Law Students

Outlining 101

Posted on September 24, 2009
This was originally posted at Thanks, But No Thanks. Nobody, the author, alternates with the Legal Underground and writes the weekly law school roundup. Reposted with permission. Recently, one of the test prep companies on campus made the (grievous) mistake of inviting me to come in and speak to the 1Ls on "Survival Tips for Your 1L Year...

Participation

Posted on September 07, 2009
From my mailbox: A writer described an awkward situation with gunners and people who argue with gunners and tension mounting in a 1L section and ended with a general question about appropriate classroom participation level.If you have to ask, you may be over-participating...

Orientation: Open Thread

Posted on August 16, 2009
How long is it?What did you do?What did you wear? What did others wear? How many times did you hear the words: "You'll find what works for you."

Reality check

Posted on August 15, 2009
This blog has historically tried to be positive -- realistic, but positive -- about law school. When the founders of this blog started it in 2006, the legal market was very different, but even then those of you who dreamed of BigLaw were cautioned that law school rank and grades mattered...

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Watch this space

Posted on August 03, 2009
Law school supplement give away coming soon.

(Almost) FREE law school supplements! HERE!

Posted on August 03, 2009
Welcome to the First (and probably only) Wish I Would Have Known Law School Supplement Give Away (some restrictions apply)Comment below to list the supplements (MAX 3) you would like. Then EMAIL ilovebutterflyfish at yahoo.com with shipping information...

Definitions

Posted on July 19, 2009
Originally posted at Jansen / No.634. Reposted with permission.Huma is right ? I remember reading blawgs during the summer before law school and not knowing what the heck certain terms meant. Here?s a quick rundown of things that confused me, most of which are from the ?definitions? page of No...

Open thread

Posted on June 29, 2009
Questions and requests for posts? Post them here.

What is IRAC?

Posted on June 29, 2009
What is IRAC?Hypothetical: Kim decided to get three star tattoos on her forehead, on the right side above her eyebrow. She went to a well-known and skilled tattoo artist named Ralph who agreed to put three stars on her forehead exactly where she indicated and approved...

Law School as seen on Youtube

Posted on May 19, 2009
First up: at the end of first year Constitutional Law, you will find this video to be hilarious. Really. The Con Luv students from the UVA Libel show knocked this out of the park.Second: my favorite song about law school. I played this at least once per exam period...

Law review write on competitions

Posted on May 04, 2009
Every year around this time, my blog gets inundated with variations on searches for "law review write on". I wrote on to law review, made E-board, and got published (which is a bigger deal at some schools than at others--our law review only publishes three student Notes a year)...

Advice to a New Lawyer on their first day

Posted on February 10, 2009
I wrote this to a friend of mine who was about to start her first lawyer job. Looking back, I think that this is the advice I would give anyone about to begin life as a newbie attorney. Or, if nothing else, I wish someone had told me this before I started my first job...

Round up of pre-L advice

Posted on August 12, 2008
Ok, Pre-Ls: you're getting ready to get started. You might be moving, buying books, looking at that tuition statement, second guessing your decision and freaking out. You're not alone. So to give you something to do this week before orientation, I thought I'd round up what others have said about law school...

Summertime blues

Posted on July 01, 2008
MN asks: So what do you do if you can't find anything? If everything has been filled or you can't afford to go 1000 away from where you are now and it's too late for summer school?For the sake of having a gender for pronoun purposes, I'm making MN a guy...

Waiting for grades

Posted on May 19, 2008
... is one of the worst things about law school. Open thread -- feel free to vent about waiting for grades, rankings, etc.

Reason I love law school #1

Posted on April 20, 2008
Professor Transparent: "We?re going to read this case even though its mostly no longer good law, because its great. It would be like if the Supreme Court overruled Macbeth. It would still be worth reading."

On a positive note

Posted on April 14, 2008
I don't like that "negative" material is the top post of this blog right now. Because I enjoy law school. I love how it has changed the way I approach problem solving. I love that it is been as intellectually stimulating as I had hoped. I love writing exams...

On dashing dreams

Posted on April 07, 2008
I was working an admitted students event this weekend.Preface: I made the choices I made for law school for my reasons. I don't care (much) about prestige or rankings and it won't matter (much) in the work I want. But let us be blunt. Forgetting the US News and the Rankings debate, we can all agree there are the top schools, the also rans, and the rest...

The $$ Shell Game

Posted on March 27, 2008
Life the Universe and Everything asks: Appropriate question??What percentage of your applicants receive scholarship offers. I'm curious here because at the school I'll be visiting, you have to be in the top 25% to retain your scholarship. Top 26% gets you bupkiss...

