salt since November, and I just finished memorizing the index I made for the collected works of Judge Posner. Y’know, just in case.

Moral: If you have to take restroom breaks, you’ve already lost.

I’m in the mid-semester slump. Y’know, where you watch TV instead of reading, or you try to do work but end up zoning out in front of the computer for the better part of an hour. You start reading but can’t concentrate from the beginning to the end of the sentence, so you end up going over each paragraph five times. You install Linux on your laptop one day, just for the hell of it. (Okay, that one’s just me.)

And it came just when the workload finally goes nuclear. Along with the usual reading, I have the final draft of a closed memo, the first draft of the dreaded open memo, outlining, studying, practice tests, and a summer job search hanging over my head.

Things aren’t all bad, though. I’m reading cases about twice as fast as I did at the beginning of the year. I’ve stuck to my plan of getting 7-8 hours of sleep a night. I’ve managed to manage my stress pretty well so far, though that will probably change once exams get a little closer. I really do like law school. I just wish they let up on the pressure every once in a while to let us catch up on things.

Still, I’m eating like crap, and I know I’ve become more boring since I’ve been in law school. I try not to subject friends and family to a lot of law-talk, but that’s pretty much all I think about nowadays, so I have even less to say than usual. I’m cranky and whiny and I bitch a lot. But that’s just life as a 1L, I guess.

Two months. I can do this.

Here’s my theory about law school: no one really knows what they’re doing. They’re all just really good at pretending. To some extent, this is probably just wishful thinking, but then again, maybe not . . .

I know an upperclassman who had my Criminal Law professor his 1L year. He got an A in the class and told me and a few of my sectionmates that he believed his high grade came from citing case names in his answer. Well, we had a review session with that professor last week, and it turns out that he doesn’t care one bit about whether we cite cases. We won’t get any points for it; the best they can do is act as a convenient shorthand, but a short description of the case will work just as well.

Now, I don’t doubt that this upperclassman had good intentions. He has good grades and is obviously doing something right. He just doesn’t know what.

So the 3L-to-1L summer job advice session next Thursday? I’ll be there, but I’ll also be taking the advice with a grain of salt.

I skipped classes on Friday and went home for a friend’s wedding. Perfect timing–the never-ending schoolwork was starting to get to me. So I spent my weekend getting dressed up, riding around in a limo, drinking, dancing, forgetting people’s names, and generally making an ass out of myself. Now I come back, and for some reason my work is still here. Crap. I’d better read blogs until it gives up and goes away.

Today is November 1. This may not mean anything to you, but to 560-some Harvard 1Ls, it means that the summer job search has officially begun. We can make appointments with Career Services and the Office for Public Interest Advising. We can attend any of the 4,877 talks, panels, workshops, and discussions that are scheduled over the next three weeks. We can spend hours reformatting our resumes, making the “Harvard Law School” as prominent as possible to hide our complete lack of relevant experience. We can skip classes to work on cover letters. We can think of new ways to casually work our job offers into conversation. And of course, we can stop pretending we’re considering public interest work and spend the next few months begging for jobs from every big-city law firm that has ever hired a 1L.

Happy November 1st, y’all.

Tonight is the halfway point in the HLS semester. To celebrate the fact that we successfully made it through the non-graded half of the semester, my section had a happy (three) hour(s) tonight with free beer and appetizers. I broke with tradition and went out, despite the fact that it’s a weeknight and there was some kind of work somewhere that I could possibly be doing. Good thing, too, because one of our professors showed up. I’d hate to be one of the people who stayed home while the law school professor went out to the bar. Also, Trevor was there, posing as a Section 1er and drinking our beer. He’s not in section 1. He stole our free beer. He’s a jerk. Also, a liar. Don’t believe anything he says. It’s all horrible, horrible lies.

That is all.

Okay, people. We’ve been doing this for seven weeks now. You know the drill. When you propose a hypothetical in class, the professor is going to turn it back on you. So think about your question beforehand, come up with a response (something, anything!), and then include that in your question so we don’t all have to sit through the uncomfortableness of the professor prying knowledge out of you.

For example, instead of:

Student: “I understand Case X, but what happens if there’s a flying monkey?”
Professor: “Good question. What do you think happens?”
Student: “Uh… um, I don’t know. Uh… [long silence] … I think… well, that’s why I asked the question.”
Professor: “Well, what is the general rule here?”
Student: “Birds are awesome.”
Professor: “So?”
Student: “Well, a monkey isn’t a bird.”
Professor: “Okay, so what’s the problem? Your question seems pretty simple to me.” Etc.

You should do this:

Student: “Okay, so the rule is that birds are awesome, but what if there’s a flying monkey? Flying monkeys seem pretty awesome to me. Maybe the rule applies to all flying animals?”
Professor: “But what about penguins? They don’t fly at all, and they’re awesome. And bats?”

And just like that, you’re talking law! See how easy that is?

I know I can’t leave this in my final draft, but I was bored and tired of writing about adverse possession:

Vermont law does not recognize the “you live in my house, you follow my rules” doctrine. See, e.g., Josh v. 10:00 Curfew, 14 H.2d 1234, 1234 (1998). Cf. Josh v. Cleaning His Room, 11 H.2d 994 (1994) (imposing sanctions to “give [the plaintiff] something to whine about”); Josh v. Eating His Vegetables, 9 H.2d 893 (1991) (upholding the highly criticized “because I said so” defense).

