Going To Law School

My friend is in law school and has fallen behind in her outlining so she has been pulling all-nighters for the past few days to prepare for exams, poor thing.

Do people actually enjoy law school? I hear that the first year is the hardest and it gets better after that. More and more medical schools are becoming pass/fail in their first year (including mine) so I'm wondering what being graded and ranked could do to a student in law school.

This is not to say that medical schools don't grade and rank, but there definitely have been efforts to move away from doing that during the first-year at least.

i dunno, i think it's gotten "better" in that it's less stressful because i don't care about the stuff that 1L's care about. but it's also more boring because you've learned how to learn things already. i worked a lot more this semester and i like my job so much better than school. i'm not motivated for exams at all.

Do people actually enjoy law school?

LOL. MAYBE you enjoy an academic environment. but there is nothing fun about law school. especially when you graduate and realize the case law method has not taught you one thing about actually being a proficient (or self-sufficient) lawyer.

cutty otm! i am currently doing a grad dip in applied finance because the case law method taught me nothing about the commercial context of the matters i work on, and commercial realities probably carry more weight in the advice we offer clients than accurate and/or insightful legal research. still enjoying it though. except for the long hours thing.

Following the advice of the professor who wrote the exams: bad. Following the advice of a bunch of random internet people who never took this professor: good.

He wants us to apply the basic principles of common law and the theoretical underpinnings of the doctrines we studied ... that shit was definitely not evident in the holdings of any case we read.

sure it is. the book is written that way.

i'm sure your professor did NOT recomment re-reading the cases. that is batshit insane.

Nah, he said do it "the hard way". I talked to my professors about what I planned to do, and they gave it a hearty thumbs up ... and they were all the #1 or #2 students in their classes. "Rebriefing all your cases? That's a great idea!" said the former SCOTUS clerk, honors fellow, and #1 student at NYU law.

a fair few of my lecturers used to deliver a speech about how if you don't read every single case on the case list you'll never do well (although i don't recall anyone saying 'read all these 150 cases 2 or 3 times'). after a while it became a question of time for me though. there simply was not sufficient time to devote to reading and re-reading entire cases. everyone has a different approach though. realistically you don't have to follow the advice of the professor or the random internet people or anyone else... you might have to be a little more flexible than blindly following what every lecturer says to you to find an approach that really suits you though.

If it doesn't work, fair enough. but I'm really starting to understand this shit by doing this.

So gem, where did you graduate ... 1, 2, or 3 in your class?

eagerly awaiting the results of this experiment.

haha you're classic burt! you'll fit right in at law school, it's full of people like you

What experiment? I wouldn't know how to craft duty rules on my own if I didn't read through all the friggin cases again. If I just looked at my notes I'd still be as clueless as I was before.

But yeah, thanks for the psych out guys. You my classmates or something?

oh burt. dry your eyes princess! i'm sure you'll pull through your torts exam just fine.

I had the time to read all the cases, though ... twice! I'm about to finish that up, and then work on distilling my notes, and then devote myself to practice exams.

It's closed book, so we have to use principles and theory in answering the questions. Those concepts are contained in basically every paragraph but the holding, which just says "yes this good."

no. the holding in a case does not say that.

I mean, if I wasn't doing this shit, what would I be doing with my time? The professor only has 2 old exams on file.

making the most concise and helpful outline possible and reading it over and over again.

making mindmaps, flowcharts, methods of attacking any question thrown at you.

these are all memorization/reasoning/reading comprehension exams. you aren't going to memorize entire court decisions, so you should be memorizing the holdings and why they were decided. succinctly.

cutty you are talking to a sock

Eh, I already have someone's outline for this professor... the scholarship program I'm in gave us a bunch, and it's pretty good. As far as mindcharts, I'm going to do that later today.

It's not about -why- they were decided, it's about -how-. The professor said it's useless to mention any specific cases

cutty otm again. do you only have one exam? and does your library not have other old exams that you can use? i get that you worship your professor and all but you'll probably get some mileage out of other professors' exam problems as well. there's only so many ways you can draft a law exam.

I'm not sure it would be too useful ... half of our syllabus was based on some weird little philosophy supplement this guy prepared.

burt there are other sources for practice problems, such as E+E

You guys are going to do fine. Don't get stressed, don't study up until the minute before the exam. Your comments and your back and forth indicate to me that you are well on the way to being able to write a good exam answer.

