JD Law Students Blog

25 September 2006: Heavy. Gray. Clouds disentangling from the cold blue earth bear upwards.

Fall of your second year will eat you. It will eat you whole, lick its lips, and pick its teeth with your datebook. And while you’re deep in the belly of the beast, trying to figure out what compelled you to take on the number of responsibilities that you did (ha, ha – sucker), you had better be working on more productive things than writing posts for your law school’s student blog.

Today’s post is brought to you by the concept “time,” the fluttering in my throat at the thought of facing another week of deadlines, and the letter C.

I [heart] law school. I really do.

Trying to explain what it is like to be a first year in law school, is a lot like trying to explain army boot camp or pregnancy and childbirth. No matter how much one alludes to the general themes or any specific experience, the bottom line is that you can’t really understand it until you go through it.  The last three weeks have been a blur of schedules, discussion and a lingering fog of cases, to read, brief and understand. I love it when I don’t hate it which depends on what day it is, how much I understand and whether or not I’ve got “it.” It is the issue of the case, the relevance to the court and the impact on the body of law in general.

Week one was a bit like undergrad, full of  introductions, seating charts and light reading. The weekend could not arrive fast enough. During week two the assignments started to pile up and the expectations kicked in. This week I ‘m loving it, I’ve established a bit of pacing as concerns my workload. To my surprise, extracurricular activities abound, from lectures and talks to trivia games and campus clubs. Overall, I am starting to feel better about what I need to do here and the upper class women and men have had a lot to do with it.

I don’t know what the culture is like at other law schools but at VLS, 2L’s and 3L’s are as quick to offer assistance as any faculty member I have encountered. They’ll offer the heads up on professors, study time and every thing in between. As a matter of fact there isn’t a perceptible barrier to communication on the campus. We all have the ability to email each other, the entire class and even the faculty. This represents the opportunity to make friends and enemies with a few clicks and that is a rather exciting prospect, quite like freedom of speech .

My curriculum is the standard 1^st year bill of Torts, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Civil Procedure and research seminars. What makes it genuinely cool, in my estimation is that my professors are “psyched” about the work they are doing, inside the class room and in practice. They research and write books on nuanced areas of the law and still seem happy to spend hours each week breaking it down into digestible bits so that the 1L mind can take it all in. My favorite classes are the ones where the professor allows us to flesh out the cases so that we can have a mental picture of the parties and add some policy or political context so that it isn’t just happening in a vacuum.    

Some of my class mates have told me that they dream about the cases, or about being questioned in class on them. Alas, I have yet to have such experiences, or for that matter even enough sleep to dream at all. But I am getting the hang of what’s, what so I’m getting closer to comfort and that’s progress…

