Learning as a Law Student
It’s interesting to look back at when I just started and see how far I’ve come in such a short period of time. The first time I briefed a case in law school, I spent about 3 hours trying to wrangle some sort of meaning from it. I got most of it wrong. The second time it took about an hour, but I still got most of it wrong. The work load has substantially increased this year. In my first semester, most professors gave us 5 to 10 pages of homework per class. This doesn’t sound like much, but it is when each page takes 15 to 20 minutes just to get a basic understanding. By second semester, professors had moved up to giving 10, 20, or even 25 pages of reading per class. This tracked well with my ability to comprehend, and before I knew it, I was actually understanding cases and concepts without having to reread it 10 times.
This year, my work load has dramatically increased, but so has my comprehension. I can still remember posting on Facebook, “My Real Estate professor wants me to read 125 pages by Thursday. I may have made a mistake.” Well, I did the work and survived. I even thrived.
It is now about a month into the Spring semester of my second year, just past the halfway point in my law school career. I am taking 6 classes for a total of 16 credits. The pressures of first year have been replaced with this year’s tsunami of work and the Bar Exam looming in the not too distant future. As long as I keep swimming, I just might become a lawyer.
