All Good Things Must Come to an End

Sorry for a period of relative (posting) inactivity. Luckily, the last week or so was spent in a state of relative intellectual inactivity (for both Cat & me, as both our schools had vacation until classes resumed yesterday).

Quick update: I spent "vacation" in Massachusetts. My last final (con law - which we could take anywhere in the world, thanks to the magic of the internet) was, somewhat ironically, on the morning of January 20th. After relatively blowing off that exam (reason explained more below) and watching the inaugural events while baking cookies, I had a few unencumbered days in Boston, give or take a few meetings and some summer job search nonsense. Got to see some people I love: my long-lost college roommate whose boyfriend just transferred to HLS; my former classmate who worked with me in DC last year and moved to Boston in August; Cat(!!) and her boyfriend; another friend who is doing his PhD at MIT [and who I know reads this - See, you're famous now!]. After a few more days of seeing friends and some volunteering, I had to come back Sunday evening, totally unprepared for the onslaught of beginning-of-semester craziness.

Buying books. Choosing classes. Starting clinic. Figuring out how to get paid for my TAing job. Figuring out how to get my student loan money refunded so I can pay rent. Lots of fun stuff.

In short: my new classes (two small 20ish person courses - one of which has VERY little to do with law, one large "black letter" class, and clinic) are awesome so far. Since I've only been to each one once, not too much to say yet...but I think it'll make a huge difference that we get to pick all our classes this semester - so I can't blame anyone but myself if I don't like the material/don't do the reading.

On the flip side, this semester will require some marginal amount of work beyond what was expected of us last semester (which was all "pass/fail"), since we now get graded with either "honors" or "pass." So I should redouble my efforts to stay caught up with reading, and to go to class regularly. I'll keep you updated as to how long that lasts...I have a feeling clinic might become a big time commitment that pushes some other things out, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing as my clinic involves doing stuff that I'm truly interested in.

A bunch of people have asked about how finals wrapped up. In sum: they're done, and not getting a grade makes it super-easy not to ever think about them again. In more detail:

Torts: First law school exam ever. More details here.

Contracts: Since contracts & procedure were both self-scheduled (we could take them any time we wanted between January 7th and January 21st), some people took this pretty early on to get it over with...our professor suggested that she'd do no more than take a cursory glance at our exams, so there wasn't much worry about knocking it out of the park. After reading over a couple of other people's/Lexis's outlines, I took this at 1am-3am one day. The fact pattern was truly interesting...I'd be interested to see the model answer, as I think there were a number of ways to go with it.

Procedure: It would not be an overstatement to call this the relative bane of my existence as far as exams went. We had to do a take-home essay before starting the timed portion, and I had kind of blissfully forgotten about that during the holidays. I ended up writing something relatively cogent (maybe?) examining the Guantanamo habeas proceedings from a feminist perspective. The actual timed portion of the exam (3.5 hours) had a rather extensive issue spotting question, and a relatively painless (read: we'd harped on the issue for DAYS in class) policy question. In the end, I kind of psyched myself out for this exam (the only one for which a professor is giving personalized feedback to everyone in the class, without students asking specifically)...but hopefully the extra two days of "studying" resulted in me not embarassing myself (meaning, after I actually read an outline, I knew that a state's attachment rule had nothing to do with the stapling/binding of filings).

Con Law: By the time the 20th rolled around, I was SUPER-glad that my professor had told us that he wasn't going to read our exams. He told us we didn't need to write anything, in fact. It was "for [us], not [him]," and if we wanted feedback, he'd give us comments...but there was no need to prove we knew con law on an exam, as he knew from our small group seminar that we all knew con law. Sweet. As a result, a few people just wrote "Thanks for a great semester!" or something similar...and the rest of us sort of halfway wrote something relating to the questions.

So yeah. That's the end of first semester 1L. Now we're in the big leagues, taking all our classes with 2Ls and 3Ls and getting more involved in activities and clinics. If the last two days are any indication, that's going to mean 10-12 hour days at school...no easy welcome to spring semester, I guess.

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