Fall break

We've reached the halfway point of first semester, which means fall break. Baseball fans headed home to Cleveland and Boston, while football fans traveled to Lexington, Ky., Nashville and even San Diego. Plenty of people have stuck around Williamsburg, including me, and have enjoyed the time off to do laundry, read books — real ones, not law ones — and work out at the gym.

To this point, I've written very little about how my classes work. Law school functions quite differently from college, so it's worth an explanation.

The entire first year of courses is mandatory. Our schedule looks like this:

1st semester:

• Criminal Law
  
• Torts
  
• Civil Procedure
  
• Legal Skills

2nd semester:

• Constitutional Law
• Contracts
• Property
• Legal Skills

Many law schools put Contracts and Property before Torts, and I guess W&M used to make Con Law a year-long course because it tends to be the most difficult. Of course, that's the one I'm looking forward to the most.

Legal Skills is a two-year, pass-fail course that focuses on interviewing, legal writing, legal research and ethics. W&M's program (co-created by Fred Lederer, who happens to be my prof) has won awards for teaching these skills in such a useful way. While it's only a pass-fail course, people take it seriously and spend a lot of time on it. The writing, in particular, is extremely difficult at first. We're all getting used to it. Legal writing requires a great deal more discipline than newspaper writing or even academic writing, I think, because each word must be carefully chosen. The TAs who grade our memos are tough on us, which should help a great deal (even if it's frustrating now). 

In the three classes that are graded, final exams count for 100%. That's right — no chapter tests, no midterms, no class participation points. One test, signed with an anonymous number. Most exams are open-book, open-note, and last either four or eight hours. (Yes, eight hours of Criminal Law. Get excited.)

Open-book tests might sound great at first, but when you consider that our casebooks are anywhere from 600 to 1,200 pages long, the open-book part doesn't seem so helpful. If you don't already know what to look for, why it's relevant and how to explain it, you're screwed. The reading that we do all semester long is mostly cases. While statutes and the Constitution comprise a great deal of American law, judicial decisions can be enormously influential — and also difficult to analyze. The idea behind teaching cases in law school, as best I can figure, is that if you can understand judicial decisions, you can probably read a statute.

On a test, professors provide hypothetical fact patterns. (Joe stabs Billy. What crime should he be charged with, or What tort has Joe committed?) Though I haven't seen any exams yet, apparently the fact patterns can be long and quite detailed.

The way most law students cope with the final exams, besides alcohol (which apparently comes after the test) is to make enormous outlines. They range anywhere from 10 to 60 pages. The outlines, if they're done right, create a sort of map that shows how which cases are relevant for particular situations. Basically, the profs want to know how well we we know the law, and how well we can apply it. Sounds simple, but from what I hear about exams, "simple" doesn't mean "easy."

So, while I've been enjoying fall break, I also took the opportunity to spend all day Saturday in the library, working on my first outline — Civil Procedure. In eight hours of work, I created seven pages of an outline. One of my 3L roommates shared his outlines with me from his 1L year — he has at least 30 pages in each of the three classes. So you can see, I have quite a bit of work to do. Exams are less than two months away. Get excited.