Admitted students weekend

Posted on March 18, 2008
Life, the universe, and everything asks: I just received my class assignment for my admitted students weekend. I am scheduled to sit in on a constitutional law class. Can anyone enlighten me about this sort of law? The only thing I know of it is Susan Estrich's opinion that it spoils every law student because everyone wants to practice it, but almost no one gets to...

a potpourri of pre-L advice

Posted on March 10, 2008
alright, i see a bunch of different topics in the questions thread, so i'm going to address what i can.the summer before law schoolas far as the summer before law school, Butterflyfish is correct--you don't need a law job the summer before law school...

Summer before law school

Posted on March 08, 2008
From Prue: what should i be doing the the summer between undergrad graduation and starting law school? i am finishing an engineering degree, and to be honest i'm a little burnt out. what i really want to do is be lazy and work in a mindless job, like starbucks...

Hey 1Ls! Hey Pre-Ls!

Posted on February 23, 2008
Hey 1Ls!You've gotten one semester under your belt. You're either happy with your grades or looking to improve. You've sort of got the hang of things but still find yourself spending too much time on legal skills. We get it. We've been there.Any burning questions?Hey Pre-Ls!Acceptances are rolling in...

1L summer: do anything, as long as it's legal.

Posted on February 17, 2008
grades are back, resumes are in shiny, working order, and it's time to hunt for that 1L summer position. the central idea of the 1L summer position hunt is as follows--it doesn't matter what you do, as long as it's something legal. this includes firm jobs, public interest jobs, summer school, and study abroad...

Don't let this happen to you

Posted on February 09, 2008
I was reading a post on a law student blog and the author, in her second semester of law school, was wondering why several of her otherwise perfectly normal classmates have suddenly become asshats. Little did she know its a common disorder seen among the law student population...

Do bar passage rates mean anything?

Posted on February 04, 2008
A reader asks: I have heard from several sources, none of which actually have been to law school, that once a student has passed the bar exam, the caliber of school he/she attended doesn't really matter. What are your ideas on this (and I'm not referring to Harvard or Yale as options)? From what I understand, the bar exam thing you heard is crap...

Go ahead, call me a tool / gunner / d-bag. . .

Posted on January 28, 2008
Law school groupie asks: How difficult is the reading at first? One persons advice was to start reading Hemingway to prepare your brain. I also kind of wonder how much the stress can get to a person. Basically, I'm afraid of crying myself to sleep a lot of nights...

Burning questions

Posted on January 12, 2008
Excerpts from recent reader email thinking about going to law school:Female reader asks: I am newly married, and I am concerned about what kind of stress being a student again would put on my marriage . . . I guess what I am asking is, how do you juggle it all? What should a 1L expect as far as work load? Is it the equivalent of an 8hr day? 10hr day? or longer? Yes, its stressful on a marriage...

Bookstore Ripoff

Posted on January 03, 2008
If you haven't already figured out that most university bookstores charge outrageous prices for law books then hopefully this blog post will save you a few bucks in the future. The internet is your best friend when it comes to buying books for law school...

Hanging in there?

Posted on January 02, 2008
Hey 1Ls,Hope you had a great break and New Year. Some of you may be back to class this week. More will be back to class next week.But who gives a sh*t, right? You don't yet have the one thing you want more than anything else right now: your damn grades...

congratulations.

Posted on December 23, 2007
congratulations.by now, you all should be done with your finals. to all you 1Ls...congratulations on making it through one of the most foreign, stressful, and unsettling experiences of your life.finals weeks get easier after this. they never get objectively easy...

Run Run as Fast as You Can

Posted on December 03, 2007
If you are a 1L (or a law student for that matter) and you are sitting inside your law library or law school reading this post while you procrastinate on studying for your exams GET OUT OF THE LAW SCHOOL NOW!I posted my musings on coffee shop studying over at Useless Dicta earlier today...

Bad role model

Posted on November 25, 2007
This blog is supposed to be about the things we would do differently if we had 1L to do over again. I'd like to think I'd have been less panicked about exams, more zen about it or something. Whaever happens, will happen, and I'll be ok. I'll land a job...

don't jump the gun...or, the beginning of the 1L job hunt.

Posted on November 18, 2007
i'm sure all you 1Ls have been inundated with material from career services lately: flyers, seminars, and mandatory meetings. they weren't allowed to talk to you before november 1st, and now they are acting as if they need to make up for the last few months that they lost with you, thanks to NALP regulations...

Job Searching

Posted on November 07, 2007
One thing I Wish I Would Have Known before starting law school: Finding a Job After Law School is Harder Than You Think.I am finishing up my first semester of my second year, so while I have had to do a summer job search and I am now starting to try to figure out if I can get an internship and job for next semester and the upcoming summer, I have not yet had to go through the nightmare of finding employment after graduation...

