The Law School Grind at 1:45 PM

Just finished my first week at school! It was not that bad but I'm sure it will get worse as time goes on. I can tell it's not going to be so much about the work but the memory and endurance to get all the way through. Going to try and not burn myself out though.

To start this post off I'm going to repeat a (shorter version of) joke one of my professors said the other day:

A physicist, a mathematician and a lawyer are trying to prove the sum of 2+2. The physicist and mathematician fill up chalk board after chalk board to prove that 2+2=4. The lawyer looks at the board and asks the judges what they want 2+2 to equal.

It's supposed to be a joke about advocacy and I find it funny.

What we do from the day to day is read massive amounts of pages all relating to a central topic. One of those topics we read for the other day was jurisdiction. Instead of reading a bunch of definitions about that topic we read cases. From those cases we are supposed to figure out the rule or precedent that case sets and then we are supposed to put it all together to figure out the rules of jurisdiction.

One of the steps central to this understanding is writing case briefs. When we read a case we are supposed to keep track of all the cases we read because they come into play at the end of the year when we take our big make it or break it tests. When we read case we are supposed to keep track of its citation, facts of the case, procedural context(how we legally got here), issue, holding(rule set), rules the court used to get to the holding, and the reasoning for how the rules apply to the holding.

We do that for about 5 cases a day which takes a bit of time to read and understand. On top of the cases we are assigned it usually is a good idea to look up all the cases that directly relate to the cases at hand, taking the main idea from each of them. The archaic terms are also a good idea to understand and the laws some of the cases lead up to are also a good idea to peak at. After each case there are problems and questions that help to understand the case or put the case into a larger context. How the case you are reading relates to the case you read before types of questions. All this is done for each of my five classes, so it starts to add up.

When it gets closer to exam time I'll fill ya'll in on that but I figure a good post about what I do from day to day would be helpful. The next posts will be more fun.

::Antdog outs::

Truth exists; only lies are invented.~Horatius Bonar