Going To Law School

Ok, I fucking hate the way civil procedure is taught at my school and I am sick of it. The "development" of current rules/case-law (which we learn by studying law that is often no longer good) is hardly interesting or useful enough to spend as much time as we do, and to make things worse we read the cases OUT OF FUCKING ORDER (both chronological and as presented in the book). It's a boring enough subject to begin with. Teach us the rules and concepts we need and move on. It is NOT USEFUL to me to know that supplemental jurisdiction developed out of things called "ancillary" and "pendent" jurisdiction that the courts were all confused about anyway, let alone to spend a week and a half on it before learning the current law.

pennoyer v. neff

that one's personal jurisdiction though

I actually finished both Personal and Subject Matter Jurisdiction a while ago and we're on choice-of-law now, which is the area that's really putting me over the line. We're reading cases that are referencing cases we haven't read, and then reading the referenced cases for the following class. Fucking retarded.

what textbook do you use?

Silberman Stein. It's bad to begin with but our professor makes it worse by skipping around.

It is NOT USEFUL to me to know that supplemental jurisdiction developed out of things called "ancillary" and "pendent" jurisdiction that the courts were all confused about anyway, let alone to spend a week and a half on it before learning the current law.

actually, it is.

tho i think you might be able to bifurcate the world of law school students fairly well into those who do and do not like civ pro. i was the former, tho it helped that i liked the professor, which was probably the key factor in any class.

Yeah, I'm more of the creative/abstract/philosophical-thinking type I guess, so I like torts and crim and hate civ pro. I can handle rules and systems, but I do so grudgingly.

yeah i was gonna say people like english, etc. majors seem to hate civ pro but technical people love it. same with other rules-based or administrative areas like immigration, which i really like.

Sometimes I get this image of me during finals week half-naked, unshaven and caveman-like, scrawling a giant flow-chart of civil procedure over the four walls of my apartment.

I have my first exam Monday for that weird class that no other law school has. I'm already like that; I just locked myself out of my apartment, so now I'm stuck at Cafe Laptop until my landlord gets home (if he ever does).

Civ Pro's definitely my favorite class so far; the professor we have is great for it, so that's probably the reason. If the professor was disorganized or something it'd probably be hell.

It isn't that I don't like rules, I just like rules where I can see the logic behind them. I feel like for every doctrine or rule of civil procedure that seems to have a certain purpose or justification, you can find another doctrine or rule that runs contrary to that purpose or justification in another area of procedure. I also find that you can often argue both sides of an issue equally well even from within the same basic political or jurisprudential viewpoint. Ultimately the more I learn to combine subject matter jurisdiction, personal jurisdiction, venue, choice-of-law, etc., the less sense there seems to be to any of it and the more unnecessarily complicated it seems to be. I suppose it's the framers' fault for creating this bizarre federation-of-sovereign-states system with two parallel court systems.

yeah i would really like to have one country, not this state shit. but then we wouldn't be spending all this time and money to be proud of ourselves, i guess.

AAAAAARRRgHhhhh Erie Doctrine I rue thee!

that was my second or third favorite part of civ pro! first is prob res judicata and stuff

Actually my favorite part is all the lawyering strategy stuff involved in all of it. Like plaintiffs filing a tort action in defendants' home state just so defendant won't be able to remove it to federal court, or plaintiffs filing in federal court in the state with the longer statute of limitations and then transferring back to their home state right away on *convenience* grounds.

We're nowhere near any of that stuff. The first half of our class was on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure ... we only started jurisdiction last week. Of course it doesn't help that Cardozo has about 12 days off in October for these ridiculous hardcore Jewish holidays.

Yeah, weirdly we don't study most of the rules of civil procedure until later. We do the relevant ones to jurisdiction in passing.

ugh, just took my first exam. I'm sitting here done and everyone's still writing these huge tomes. I hope I did OK. : [ I had all my material ready and knew the answers to all the questions, but I have no idea what these people could be writing! It's like there's a million words on their screen. I only wrote about 2,500 words ... it looks like these guys are writing 10,000. and this isn't even like a real class.

Yeah, I just handed in my first graded writing assignment. 7 page memo. Unlike other schools, we're actually graded for Legal Writing. Thanks, BLS.

We're graded for Legal Writing, too. :[ It's only a 1 credit class stretched over two semesters, so eh. It's still annoying as hell. What's crazy, though, is that I heard NYU and Columbia are going to abolish grades soon. A nice way to shit all over the lesser NYC schools.

i think everyone grades for legal writing?

People have told me it's often (usually?) pass/fail.

o maybe that is when they combine it with legal research and make it like "lawyering skills" like we should have done because we took a separate graded legal research class and it made some people's grades like A A A A C

Ours combines it all ... it's legal writing/lawyering skills. RIght now they have us researching cases ... in a library! my hands touched paper. :{

ew!

Do you guys have the tentacles of Thomson/West and the black hand of Lexis Nexis all up in your school? We get so heavily marketed to it's absurd (also wrt BarBri/Kaplan/Pieper)

um yeah today i had free chipotle on lexis's dime for watching what ended up being like a 10 min presentation about some feature i will never use. westlaw is 10x better and i always use it at work instead of lexis but i accumulate lexis points to use on amazon. westlaw points can't buy anything but i did use them to get a coffee grinder.

can't buy anything good, i mean

Westlaw definitely seems better. It's funny how even the westlaw reps at our school are more polished and professional and our lexis guy is this scrappy, inappropriate and slightly irritating though ultimately harmless dude.

no our westlaw rep is definitely the creepy one it's just that his product sucks less so he doesn't have to do that much, i guess. but they both act sincerely excited about it. i once did ctrl-click "view image" on his picture on the westlaw front page, and it makes the image hueg and you can see that his shirt has stains on it and he has food in his teeth!

westlaw is better for primary law, fwiw. both are run by huge ass companies but yeah thomson west has its act together much more than lexis

every time i use either one i'm like ugh these are both so 1998, you'd think at least one of them could come up with a better design. i'm not even talking about how it looks, just the whole system is awful and convoluted and inconvenient.

lexis just got a lot clunkier, too. sometimes you can ask your rep for shortcuts to get to databases. i try to always use "search for a database" on West or "find a source" on lexis to get to where i'm going--after awhile you start to ignore all the bells and whistles and bullshit

Fuck an erie doctrine

BarBri offers some kind of deal where you put down a $100 deposit on a review course now and get access to all their first year review materials. They have a bunch of online lectures and some live events in NYC as well. Does anyone have any opinions on whether this is worthwhile? I was considering doing it just for the review materials, which might be worth it even if I don't wind up taking their course.

Hey, any of you guys have a stray Westlaw account I could use? I have a big writing project and they're making us use library shit. ughrhgh

burt you sweet little sock most law students have free westlaw and lexis accounts

I know, but our school doesn't give us access until the second semester. hurghhgh

i don't even know how to use books to look things up really

God knows why they're putting us through this.

could end up lawyering in amish country

Our library and writing center is run by cranky old people; for some reason they always think their musty old way is somehow "superior" to our gadgets and gizmos, and so they think this will impart some kind-of wisdom on us. Nope.

those cranky old people are called librarians, burtie

actually--learning how to use books to research can be very helpful compared to just relying on lexis/westlaw. i'm pleasantly surprised your school does that burt. where did you say you were going again?

Carbozo. Shepardize. SHEPARDIZE

we did learn how to use the indexes and stuff, and i know how to find cases and statutes in books (duh) but they let us use westlaw right away so no one retained anything

xp i would be lost trying to shepardize from a book

learn how to shepardize from a book!

That's what we're doing.

why though?