90-percent
Posted by John Mock on Oct 22, 2008
90-percent. On it’s face, 90-percent is a pretty subjective quantity. If you ask someone, is 90-percent good or bad, you’re likely to get a myriad of different responses. For example, if I get 90-percent on all my final exams this semester, I’ll be a happy, happy law student. However, if my car gets totaled by a semi driven by an escaped howler monkey from a zoo and the insurance company only will give me 90-percent of the market value of my car, and I owe more than my car is worth, I won’t be such a happy law student.
I bet that the Widener community is pretty happy about 90-percent though. On the July Pennsylvania Bar exam, 90-percent of Widener alumni taking the test for first time passed (the actual rate was a couple-hundredths of point below 90). This was significantly better than the pass rate for the whole state, which was 83-percent. And, I make the caveat that I am getting my information from the Board of Law Examiners website, according to my research, this places Widener right up there with top tier law schools.
This makes me a happy first-year law student. It means that Widener is doing a great job preparing students for the bar. I see it in my classes on a consistent basis. The professors mention particular issues they’ve seen appear on past bars. The professors take time to teach areas of law within a particular subject precisely so we’re more prepared when it comes time to study for and take the bar exam.
Additionally, the benefits I’m seeing of a Widener degree go beyond a great passage rate for first-time takers of the bar. I’ve mentioned in the past my Legal Methods class. Despite the incoherent ramblings this class exacts from me on occasion and my general consternation over trying to fit in all the assigned papers due for this class within all the other work I have preparing for class each day, Legal Methods is a vitally important class for us future attorneys.
In Legal Methods, we’re learning how to function as a lawyer in terms of writing intra-office memorandums and performing legal research. While learning the law through studying appellate cases and Socratic dialogue is crucially important because it teaches us how to think like lawyers, all that is pretty much useless if we don’t know how to communicate that knowledge effectively and clearly. Legal Methods is doing that, even if it’s stretching me thin (I’m pretty sure life as an attorney will be strikingly similar in its stretching ability).
So, again, in many ways I am so glad I came to Widener. Yes, there were schools that scored higher passage rates on the bar. However, I feel that here at Widener the faculty and administration genuinely want me to succeed as a student and as an attorney. And in the end, isn’t that the whole reason I’m here?
Hitting my stride: halfway there
Posted by John Mock on Oct 10, 2008
I feel like I’m finally hitting my stride as a law student. The first several weeks were a whirlwind of activity, learning what is expected in class, meeting classmates and trying to find where I fit in to all of this. Now that I’m halfway through the first semester, I’m getting more of a solid idea of what I’m doing.
That isn’t to say it’s gotten easy. If anything, it’s gotten harder in that the amount of reading and preparation for class has increased each week. This new amount of work isn’t unmanageable, but good time management has become a must. And I find I’m spending about four hours a day outside of class preparing for tomorrow’s classes and reviewing the classes I have just had.
So, it’s not impossible by any means. But it can get harried as you make sure that you’re prepared for class and make sure that you’ve understood what you’ve learned.
One big caveat, however. This week, I’ve got two quizzes – one in Property and one in Legal Methods – and these two quizzes are teaming up on me to stress me out to no end. Of course, I’m sure it’s all in my head. But making sure that I feel like I’ve put the requisite study time into these two quizzes is super important to me. I don’t want to sit down and take these quizzes and think that I should have spent more time.
Having the chance to take these quizzes, though, and get a sense of where I am in understanding the material in both of these classes will be a big advantage as I head into the dreaded “Finals” territory in about seven weeks. This is a difference from undergraduate work, a difference that is disconcerting, I’m sure, to many of my classmates – myself included.
As an undergraduate, we had quizzes and papers and mid terms, all of which helped us gauge where we were grade-wise as we headed into our final exams. In fact, I had many classes where I knew exactly what percentage grade I needed on the final to earn the “A”. Not so for many of the classes in law school. In three of my classes this semester, the only grade in the class will be the final. This is both invigorating – I have to make sure that I’m on top of the material and I understand everyday what we’re taught – and wildly frustrating – I have no good way, other than discussing with classmates and the professors, of where I am in relation to the material.
And that’s what I love about law school. It’s not undergrad. It’s hard and challenging. And in the end, there is a real sense that I am learning concepts and ideas that are lofty and worthy of study; that I am part of an almost ageless profession that helps defend people and stand for those who can’t stand for themselves.
Survivor: first three weeks of law school
Posted by John Mock on Sep 15, 2008
So, I’ve survived the first three weeks of law school. Last week, we had a short quiz in Property. The purpose of the quiz, we were told, was for us to gauge if we were up to speed with the areas of property law that we’d learned up to the quiz. It wasn’t really all that hard of a quiz, although I certainly let myself get pretty keyed up for it. In fact, I’m sure that the night before the quiz my wife was a saint for putting up with my, “Holy crap I’m going to fail,” musings that I lamented all last Tuesday.
I’m happy to report, despite my absolute conviction that I would fail miserably, that I passed with room to spare. Which reassures me that I am, in fact, learning the material.
This weekend was also the end of the second week of my fantasy football league, where my team “The Adjudicators” – a little nod to my current law school enrollment – lost by a narrow margin. If I’d only started that one player on my bench! Both times, if I’d started the other quarterback I would have won. Ah well.
And the slim margins I lost my football games by brings me to the point of this current blog post, I suppose. The current political race, it appears, is going to come down to the slimmest of margins. If all the polling is to be believed, this race could be even closer than the famous (infamous?) 2000 Presidential race.
