Salzberg to Softballs

This week last year, I was entertaining newcomers to Abu Dhabi and looking forward to a trip to a Salzberg, Austria. This week, I have a midterm exam and a softball game with my classmates. A lot can change in a year.

Speaking of exams (my classmates will hardly speak of anything else), I reported in my last blog about going to classes on how to study for the exams in my regular classes. But my going to classes for other classes doesn’t end there. This week, I had class to prepare my computer for the exams. I learned how to download, activate and tryout the special test-taking software. This is the same testing software I will use to take the bar exam. And just so I won’t be tempted to surf the Internet during my midterm, this software temporarily disables my computer, leaving only a word processing function. The software also acts as a monitor so when the proctor says, “Stop typing now,” the program will tell them if you did.

You can also ask the test software to alert you when time is running out. This is very useful as none of my classmates actually wear watches. If they want to know the time, they check their cellphones, which of course, will not be allowed in the room during the test.

Of course, you don’t have to use your laptop for testing. You can write everything out in a test book. As I type about three times as fast as I write in longhand, that’s not a good choice for me. Some of my classmates can’t even write in cursive so you know they aren’t going to try to speed print their exams.

The school’s official line is you don’t need a laptop to go to law school. This is like telling someone moving to the U.S. they don’t need a telephone. Yes, you could conceivably get by without one, but it’s awfully handy to have one to communicate with the rest of the world.

After all, you never know what can come up, just as you never know where life will take you. And today, life is taking me to the softball field. Who knew?

What’s on the Test

The law school held the first of what will be many different seminars on how to take tests. Yes, besides my usual legal classes, I now have to go to classes to learn how to take tests in those classes.

My grades will be based only on one test in each class given at the end of the semester. So it's sort of in your best interests to figure out what's going to be on it. One of the professors here came up with the following non-legal example to demonstrate how we’ll be tested:

A 4-year-old has to try to figure out how to stay out of trouble with her mom based on the following incidents:

Incident #1: The kid takes a cookie before dinner. She gets in trouble.

Incident #2: The kid asks for a cookie after dinner. Mom quickly gives her one, praising the kid for eating all her vegetables.

Incident #3: The kid takes her teddy bear and slams it on the floor. Mom doesn’t get mad.

Incident #4: The kid takes her ball and bounces it in the living room, nearly hitting the plasma TV and Mom’s wine glass. “Get that ball out of here!” Mom shouts.

Using the examples above, you have to make up some rules. The professor formulated these:

Rule #1: The kid can only have a cookie if she eats her veggies at dinner.

Rule #2: The kid can play with her toys any way she likes as long as it doesn’t threaten any of Mom’s stuff.

Here’s your test question:

The kid decides to color on the wall in her room. She doesn’t like her artwork, so she breaks the crayons and throws them in the trash. She’s so unhappy with her wall drawings, she goes into the kitchen and gets out the drain cleaner, which she thinks is a cleanser. Before the kid can burn herself, Mom finds her and puts the drain cleaner away. Is the kid in trouble?

You could just write, “Yes, and how!” But then you’d make a big fat zero on your test, as most professors give NO POINTS for coming up with the “right answer.”

Instead, you score points by going through each of the facts and analyzing them based on the rules. Let’s start with the broken crayons. While they aren’t a toy exactly, crayons are her personal playthings, so they are more like toys than Mom’s stuff. Using Rule #2, breaking them shouldn’t land her in trouble. But how about the walls of her room? Is that the kid’s property? Or will Mom think the walls are part of the house and that belongs to her? To score maximum points, you’d better argue both sides.

Now, how about that drain cleaner? You could write that the rules don’t really address dangerous solvents so the kid wouldn’t be in trouble with Mom. But you’d get very minimal points if you stopped there. The professor, in analyzing this fact, decided to look at the PURPOSE of Rule #1. The purpose is protecting the kid’s health by ensuring she’s eating well. Since the underlying value is protecting the kid’s health, you can now argue it would be against Rule #1 to drag out the drain cleaner as it is a serious danger to the kid's health. Pretty tricky, huh?

No, I won’t really be tested on 4-year-olds coloring the walls. This is a good thing as in that case, it would be difficult to get me off the topic of parental supervision and child-proof safety latches!

Instead, we’ll get legal problems with a lot more facts and complications. The incidents are the actual case studies I’ve been briefing every day. Before the exams, I will need to do a course outline (which I’ll ALSO go to classes on how to do) for each class. To make my outline, I’ll compare and contrast the cases and hypothetical situations my professors talk about in class. And I’ll formulate my own rules with all the conditions and exceptions. That’s what I’ll be studying before exams.