The best thing you can do in exams is take your time, outline simply and thoughtfully, and write a concise and organized answer. Figure out the arguable points, and take as many facts on either side of that argument from the fact patterns as you can for each argument.

Budget your time well. A good number of my professors used to assign point totals to the individual questions, and I would divide my time according to the percentage of worth for each question. That approach kept me from NAILING the first question but bombing the second one because of poor time management.

And don’t get cute. Keep it right in the confines of the question. Answer what the question asks.

I cannot say that I envy the pre-holiday exam rush, but its an exciting time. Try to have some fun with it. I mean that seriously. And when you’re done, just leave. DON’T do the post-mortem discussion outside the exam hall. Go have a beer, and then start studying for your next exam.

torts

Sad to think only a few months ago I had no idea what that word meant.

I'm almost there, maaaan. first establish duty ... then breach, by analyzing reasonable care, circumstances, etc., in light of duty to defendant, then causation a) cause in action, sometimes b) proximate cause, and then damages.

I smell like shit and I haven't used my vocal cords to speak to another human being in about 3 days

all my class mates have taken this torts exam so easy. it's like, "really guys, you've mastered this so easily?" am I stupid here?

I feel simultaneously completely ready and completely unready for Civ Pro. I did half a practice exam today on subject matter jurisdiction and personal jurisdiction. On one hand I felt very clear with my analysis. On the other hand I made errors including:

- Saying that the defendant could make a "special appearance" to challenge personal jurisdiction even though the case was in federal court and I should have cited rule 12
- doing the whole diversity jurisdiction analysis (correctly) while entirely forgetting to mention the statute

There's so much more shit to get WRONG in Civ Pro. Torts is practically creative writing once you know how it works.

When's your Civ Pro exam? Yeah, torts isn't bad ... hey, I have a question: what kind-of third party liability do defendants usually have? Is it just up to the special relationship they have with those who commit the tortious act? and in absence of special relationship, no liability for injuries to third parties?

Civ Pro is Wednesday. But it's open book. But it's really dangerous to rely too heavily on it being open book (because in a 60 page outline, it's easy to forget to look).

Hmm -- can you be more specific about what you mean by liability to "third parties"?

Third parties ... you know, like Tarasoff or Nicollet Hotel and all that stuff.

Say the hotel staff knows the guests are throwing chairs out the window and some dude gets hurt by it ... is the hotel staff liable for the injuries to that third party based on the actions of the guest, or is it simple nonfeasance? How is duty argued here? Is there a general rule or is it always up to arguing special relationships?

Well, I guess there can never be a general of duty for nonfeasance, but I don't know. I guess I'll look it up.

Did you guys suffer through this in your class?

Oh, I guess the court in that case used the duty test to impose a new duty

and absent particular circumstances specific to the case to impose a duty, and no special relationship, no duty, and thus no case. Sorry, I'm still working this duty shit out ... it seems like it's the absolute most important part of torts.

Well, if you're talking about special duties to CONTROL the actions of a person, the people that you're calling "third parties" are the only ones that are going to be claiming any liability in the first place. I think you're confusing a duty TO someone else with a duty to control someone else. The whole point of the duty to control cases is that a third party was injured.

Tarasoff is the only case you've named so far that we did. That one is kind of a mindfuck really. My professor totally hates the holding. But in that one the court does say there's a special relationship created because it's a therapist and a patient. The court says that the therapist was negligent in failing to warn the intended victim.

I didn't confuse that. I'm saying, how does one argue duty if presented with a new fact pattern absent a clearly defined special relationship? I read the holding of the case and it just used circumstances of the facts in the case ... foreseeability, knowledge, position to do something, etc. etc.

If you're specifically talking about a failure to control/failure to act case, then yes, you usually need a special relationship between the defendant and the person whose conduct they were allegedly supposed to contorl. If not, you don't have to go creating new duties.

For the record, the court says that "plaintiffs' pleadings... establish as between Poddar and defendant therapists the special relation that arises between a patient and his doctor or psychotherapist. Such a relationship may support affirmative duties for the benefit of third persons. Thus, for example, a hospital must exercise reasonable care to control the behavior of a patient which may endanger other persons..."

Tarasoff is creating a new duty, though ... before that case, that duty did not exist. Before Tarasoff that special relationship did not exist

hence why it's so controversial among torts professors. I guess it's totally pointless to worry about it