Archive for the ‘Chicago_1L’ Category

Hey all. So I literally just turned in out Spring Brief assignment. What a relief that was to get out of the way. I thought it wouldn’t be that hard so I left a bunch of it off to the last minute, kind of. The result was that I have been working on it for about 6 days straight. Have not read for any of my class during that time and have not really slept all that much during that time either (I think the most sleep I got was maybe 5 hours). So anyway, as you might predict, I am very tired, very cranky, and at the same time, very thankful to be done with that hellish assignment. Now, I get the relief of getting to outline and begin preparation for exams, which will start around the beginning of June, I think. No rest for the wicked, I suppose.

I made an interesting realization, or my father did for me, when working on this last assignment. He said, “Well son, just think, now you have the rest of your life to look forward to writing assignments just like this one.” I thought: kill me now. I might be convinced at this point that the last thing I want to do with my life is to become an appellate lawyer. Maybe trial would be better, or, even more interesting to me, transactional. Anyway, this post might be very scatter-brained, but I’m exhausted … so deal.

The other thing I don’t think I talked about yet was grades. They came out piecemeal this quarter since one of our professors worked a little faster than the other in reviewing exams. I didn’t want to say anything before both came out because I’m kinda superstitious and I didn’t want to jinx myself, but anyway. Grades came out and the funny thing is, although I hate law school much more than I did the first quarter (and don’t care nearly as much about grades), somehow, I did better than last quarter. Chalk it up to luck …. literally. I’m really not sure how I did as well as I did but hopefully (knock on wood, fingers-crossed) I can ride this wave with Lady Luck through spring exams. That would be just incredible and ridiculous all at the same time.

As for the break down, I did a bit better on the exam my section took second, than I did on the one we took first, which is exactly what happened last quarter. I’m not sure why this is. I might be that people tend to focus all their energy on the first exam (since, in both quarters, the first exam was generally seen as the harder of the two) and neglect the second while I spread out my studying a bit more. Or, it might be that I just do better on take-homes (since this second exam in both quarters has also been a take-home exam). Anyway, whatever it is, so far, my “method” (read: crazy spat of unbelievable fortune) seems to be working decently well.

Well, cheers for now — here’s to another 1.5 months or so of hating life. Then the real fun begins. Wish me luck, y’all!

First thing’s first: not that I care or anything (as noted, my negative spirit for this school) and not they really matter anyway, but USNWR came out the other day for anybody who missed it. UChicago is slowly making its way back up the ladder to the tippy-top of top law schools. Though, arguably, it never left its prestigious place in the legal community, at least now 0L’s who, for some reason, use the rankings as their one indicator of which school to go to or those outside the legal community who don’t matter anyway will give me weight to my boastings when I say: “Oh yeah, I go to UChicago law. It’s in the best 5 law schools in the country. Nbd.” So that’s nice, if just for that. People used to get really weirded out when I said it was in the top 6. That sounds like the most random number ever to those who aren’t aware of the generally accepted top 6 schools in the country. It sounded like I was trying to make up for something, but no more!

Anyway, enough of that. Life is starting to suck majorly again. The brief is due in a little over a week and I don’t think I’ve ever felt the pressure as much for a paper as much as I do right now. For one, a brief seems to be fundamentally different from the previous writing assignments (memos) we’ve had. Everyone I know is complaining that we were all ill-prepared for the assignment. So at least I’m not alone in the struggle. No one seems to know what to do or how to figure things out. So I’m thinking our submitted papers are going to be essentially cut-and-pastings from whatever example briefs we can find (just substituting in our issues and arguments into the respective sections). In short, it’s going to be a mess.

It doesn’t help that we have very little time to complete it either. We’ve been given three weeks. One of the weekends in this time period was Admitted Students Weekend and almost no one I know got any work done then (except those who are going out of town in subsequent weekends before the paper is due). Everyone is so busy during the week reading for classes (or at least I am) that the remaining time left over to work on the brief ultimately comes down to two weekends. In undergrad, I often wrote maybe 3 to 4 drafts of a paper, submitting drafts to multiple people for editions and what not. It looks like this time, I’ll be stuck with one … maybe two, at best. This means my work product is going to be pretty shoddy. There’s no way around it. My only hope is: 1) everybody else’s paper sucks (which won’t happen because there are some people in my section who literally do nothing but study and work at law school …. poor them), or 2) get lucky. I’m banking on #2.

Maybe this whole “limited time” thing is the writing instructors’ way of giving a taste of real-world practice though. In any case, once again, stress abounds.

ASW came and went. That’s too bad, because it was an f-ing blast. I think I succeeded in meeting many new people and probably putting on a false front of fun for enough time for some people to generally like me. So, mission accomplished. For those who were not present, here were some of the highlights.