My first thought when I picked up my graded memo was, “Wow, look at all the comments!” I was so relieved to finally get some feedback that it didn’t occur to me that lots of marking up equals lots of things I messed up. As soon my brain made that connection, though, I flipped to the back page, where I saw that I got…

…a pass. Of course. That’s what I had expected, but, looking back over it, I maybe should have been a little more worried about my grade. My writing wasn’t nearly as good as I remembered it being. Note to self: give yourself an extra day to go over your next memo, and stop using one-sentence paragraphs.

Holy crap, I actually understand this! (Link to a SCOTUSblog summary of Schaffer v. Weast, a case having to do with the burden of proof in an administrative due process hearing. Warning: my Civil Procedure class just finished up a section on due process. You might not find this nearly as interesting as I did.)

This law school thing must be working!

Like most of the other 1Ls here, I signed up to work for a law journal. Well, actually, two. Shut up. On Sunday, one of my journals had their first subcite of the year. The group of us assigned to this particular article spent a few hours in the library, checking all the footnotes in an article for proper form and examining the cited sources to make sure they actually support the author’s assertions. Our weapons in this battle against the non-standard citation style of lazy/forgetful law professors? Boxes of red pens, lots of candy, a fair amount of swearing, and The Bluebook, a 400-page pamphlet that explains the citation rules in a clear, simple, internally consistent manner. No, not really.

My initial enthusiasm (”Wow, I get to work with legal scholarship!”) was quickly replaced by confusion about the rules regarding when commas should be italicized and whether a “See BOOK X” needed a pincite or would be better as a “See generally.” Luckily, assorted editor-types were around to answer our questions and guide us along. We finished the first round of cite-checking quickly and with a minimal amount of pain.

The next day, I put on my line editor’s hat (I’m imagining it to look something like this) and went back to work. Line editing involves going over a section of previously subcited pages, attempting to make sense of some other subciter’s chicken-scratch, rechecking citation formats, making grammatical changes as necessary, and entering all these changes into the actual article. I found it more interesting than subciting, simply because I could work with a larger chunk of the article without being interrupted by constant source-checking. Also, the relative quiet of the journal office did wonders for my concentration.

All told, I did almost six hours’ worth of work over the two days, and I enjoyed a lot of it. I can see how the work might get tedious eventually, but so far it’s a nice change of pace from case briefing. It helps that I’ve been assigned to a single article, so I have some idea of the context of the page I’m working on, and I feel somewhat invested in the article. That’s my article. I worked on it. Yeah.

And, I now know that ellipses go space-dot-space-dot-space-dot-space, not dot-dot-dot. Oh, how naive I’ve been.

I just overheard someone talking about which of HLS’s twelve student-run academic publications is the “party journal.”

I don’t know what to think of this. My mind has been blown.

Some organizations have started to promote their meetings by specifying that the free food offered at their event will not be pizza.

Others apologize that the free food will be pizza, but point out that it is still free.

I’m just happy that I don’t have to cook dinner tonight.

With the first Legal Research and Writing assignment comes the truth: Harvard Law students are just a bunch of overachieving, ultra-competitive stress bunnies after all. We pretend we don’t really care about grades. We try to act relaxed and laid-back, like we actually believed the Dean when she said, “The competition is over, and you won.”

But the minute we’re told to look up x number of sources on the “inevitable disclosure of trade secrets” doctrine and that it shouldn’t take more than an hour to do, all hell breaks loose. People spend three hours, five hours, a day and a half on it–and this is for the two-credit class that is graded pass/fail. I spent two hours on the assignment, and I feel like a slacker.

The secret’s out. We care. And if you get in our way, we will cut you.

Probably the only reason I’m not as overwhelmed as CM seems to be is that my girlfriend came up to visit this weekend. Instead of spending the weekend chained to my desk, we went to the aquarium (which was awesome–pics up later in the week, hopefully), watched movies, wandered the Cambridge area, and ate at a few area restaurants. Admittedly, I did some reading too, but it was a very relaxing weekend all in all (and I hope you now understand why there haven’t been any posts here since last Wednesday).

And boy, did I need a relaxing weekend. I got called on–and completely taken apart–in class Friday. This professor likes to work his way down the row, and the person beside me was nailed first, so I should have known it was coming. But still, when I heard, “Mr. Josh, what do you think about that?” I didn’t comprehend for a second or two.

I now understand the phrase “deer in the headlights” from an entirely different perspective. There I am, just moseying along through the forest, chewing up a few leaves, writing down the interesting things that are being said, when I notice that something’s wrong. What’s this? The ground is hard and black here, and there are no more trees. And why is the person beside me talking? And then, the headlights. The horn. The large object hurtling at you surprisingly fast. The question on the part of the opinion you almost, but not quite, remember.

The language center of your brain shuts down. Your mouth hangs open. Your hands shake. Your eyes skim over the text too quickly to actually read anything. You forget words like “contract” and “bailment,” and end up saying something like, “Well, the thing the people agreed on, it’s a reason to find for the plaint–defen–the… the car driver person.”

As far as I know, my section, unlike CM’s, hasn’t started forming study groups yet, but after my performance on Friday, it’s quite possible that I’ll be blackballed. Really though, I’m not taking it too hard. It’s been impressed on me too many times now that grades are based on the exam, not in-class performance. Everyone locks up from time to time. It was just my turn.

Anyways, I did better today in another class. Girlfriend and I saw this professor Sunday night when we went out to eat, and I don’t know whether she noticed me (I didn’t want to do the stalker thing and interrupt her meal to say hi), but the Professor did stare intently at the seating chart for several seconds before calling on me. I’m not saying that I was punished for having free time the night before class, but if you’re out on a date and your professor walks into the restaurant, it might not be a bad idea to pull the fire alarm, that’s all.