Student Blogs: 1st Year

The second semester starts out much like the first semester. Textbooks? Check. Pens? Check. Trapper Keeper with 3D geometric shapes cover? Check. First Assignments? Check? Anxiety, fear, and the unknown? Uhmm. It seems to be missing.

The second semester is your chance to apply all of the lessons you learned during the first semester to a clean slate. So, everything you would have done differently during the first semester, you actually get to do differently in the second semester. Plus, you’re an old pro by the time the bell for round two rings. You know what to look for in cases. You can better anticipate what a professor is expecting when a question is posed. Also, you have a huge bank of legal concepts, some universal, which you acquired during the first semester. For example, before the first semester, I spent almost an entire weekend working on first assignments, and only an afternoon preparing first assignments for second semester. That isn’t to say that second semester is a breeze. I still had my freak out and want to quit moments just like first semester. It’s just that you are better able to deal with them.

My second semester I took Criminal Law, Constitutional Law I, Property II, Legal Methods II, and Contracts. It is the same amount of credits (15) but with 5 classes, which means one more final exam to be taken.

Criminal Law was probably one of my favorite classes spring semester, which surprised me because I had never really thought of it as an option prior to law school. But with success, comes fondness. As my professor noted, you’re never going to be bored studying Criminal Law. The stuff is “juicy” (his words). I have to agree. Every week was a case that involved somebody getting stabbed, selling drugs, or planning to rob a bank. It’s all great fun until you realize that these things really happened. Somebody really did get stabbed. Somebody really did sell drugs to a ten year-old. Those realizations tend to take the fun out of the reading, but not the interest.

Contract Law was also a good course. I had a very entertaining professor who liked to make jokes, except on the final. Contract Law is all about how a person’s promises become binding upon them. There is a lot of material covered in this class and studying for the final was less than easy. In two days, I felt that I had an impossible amount of information to master.

Constitutional Law I was a little different than other classes. In other classes, you read cases that illustrate a legal concept. It’s not necessarily that the case is groundbreaking or the judge is a legal genius, but that the case illustrates the legal concept well. Thus, the thing you study and remember is the concept and not the author or the case name. Constitutional Law is all about important authors and the important opinions they write for cases. So, in studying for the final, you have to not only memorize the legal concept but the case it was from, the author whose opinion it was, and the names of cases and authors whose opinion differs. Once again, it is a lot of information. Being a history buff, the thing I liked the most was when we would get into the historical context and how the current events of that time shaped opinions of the Court.

In Property Law II, you dig further into the world of property law. We spent a good half of this class covering the real estate contract. During that first half, there was actually some overlap with contracts in that we were covering similar concepts in two different classes. It’s always nice when classes work off of each other. Most of the concepts were completely new to me, though. I have never bought a house and had no idea all the steps that were involved. Learning those steps in Property Law II just reinforces my thought that law school makes you good at life, or at least skeptical of it.

Legal Methods II was the class that provided me with the most freak out moments. In the spring, the assignment for legal methods was writing an appellate brief. The toughest thing about the assignment was the massive amount of cases you have to sort through. I started out with a 2″ binder full of cases, which I had to read and reread and then read again. The second toughest thing about the assignment is the process of extracting what the cases are actually trying to tell you and how that applies to your fact pattern. You end up with a billion ideas that you want to incorporate into your brief, no idea how to organize them, and a word count that makes it inevitable that all but a few of your amazing ideas will be left on the editing room floor. This assignment devoured my spring break and bunch of my weekends. So, don’t let this two credit class fool you because it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

With the exception of the legal methods assignment, the second semester wasn’t all that action packed. It felt like the whole semester was building towards finals. Like marathon with a sprint at the end, I just kept chugging along the whole time preparing for the next day’s classes, and then Bam! it was off to the races for finals.