Thursday was pretty low-key. I think all the admits had like a brief two-hour reception. But even that was graciously catered and, as always at law school functions, alcohol was present: a decent champagne, not sure what it was exactly though. That was followed by bar review at a downtown chain restaurant/bar. Though I was disappointed with the strangely generic choice of venue, it was nonetheless a good time and I think the admits were relatively surprised by the lack of nerdy-ness within the classes.

Friday was pretty laid back for students, not so much for the admits, I think. Classes for students (or at least for 1Ls) were generally cancelled, except for the electives, which I suppose the faculty wanted to show off to admits for some reason. My only issue with allowing admits into classes is, if you’re going to allow for it, please do so limitedly. What I mean is, too often these admitted students come into classes like midway through the quarter and the bold/foolhardy end up asking questions of making in-class comments when they really don’t know what’s going on. This results in wasted class time (for those of us who are paying insane amounts for the professor’s time) and really an atypical showing of what law school is really all about (since these professors wouldn’t dare facing the wrath of the admissions office if they ridiculed the admits by their comments as the professors so often do to us, haha).

After showing off classes and participating in a (free) lunch with the admits, the next highlight was definitely the trivia contest. Over the last several weeks, student teams have competed for the right to face the faculty all-star trivia team. When it was all over, the faculty was ridiculed in a rout thanks largely to the performance of one 1L (who will go unnamed) but who was just an absolute trivia genius (I think he might have doubled the faculty’s total score). This was followed by a (free … which was awesome and rare) wine mess that many faculty members surprisingly attended (just another one of UChi’s admissions office’s effort to show that fun does not, in fact, die in Hyde Park … which may or may not be true). Wine mess bled over into going to dinner at some famous Chicago deep-dish restaurant and then more drinks/some food at the infamous Cubby Bear Bar, directly across the street from Wrigley Field.

Saturday, I was too hungover to do really anything at all. Congratulations to the admits (including the one I hosted) to getting up at some god-awful hour to go do something at the law school, which I’m sure was fun. I felt bad for not getting to say goodbye to my little admit since he left directly from the law school after going there Saturday morning, but I’m sure we had a great time together anyway and hope to see him back here next fall. Anyway, successful weekend, now behind in work, but don’t care, and fun is now gone for good.

So I think, somewhere in the annals of this blog site, I noted some things that I thought were unique to the University of Chicago. But, guess what? I’m gonna do it again. And probably focus on a few different things than I did before since I now have a largely different perspective on the school …. which might be a good or bad thing.

First, is the faculty. I think last time I mentioned something about their accessibility and such, which is generally true. But another interesting aspect of the faculty is how young they are. It’s actually kind of ridiculous. I think if you were to find the average age of law professors at most schools, it might be upwards of say 55 or 60. It is true that we’ve got our fair share of faculty who are more dead than alive, but it seems we’ve also got a last plurality of quite literally brilliant minds just starting out in their careers, not least of which are the Legal Writing instructors (Bigelows) who I find to be particularly engaging (hopefully they’re reading … Hey you! Give me a better grade next time! I’m posting awesome things about you!). I think there’s a link on our school’s website up right now displaying some of the young talent at UChicago. I’ve had class with a few (maybe more than that) of these folks and it’s incredible the grasp they’ve been able to attain on the law in such a short time … and their credentials are ridiculous … something I will never attain. That much is for sure. Anyway, it seems the last administration of our law school (the dean and such) put a real emphasis on recruiting young talent to help supplement the already illustrious older generation of law professors, which is an interesting a fairly unique dynamic to this school, I think.

One sort of point which is not necessarily negative about the faculty here, but something that is not in line with my tastes/preferences as a student: the faculty is not diverse ….. at all. I think this was one of the complaints of the LSA I heard at some point earlier this year. The faculty is largely composed of white males, which is somewhat disappointing from my point of view, but you might get that in most other schools as well. I’m not sure.

Another unique aspect of UChicago, which I also might have mentioned in my last post, just in a different sense, is: the size. This does add a different (and I think beneficial) social appeal: Chicago is certainly not the place where fun comes to die, at least not for me and the group that I’ve chosen to socialize with. But in addition to that, it helps (maybe, keeping fingers crossed) in finding jobs in economically troubling times. Granted, this might just be the Career Services office trying to allay all 1L fears of failure, but according to those that have heard direct from them, UChicago does better in constrained legal markets simply because there’s less of us. Firms might look to diversify their incoming classes and with a limited selection coming from UChicago as it is, they are less inclined to scale back on the already small numbers that come from our school … and perhaps even less inclined to eliminate incoming UChicago students all together. The result: less people coming back empty-handed.

Anyway, that’s the job perspective I’d like to think about going into OCI, even if it is just a complete falsehood. But as for now, it’s time for Admitted Students Weekend. I’ve been trying to get all my work for Monday done (except the brief, which I am choosing to neglect) so I can just not worry about work and focus on having a good time with the lil baby Admits running around. So yeah, back to work so I can enjoy this weekend. Should be a good time.