Molto Giuridico is translated as "very legal" or "very juridical" in Italian.
I'll be using this blog to write about my experiences as a first-year law student in a city in the midwestern US. What I like about the idea of a blog is the ease with which you can publish journalistic accounts of all sorts of things, from obscure sports to molecular gastronomy to juicy narratives about being a nanny to a stuck-up Brooklyn freelance writer.
What I don't like about many blogs is when writers attempt to cover too many of these varying topics, and not very well at that. In this blog, I won't post descriptions of what I cooked for dinner last night, predictions for the Rugby World Cup, my review of Flight of the Conchords, links to Obama campaign commercials, or any topics that don't directly pertain to the blog's subject: being a first-year law student. My goal -- which will take some practice, I know -- is to report on law school like a good feature journalist would do. My previous stint in a graduate program in the humanities taught me a lot of things, but it did not sharpen my ability to write with concision; most of my professors in that field actively or passively encouraged disorganization in my writing. I hope that blogging can help me relearn the skills of expository and analytical writing for a non-specialized audience.
Most of my readers will probably be people who know me, and so of course we have other lines of communication to talk about everything outside the world of law school. And conversely, you probably don't want to talk to me on the telephone about the cases I have to read in Civil Procedure, so it's here for your reading (dis)pleasure. If we're friends and you want to remain friends with me and yet you're bored to tears by the law school stories, it is OK: reading the blog is not a prerequisite for any future conversations we can have. I don't know if it will be worth anyone's time to read, and I won't make conversational references to its content assuming that anyone has. I hope reading this will be entertaining, but the commitments of law school itself will prevent me from spending too much time polishing my blog posts about it.
After a six-day orientation program, classes will officially begin this Tuesday. The first-year curriculum is comprised of five classes: Contracts, Torts, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, and something called "Lawyering," which is called Legal Writing and Research at some other schools. The classes meet two or three times a week, so I'll be in class from 9-noon every day, with an additional class in the afternoon on Monday and Thursday. The class time itself is a little lighter than some other schools (by 1-2 hours per week), but the reading load is just as daunting. I just bought several massive textbooks (costing nearly $700, including a couple of used ones!) which I'll be lugging around until mid-December. My daily planner now has a regular block of time devoted exclusively to these guys: Sunday through Thursday evenings, 7-11 P.M. We'll see how this reading plan works in practice...
Monday is the last day of orientation before classes start on Tuesday morning. I'm now dreading my email for fear that a professor is going to assign reading before the first class. Returning to the classroom as a student is going to be really strange...