I wonder if, the day after the smoke clears from election night and we have our winner, the armchair politicians will be debating the last minute decisions of each campaign? Sort of like how I’m debating with myself whether starting Tony Romo last week would have been a better choice than Kurt Warner (pro tip, it would have won me the game) and if starting Jamal Lewis, who got 1 point more than Chad Johnson, would have won me this week’s game (again, it would have).
It will be interesting to hear the political pundits saying this campaign should have done that, and that campaign should have done this. But in the end, will it really make any difference? I would hope that, whoever wins, the losing team won’t look back and say, “If only we had made that one little decision differently, we would have won.”
It’s not any fun to lose when you know you would have won, had you done things differently. Luckily for me, that feeling is only hampering my fantasy football and not my property quizzes. I’m okay with losing football and winning law school.
The Marathon that is Law School
Posted by John Mock on Sep 8, 2008
It’s Monday afternoon, and I’m sitting in the Moot Court room waiting for Contracts with Professor Jones to start. The weekend was relaxing, when I wasn’t preparing for my marathon start to the week. Oh, I haven’t mentioned that yet? Well then, let me get you up to speed.
On Mondays, I have four classes (every other day I have only one or two). While I understand the need for stacking these classes on Monday – not the least of which is getting all the material covered in Property because we’re going to have to miss some Fridays – it’s a beast of a day that leaves my brain a quivering mass of Jello Pudding. Whew. Lotta brain power being used all day. Luckily for me, I have only one class on Tuesday, and it’s in the afternoon. Yay for sleeping late.
So I’m waiting for Contracts, in this, the third week of – cue the orchestral fanfare – law school. Not much has changed from my first post. I’m still jazzed to be here, taking one day at a time, and honestly, I’m loving it. Wow. I just looked at that last sentence, boy that’s a lot of commas.
But I am loving it, loving law school. The mental challenge to learn a new way to read and think is invigorating. And the general axiom that, “law school teaches you to think like a lawyer” is absolutely spot-on. Here’s a great example of that.
In our Introduction to Law class during Orientation, the faculty taught us the basics of reading and briefing cases through a series of problems surrounding the “Dog Bite Statute.” As it so happens, while I was taking my dog out to do his “business” this weekend, another dog came up to him in our yard and bit him on the face. Thankfully, my dog didn’t fight back – he’s a lover, not a fighter – and he wasn’t hurt badly, but I immediately thought back to the class and the dog bite cases and my brain started working on the problem.
Did the other dog attack unprovoked? Can I bring an action against the owner of the other dog to recover any costs from patching up my dog? I didn’t even stop to think, “I should consider what’s just happened through the lens of legal analysis.” I just did it. Pretty crazy, I know.
So the moral of the story is, pay attention in class and to the cases, because you never know when your 70-pound black lab mix is going to be dominated by a 15-pound yappy dog.
Until next time or I go crazy. Either or.
Are all the horror stories about the first year of law school true?
Posted by John Mock on Sep 4, 2008
If you’re a prospective law school student, and you’re anything like I was, there are undoubtedly tons of questions flying through your mind. You’re possibly thinking, “Will I be able to handle the workload? Will I have any free-time? Are all the horror stories about the first year of law school true?” My answer to these questions are yes, yes and no.
Can you handle the workload? I definitely was worried about the amount of work assigned in my classes. So far, it hasn’t been any more work than I regularly had to do as a journalist and editor.
Is it more work and harder assignments than undergraduate? It depends, from what I’ve seen. In my experience, the class assignments and daily readings aren’t any larger or harder than what I did in my philosophy undergraduate course work. In fact, many of my undergraduate classes assigned more pages between class sessions.
I can, however, tell you that thinking critically about the law takes a different kind of mental “muscle” than a lot of what you may have done at college. The professors here talk about the “seamless web of the law.” This just means, as far as I can tell, that all law builds on the law around it, that cases draw from previous cases and many times one case will pull in different areas of law from different perspectives. This can be overwhelming to someone who isn’t used to thinking this way. It’s definitely invigorating to have to stretch yourself to start to see the bigger picture.
What about free-time? Maybe you’re like me and had oodles of free time in college because you were able to finish the assignments rather quickly. This doesn’t fly at law school. Now does this mean you’ll never see the outside of the library or classroom again? I don’t think so. But you can expect to do five or so hours of work outside of the classroom for each class session. At least, that’s what it’s been taking me so far. But I don’t think that’s all that bad. Working in journalism, I routinely put in 10-hour days, and with two to three hours of class a day, five more hours on top of that only puts you around eight hours a day. That’s plenty of time to do things you like to do. You just have to budget your time well.
You mentioned horror stories, how horrible is it? Not horrible at all. In fact, I’m ecstatic about my choice of attending Widener. I had offers from other, higher-ranked schools. I have friends that have attended some of those same schools. And so far, Widener has been leaps and bounds better insofar as taking care of 1Ls. We’ve had chances to mingle and meet each other, our Legal Methods class (the class all students are required to take to help them learn the ins and outs of studying law) is immensely helpful. The professors are all great teachers, and I can say this because I’ve had some lousy professors at other institutions. Everyone on the staff and administration has been a pleasure to work with.
So, to wrap up this first blog, I’m happy I’m here, law school is not as bad as people say it is, and if you’re thinking about Widener, I’d strongly recommend a closer look.