Obviously you stop blogging and, with few exceptions, communicating with the outside world. Here are some things that I have been doing:
1. Revising my first memo and writing my second (and final) memo for my Legal Research and Writing class. (If you've been following the story so far, this class has the nondescript and awkward title "Lawyering" at my school.)
The memos are the most practical assignments of the first year. In each, I was assigned a hypothetical case for which I had been given a brief summary of facts by my hypothetical boss at my firm. In Memo #1, a client who is a regional manager at a local paper-clip company had some employees who were making fun of him at work. One of them created a MySpace page mocking the boss, and he found out who did it. Because he'd been emotionally traumatized by the situation, he wanted to know if he could sue his employee for Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress (a tort).
So we had to research Kentucky cases in which this had come up and write a 9-page memo summarizing the important findings and answering the client's question. My answer was NO, that he did not have a cause of action, but some people went the other way. I should pause here to say that, although in one sense the idea that this assignment has "no right or wrong answer" reminds me of humanities graduate school a lot, the kind of analyses that you can perform in law school are not nearly as broad as they are in that field. Although it seems that almost any kind of well-researched response to a theme in Oliver Twist might yield a good grade on a seminar paper, law school is very different. Memo format is very rigid, much more than an article in a typical journal of literary criticism. After tracking down a bunch of relevant cases, you formulate a rule of law that seems to apply to your set of facts, and then compare the facts to each element of that rule. But you have to have a specific rule that can be stated concisely and that breaks down into easily-numbered elements before you begin analyzing your case. The end product is not necessarily the most thought-provoking inquiry into the philosophy of law, but it is (when done well) clear, direct, and comprehensible to the lay person and the legal specialist. Not the easiest task.
Our teacher helped us a lot with Memo #1, which was worth 20% of our grade. We talked about the cases during class time, shared the research -- i.e., although we went out and found the cases ourselves, she gave us a list of the ones to use after the fact, so no one could have been totally off track before sitting down to write. I guess they could have been off track, but it would have been impossible to be looking at the wrong cases.
The training wheels were off for Memo #2, and we did almost everything ourselves. And so even two days after turning it in, everyone is still nervous, because what if I missed a case that was really important and my analysis was totally wrong...? I feel pretty confident that I did well, but won't know for quite some time. Again, it's a different feeling than a seminar paper: if I wrote about a novel and overlooked the fact that the foremost scholar in the field had written an article that completely contradicted my thesis, the professor might mention that in the her comments, but probably wouldn't hold it against me. But if I missed the most important case that pertained to the fact pattern in my memo, it would not be a good thing.
And Memo #2 is worth 70% of the semester grade.
2. Reviewing for final exams (which are all worth 100% of the semester grade!) is tough, especially when the workload hasn't really slowed down for any of the classes. Although I did some reviewing during our fall break, I haven't done much since. And, as with school at all levels, you tend to get bored listening to the same lecturer for 12 consecutive weeks, and you kind of know their personalities well enough that you feel like you can get by with reading less... and so you do.
3. I've also been on a committee that interviews the prospective new faculty members when they come to visit, so that has sucked up a few free afternoons. It's been interesting though. Because I have some experience with academia, I think that I know how to read résumés and talk about scholarship with the candidates a little bit better than the other law students. Yesterday I interviewed a guy who got his B.A. in 2000, making him approximately one year older than me, except that he's wearing fancy brown wing-tips and graduated second in his class at Harvard, and I'm at modestly-ranked midwestern Law School and wearing Sambas and carrying a backpack. Sigh.
The interviews are one area in which I do feel an advantage over the rest of the law students, although unfortunately shop-talk about critical theory doesn't help my GPA. I like going to office hours and talking with the faculty outside of the classroom context -- and, as most teachers know, no one ever seems to come to office hours, so they always seem kind of cheery and pleasantly surprised by visitors.
4. Somehow, in all of my free time, I am supposed to have begun soliciting jobs already! The American Bar Assocation, in its boundless goodwill toward first-year law students, has instituted a national policy that the job hunt is not allowed to begin until... drum roll... November 1. They actually let us finish 5% of our legal education before we have to start the job search! It's a total crime. For many reasons, but especially this one: the job that you get is so closely tied to your grades that it's totally bogus for us to be burdened with hunting for jobs so soon. If you are in the top 10% of your class, you will probably never even consider a job that the 5oth percentile will gladly accept, and vice versa; the employers of the top 10% aren't returning phone calls from the middle of the pack.
And we won't receive grades until 4-6 weeks after final exams, which surely means that a large percentage of the job-hunting that one does before that time is time wasted, which, as M. Proust reminds us, cannot be regained.
