So fantastic news. We didn’t actually get our Legal Methods exams back, but the professor sent out a mass email detailing the good news and the bad. The good news – and it certainly is good – is that for the first time in years, no one failed the exam! Yes that’s right. We are rock stars. The bad news? None of us mentioned any facts. And apparently facts are important when you’re a lawyer? (According to the professor, “Ours is a fact-dependant profession and this I either failed to convey or you declined to learn.” I think from now on any time a professor calls on me, I’ll respond with, “I declined to learn that.”) Ah well. Failing Legal Methods would be an inconvenient humiliation I just did not need right now. So I’m happy.

Know what else makes me happy? Writing class! The first five minutes of class was productive: we were informed that our memo outlines are now due a week later (which gives me back my weekend) and the actual memos are due four days later. The rest of class we spent eating Halloween candy and building things with Play Doh from our writing instructor. It was a pretty good class.

Oh, the first memo! I got it back. She had individual conferences with all of us to discuss what we did right and what we could improve. Apparently I got confused about the structure and I need to re-arrange the whole thing, but she said my analysis was “great.” Re-writes aren’t required, but I’ll probably do them. I really like our writing instructor (see above re: candy and Play Doh) so I don’t want her to think I’m not taking her class seriously (even though see above: candy and Play Doh).

The other interesting thing going on for 1Ls is choosing our spring elective. We have three required classes next semester (property, constitutional law, and criminal law) and we get to choose our fourth out of seven options. It’s some kind of lottery system where we rank all seven options in order of preference and the Registrar endeavors to assign as many of us to our top choices as possible. I have it narrowed down to two top choices. One is a class that sounds really fun. It meets three times a week for an hour each session and you spend the first two classes learning about some aspect of lawyering and then the third class you actually apply what you learned by assuming the role of an attorney in a given situation (like a custody battle, for example). The other class is all about statutory interpretation. The reason I’m considering it is that it feels like it might be more useful in the long run and more impressive to a judge (I want a clerkship after graduation). The other thing to consider is that for the first class, we’re graded on a paper and a final exam. For the second class, we have two papers and a final exam. (Now that I think about it, that should end the debate right there.)

So I’m not sure what to do. Do I take the fun-sounding class with the less harsh grading? That class is guaranteed to be huge and maybe I should think about taking the statutory interpretation class which will be much smaller. The powers that be keep telling us we should be cultivating relationships with faculty for letters of recommendation down the road and that would be easier to do in a 20-person class rather than a 100-person class. Then again, next semester I’ll be taking four classes instead of three and I already feel like I couldn’t handle any more coursework so maybe I should try to take it easy with the elective. Decisions, decisions.

Then again. Maybe I should just take intellectual property.

Any 2Ls or 3Ls have advice?

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