Being in law school and taking breaks from it is like suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder. When you’re going through the stress stimuli, the world’s quite often a blur and you’re bursting with responses and reactions and you’re so overwhelmed that you don’t say much. When it’s over because you’re so overwhelmed you often don’t know where to begin. That’s why I’ve been silent for the past few weeks. Savouring my time away from law school, discovering that I still had friends that were willing to speak with me after many moons of neglect and just the ability to not spend much time in front of my laptop has kept me from blogging. Now that the summer semester is upon us however, it’s back to the old ways.
This summer features Property Law with a visiting professor from Chapman School of Law, Donald Kochan , who not only has a website going, but some degree of progressive pedagogical thought, enough to be willing to have a mid semester practice exam, reviews thereafter and even posting old exams online. I hear the rumblings in the cobwebbed halls of legal academia already.
Property Law is my crash course into the world of economics. Having been a tech-geek for far too long, I’m glad I decided to pursue law because I would have never been exposed to much of the thinking, literary linkage or historical lessons that the study of law affords me. I mean where else can you have pithy wisdom from ancient Roman tomes such as Juntinan legal thought right next to the equally potent maxim of “Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers”.
To all the prospective law students out there, the study of law is not what you thought it was going to be. Not that it’s bad in any sense, it’s just that you’re not learning what you see on TV. You don’t really learn to cross-examine a hostile witness in anything but perhaps trial advocacy or by being part of the mock trial team. Two things that most law students don’t ever delve into. You don’t go to law school to learn the state of the law or what the law is on the books currently (well not really). You’re in law school to learn why the law is the way it is and perhaps if you’re lucky, how to apply it.
Law professors have this nasty habit of trundling to death the tired phrase : “you’re in law school to learn how to think like a lawyer”. If you want to know how to do that, just read this. (hat tip to Gilman for that one). That’s right, the study of law is really just playing one very long game of “What if?”.
I think I’ve just become a jaded second year law student.