Looming Finals

Posted on November 02, 2007
It's the most horrible time of the year. The ghosts and goblins have gone away for another year, the stores around town are kicking themselves into Christmas Cheer overdrive, and panic is beginning to descend upon law students across the nation. In case you haven't been paying attention or counting down FINALS are now right around the corner, some maybe even less than a month away...

choosing classes

Posted on November 01, 2007
november has rolled around. that means it's almost time to pick classes for next semester.these musings pertain a little less to the 1Ls now than it does to the 2Ls and 3Ls, but it's good for you 1Ls to have this in your mind when spring comes and you get to sign up for your 2L classes...

Attention 1Ls

Posted on October 18, 2007
What you should be good at by now:Getting through your reading through book-briefing or mini-briefing (two-three sentence briefs) and/or some combination of supplementary aids.Beerpong (so I've been told having never played it myself)Getting over yourself...

save the drama for your llama.

Posted on September 18, 2007
amen, amen, a million times amen to #1.(this started as a comment to Useless Dicta's last post, but it started to get so long that i decided to make it a new entry to the blog.)i didn't quite realise what a drama factory law school was until i was a 2L...

Useless Things I Wish I Would Have Known

Posted on September 17, 2007
Like Butterflyfish and others I have apparently "passed the write on" and now I get to contribute all kinds of Useless things to the Wish I Would Have Known blog, so here it goes :) I'm usually blogging about useless things relating to law school and life in general over at Useless Dicta ...

Follow-up on supplements

Posted on September 15, 2007
I think the biggest question I had as a Pre-L / One-L was about supplements. In fact, the Lawbitches did a nice post about it on this site -- check the archives.You're a month into law school and maybe just starting to get the hang of it. So of course, the prof's are ratcheting up the reading assignments and you may start to feel a little overwhelmed...

studying...one gal's thoughts.

Posted on September 12, 2007
i saw michelle's comment asking how we study, so i thought i'd chime in.as far as con law goes, i have one word: chemerinsky. it bears repeating...chemerinsky. he has a soft-cover treatise on constitutional law, and it's the con law bible. i read that treatise in lieu of the casebook, at the end of the semester, and con law was my highest grade that semester...

1L Reflections

Posted on September 10, 2007
So I am another new member of the blog .... I apparently passed the "write-on." And Calculating said the waterboarding er... initiation is scheduled for next week. So there is that.Normally, I blog at A little fish in law school.Over the summer, I posted some commentary on the end of 1L and the ambivalence I felt over it and exams...

courtesy, please.

Posted on August 31, 2007
hello all.my name is nicolle...and i'm a new contributor here. (thank you, Calculating!) i've been blogging (a little) about law and (a lot) about random, non-legal things for a few years over at the last refuge of the persecuted crack smoker, and i'm currently a 3L at Washington University in St...

Looking for Contributors

Posted on August 23, 2007
I think, in theory, this blog was a good idea. We had a strong start. But now we are all at different points in our lives and busy with other things. And I know that we had a lot of additional posts planned last year that just never got written (more on relationships, the job search, the MPRE, etc...

1L Second Semester: A New Beginning

Posted on January 18, 2007
Hey look, you made it. You survived. It's all gravy now.You haven't gone postal, stigmata haven't appeared on your body, nor has John Roberts called to offer you a 10th spot on the Supreme Court. As you scan your classes now, you will see the opening of where someone sat before, new gunners have appeared, old gunners have gone quiet...

Quick Finals Advice

Posted on December 09, 2006
Be calm. It's not the end of the world. Grades are curved. You didn't flunk out.You will be fine.Look at me, I've made it through, and I can barely use the English language.

On Campus Interviewing

Posted on October 22, 2006
Grades Are ImportantYou have heard it from us, and you may hear one variation or another from your classmates and faculty: ?Grades are not everything,? ?Grades are not that important,? ?You are not defined by your grades.? Bullshit. If you want to go work at a big firm and you want to do OCI, grades are everything...

How's the 1L grind going?

Posted on October 11, 2006
I figure we are about at the halfway point of the semester. Are there any questions, comments, rants, fears, etc? Let us know if we can help you out!

How Not To Succeed in Law School.

Posted on September 20, 2006
Hat tip to TJ for alerting us to this article.In a classic "I Wish I Would Have Known Moment" I can only say that I wish I would have read this article before I went to law school. Wait, it probably wouldn't have stopped me, and I probably would have spent all of my first year trying to figure out which one of the three 1L groups I would fit in...

Grumble, Grumble...

Posted on September 10, 2006
On behalf of the contributors on this blog, I sincerely apologize for the lack of posting lately.Not sure what aLs and Namby are up to (well, Namby's a 3L who I'm sure is experiencing the senior slide and aLs has obviously been busy mastering Microsoft Paint), and I'll admit that I don't even have a terribly fantastic excuse...