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…