I’ll need to know all those rules and examples because I’ll use them for the framework to anaIyze whatever unique hypothetical legal situation my professor comes up with as my exam question. I'll have to argue the facts in as many ways as I can and draw a conclusion. But once, again, the answer doesn't count. This is how they teach you to “think like a lawyer.”

Not a Quick Study

For each of my two hour class sessions, my only homework is about 20 pages of assigned reading. So why do I have to study all the time?

I do start by reading the 20 pages. It takes a little while because I need to stop and look up all the words I don’t know in my legal dictionary. I keep my legal dictionary in my Chinese water bucket beside my comfy reading chair in my library. Then I pencil in the definitions in the margins. (I am very thankful law books all have wide margins.)

I also use my pencil to underline stuff I think MIGHT be important. But frankly, at this point the material is so obtuse I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be getting. Each reading assignment includes about three cases written by judges at the end of the proceedings, but that number can range from none to six cases. After each case there are questions and notes. I read the questions, but I don’t try to answer them because at this point, every answer would be, “Who knows?”

Along with my pencils, a necessary tool in my law school study arsenal are colored highlighters. Someone at school is always giving out candy and highlighters as these are the treats we love. I can’t eat the candy, but I ALWAYS take the highlighters. This is because I do more coloring than your average kindergartner. So armed with my highlighters, I’ll pick up the book again.

This time, I will go through the case studies I read in the reading assignment and I will highlight the information I think I’ll need. I have four different highlighter colors. I use green to underline the facts, the “what happened” before everybody called their lawyers. This is generally the easiest thing to find.

I use blue to underline the legal history up to that point. This is for all the stuff that happened after they called their lawyers but before the judge writing the opinion saw the case.

I use orange for the “question,” which is what is the court trying to decide. This is the hardest to find because we read a lot of appeals cases. So you usually aren’t talking about who’s right between the millionaire’s heirs and the mill worker who saved his life. Instead it’s stuff like, “Whether the earlier judge erred in not using the defendant’s motion in issuing jury instructions.”

My pink marker highlights what the court decided, the “holding.” This might boil down to something like, “That lower court got it all wrong. Try again.” It would be nice if they actually wrote it in my book that way. Instead, if I’m lucky, I get “Judgment reversed and remanded.”

Then I use yellow for how they justified this decision, including old cases, laws and sometimes any old opinion they feel like throwing in (called dicta because in law everything has to have a fancy name).

While I am racking up mileage on my highlighters, I keep my pencil handy too. Because I am “special” in my lack of three-dimensional ability, I sometimes have to draw a diagram of the buggy wreck from my highlighted facts just so I am clear on what EXACTLY happened.

Later, I will move my heavy law book into the dining room where my computer is set up on the table. Starting with my highlighted information, I’ll write a paragraph outline, called a brief. This is where I synthesize all the information in a case, putting it into a standard format. Since this is a tool for me, I put whatever I think is important, but I usually start with my highlighted information and clarify it from there. Each brief takes me anywhere from 20 minutes to 45 minutes, depending on how much information there is. (Remember each 20 page reading assignment has an average of three cases I’ll need to brief.)

At the end of this process, I have a pretty good understanding of the details of this formerly obtuse information. So I’ll take a few minutes and try to understand the bigger issues. Hammer v. Sidway is about an uncle promising his nephew $5,000 for not drinking, swearing and gambling until the kid turns 21. Future lawyers have been compelled to study this case for the last 100 years. What makes it so landmark?

The day before class, I’ll reread each case one more time. (For lawyers, the devil is in the details and I have to know exactly the length of that wire the 12-year old boy was wielding when he was electrocuted.) I’ll also now go back and read the questions, most of which I can now venture an answer to. Further into the semester, I will be adding a step of picking one question to answer on paper with an in-depth analysis as practice for exams.

But for now, I am pretty much prepared for my Monday Contracts class. I just have to start all over and do the same thing for my Monday Civil Procedures class and my Tuesday Torts class. Wednesday, I have Contracts and Civil Procedures again, so I better have my new set of reading assignments done for them and for next Torts class on Thursday. Oh, and I can’t forget my research and writing assignment for my Friday Legal Methods Class.

So, what have you been up to? Me? I’ve just been studying.

Me and Sandra D.

One of the really cool things about the law school at ASU is that it IS the Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law. Even better, is that sometimes Sandra Day O’Connor actually shows up! On Tuesday, she addressed my Dean’s Session class.