“Goodbye my friend, it’s hard to die.” This was something said to me recently on the passing of a loved one. OK, so maybe it’s the lyrics to “Seasons in the Sun” but Terry Jacks is right—dying sucks. And it’s all the more difficult when it’s a close friend, someone you’ve shared close moments with, someone who seemed to know your every mood and every thought, someone who was there for you, through thick and thin, good and bad, every up and every down. Yes, I’m talking about my iPod.
I once wrote an entire post here about my iPod. Yeah, maybe I’m a loser, but in so many ways that little portable hard drive with mp3 player was woven into every intimate detail of my life. The iPod was my company on every long car ride through Vermont and beyond. We went to the gym together. We hiked Kent’s Ledge. We studied in the library—and really, if you can’t thumb through the Federal Registry while “Let It Whip” and “Raspberry Beret” are blarring in your ear, there’s no reason to go to law school. And this semester I’m on an externship in New Hampshire, two hour commute every day, made all the less painful because I had instant access to over 5000 songs, from 2Pac to Zwan, all at my fingertips. And now my iPod is dead. I think I might cry. Don’t know what you’ve got … ‘til it’s gone …
In terms of importance to my law school life, my iPod ranks #2, just behind my dog Delia and about 15,637 places ahead of my collection of “How to Survive Law School” books. In fact, when I give in and eventually write my own “How to Survive Law School” book, I plan to devote an entire chapter to the need for an iPod, right between the chapters on tipping the local bartenders and “Caffeine vs. Crystal Meth—Pros and Cons.” Anyway, thoughout law school my trusty iPod has been there for me. First semester I was learning Civ Pro with Snoop and Dre. I crammed for Appellate with Iggy and the Stooges. Merle Haggard got me through Evidence. My iPod was like my own little law school cheerleader. “Dude, you can do two more hours of reading tonight … ‘cause ROCK AND ROLL AIN’T NOISE POLLUTION …” Now I really am going to cry.
It happened about a week ago. We were down at the gym sculpting the guns when bye bye Miss American pie the music just died. I think I was listening to Pantera. Or The Pixies. Or Prince. It was something starting with “P.” Anyway, I looked down at my buddy, thinking that his little battery had died or something, and I got the “Sad iPod” screen. Has anyone seen the “Sad iPod” screen? Basically your iPod emotes a little digital face, only it has X’s for eyes and a little digital tongue sticking out, like Yosemite Sam just dropped an anvil on it or something. It’s pathetic. And somewhere over at Apple headquarters you just know that there’s a programmer giggling to himself over his cleverness. Thanks guys. Why not just have it emit some kind of hacking cough, or maybe play the opening riff from Electric Funeral?
In retrospect I should have seen the warning signs. It would lock up at certain moments and require a manual reset. It would get unusually hot, and not just when Rick James was playing either. It also refused to play anything by Lou Reed after he left The Velvet Underground, though this might have just been a personal preference. But I guess these are the kind of things that we say to ourselves before any sudden death. My iPod was still young. It looked good for it’s age. Just last month we were on the beach together and it went through Nirvana’s entire song catalogue in one sitting. This is such a tragedy.
The bargaining stage of grief in this case was quite literal. Paul Allen and his Apple henchmen wanted $300 to fix the thing, plus I’d have to pay shipping, plus I’d have to wait 4-6 weeks while my iPod sat on some dusty maintenance shelf, plus I have to admit that Matt Hasselbeck is an A-list quarterback. That’s where I draw the line. I half-heartedly made a phone call to Apple customer service, where hold time is measured in light years, but I was really just trying to postpone the inevitable. My iPod was dead. It was out of warranty, out of options, out of life. Ashes to Ashes and dust to dust. Vaya con dios, mi amigo.
To quote Avril Lavinge, what more can I say? Music is an important part of law school life, whether it’s the soft sounds of a Schubert symphony or the pounding percussion of Finnish deathmetal. It’s the companion that joins us during late-night study sessions, it’s the background noise to all the work we do. It matches our moods, it deepens our thoughts, it enhances our personalities. You need music to survive law school.
So I went out and bought a new iPod.

I have a minor obsession with weather.com.

That website is telling me that the air temperature will drop to something like 36 degrees tonight, and 33 tomorrow. A mere cold spell it may be, but this is feeling like my first experience with authentic Vermont weather!

Okay, maybe the second – the half-hour hurricane-like tempest that raged through West Lebanon yesterday was not the kind of thing you see in California.

Anyway, when the weather is dipping almost to a freeze, and given that where I’m from it never gets that cold, my instinct is to turn up the heat and make a mug of tea and curl up with a blanket or three.

However, my landlord has not yet been kind enough to furnish me with heat.

This may be a bit too authentic.

All right, I’ve been in law school now for a week and a half, and I think I’ve figured out how things work. Stop me if I’m wrong:

I get an assignment. I go home and do the reading; then I do the reading again. After briefing the cases and maybe discussing them with some classmates, I feel like I’m in good command of the material. Then I go to class, and an hour and fifteen minutes later, I’ve found out that I didn’t actually know any of the stuff I thought I did.

Talking to other 1Ls and Dean Shields leads me to believe that this is pretty typical, and likely to continue until sometime around first-semester finals.

At this point, after driving across the country for a week and getting through a hectic week of orientation, I’m just glad to have something that resembles a routine. Who knew that wandering around in a state of confused oblivion would ever feel so comfortable!