When I’m in class or attending a school sponsored seminar or the like, I take notes. I take them for me and invariably I often am a scrivener for those that couldn’t make it. My ability to pretty much type as fast as most people talk lends myself to such a position. It is not uncommon for me to broadcast my notes to my evening classmates who are often victims of a far less flexible schedule. What is curious to me the is their response: gratitude and a good bit of surprise that I would want to share and not keep a leg up on my classmates.
Is this normal for law school? For most competitive arenas? I certainly hope not. I once explained it to a fellow techie-now law student that “not sharing my notes and getting ahead is like being happy I won a desert marathon because everyone else didn’t have any shoes”. That’s no way to get ahead. For one thing, it’s the cowards way up. The law center at Univ. of Houston doesn’t seem to foster that contemptuous competition that I have heard of (albeit anecdotally) in some ‘name-brand’ law schools.
It’s interesting to consider that as far as Federal Procedure is concerned, the judiciary espouses the ’sunshine notion’ of law through discovery and depositions. I have never dealt with Criminal Procedure and Texas Procedure but I’m tempted to believe they are similar (at least prosecutorial disclosure in the criminal arena). This certainly allows for a civil and criminal case to be far more than a game of legal Battleship. I am sure, however, that I have far more glorified notions of the law than what it is in practice. I guess I’ll keep dreaming while I’m in law school and just hope when I wake up to reality and a law practice that the truth isn’t a nightmare.