Former Justice O’Connor spoke about how difficult it was to find a job after she graduated. She was at the top of her law school class at Stanford, but all the law firms insisted that their clients would refuse to work with a female attorney. She finally got a job by working for free for the government in an open space she shared with somebody’s secretary. After three months, they finally started paying her. She did a brilliant job. (She is, after all, Sandra Day O’Connor.) She moved to Arizona and took some time off to raise her kids. When she was ready to go back to work, she STILL couldn’t get a job, even with her now proven professional track record.

This must have sounded like science fiction to my female classmate. After all, today many law partners and their clients are women themselves. But while we’ve made a lot of progress, women aren’t quite there yet. Women still make only 77 cents to every one dollar of their male collegues. And yes, we have a female vice presidential candidate. But she is has been criticized for being a working mother. Nobody’s asking Obama about his choice to work outside the home.

Almost half of my class is made up of women, but we are attending the ONLY law school in the country named after one. (William and Mary doesn’t count!)

Sandra Day O’Connor was back at school today for her portrait unveiling. I made a point to be there too. Former Justice O’Connor and I have one big thing in common: We decided to go to law school because weren’t quite sure what else to do. It turned out okay for her.

They handed out postcard pictures of her new portrait. I propped up mine up in my home library. So when I’m tired of studying, I can look up and be inspired by the first female U.S. Supreme Court Justice, whose namesake school I just happened to attend.

The Dog Ate My Homework

I always thought if you caused some kind of accident, you were responsible for it.

Now that I have two whole weeks of law school under my belt, I’ve learned that’s not always true. You are only responsible if you screwed up. For the past week, we’ve been studying a case about a guy who blacked out unexpectedly and caused a bunch of damage. Guess what? The courts held it wasn’t his fault because his blackout was unpredictable. He doesn’t have to pay a cent. As for his completely innocent victims, tough luck.

Injuries of various kinds are called torts, and I have a whole class about this subject. Torts sounds like something you eat so maybe this is why I am always hungry after that class. Actually, I am always hungry after ALL of my classes, so I can’t blame that on torts.

Torts is different from my other Monday/Wednesday class, Contracts. Contracts is a lot less forgiving. You blacked out unexpectedly, your grandmother died, the dog ate your homework... This time the law doesn’t care what your excuse is because YOU made this bargain in advance. You pay.

On the other hand (in law school, we are ALL about “on the other hand”), the other side has to prove you had a contract. Now, if you are presented with a jillion pieces of legal sized paper filled with lots of incomprehensible goobley-goop and there's little sticky notes indicating where you are suppose to sign and date, chances are pretty good you're looking at a contract. (And you don't even need two weeks of law school to know that.)

But no self-respecting law school professor would EVER give his or her class a clear cut situation. Instead, we get stuff like this: My dad used to promise Alec and Taylor money for every A they made on their report card. Is that a legally enforceable contract? Or is it just a gift with a condition?

What if, instead of my dad, it’s the school district promising them money? And what if, instead of cash, they promised them in a job after graduation? How about if they post this policy on their website? Is that a contract? Why or why not? And just for fun, let’s throw in a whole bunch of new twists to see if you change your mind. And don't forget, there are no right or wrong answers to any of this! As an attorney, it's your job to be able to make a factual-driven argument for either side.

This is my contracts class. This is also why, at the end of the two hour session, my blue spiral notebook doesn’t have very many notes. The dog really could eat my notebook and I really wouldn't be any worse off.

But I’m not worried. If I don’t do well in law school, I’ve got that unpredictable blackout excuse all ready to go. Think anybody will buy that?

Law School by the Numbers

ASU received more than 3,000 applications for this year’s incoming class of L-1s. They accepted around 600 of these. That’s pretty selectitive.

The average law school applicant applies to six schools, so not everyone accepted will choose to go to ASU. Over 400 people either decided not to go to law school or to go to law school somewhere else.

My incoming class of L-1’s is made up of 183 students. The median undergraduate GPA is 3.6. In my dean’s session class, which has all 183 L-1 students and lasts for 90 minutes, nobody’s cellphone ever rings. How is that possible?

ASU divides the 183 of us into 12 groups. While we all have to take the same subjects, all the people in your group have the exact same professors and class schedule. One person in my group was Alec’s best friend in elementary school.

Only 14 L-1s are over 40. But I am not the oldest. One of my classmates is 65.

To keep up with the work, you need to read at least 4-6 hours a day. This includes weekends and does not count time you spend in class.

So my favorite ASU law school statistic is this: Among my classmate, my LSAT score was in the top 25%. I think of that when I have to reread a page of some obtuse court opinion three times to try to eke out some meaning. This is hard. But I can do it.