Study Junkie

I had last my final yesterday. Thankfully, the professor reduced the test from four hours to 3.5 hours. There are no breaks. You can sign out to leave the room, but the test continues.

One of my biggest fears had been keeping up my concentration level for such an extended time. But my practice sessions at home worked, and the only time I lost focus was when my cellphone rang. I had forgotten to leave it at home. Because phones can transmit all kinds of information, bringing one into a test is verbottem. The Law School is VERY serious about the honor code violations, and I had visions of being immediately hauled out of the room by the proctor and thrown out of school. She, however, didn’t even look up as I frantically dug through my backpack and turned it off.

Then I immediately went back to writing about whether or not a contract was formed when the two businesses didn’t agree on the return policy for widgets. (In Contracts, we talked a lot about buying and selling widgets.) My offending cellphone was mitigated a bit by the fact that many of my classmates, including me, were wearing earplugs. These are distributed free before exams.

After completing my last final, I met my classmates at a nearby bar. Lots of things have changed since I was an undergraduate, but college bars are EXACTLY the same. They are still dives with cheap drinks. I ordered a beer and they brought it in a huge glass. Only bars in college towns and Russsia serve beers that big.

I expected to be relieved the semester is over. But instead I feel restless. Law school has turned me into a study junkie. I keep thinking, "Aren't I suppose to be studying something now?" But there's nothing to study. I feel like I'm going cold turkey through study withdrawl. Today, I rearranged the furniture, only to move it back exactly where it was. I need to figure out how to have a life again. At least until classes start resume January 20.

Fighting Forrest

For the first time in my life, I’m not very smart. In fact, sometimes I feel like the Forrest Gump of ASU Law School. It’s a very humbling experience. So I guess it’s not too late for me to get in some more character-building.

It’s finals week. To stay functional, my brain insists on breaks every four hours, a night off once a week, and eight hours a night of rest. Within those constraints, I pretty much study the rest of the time. This has been my schedule all semester, so finals week isn’t much different.

As I am already at my Sustained Maximum Cruising Rate for studying, the big difference for me is practice testing. All my finals are from 1 to 4 p.m. This is a three hour test in the middle of my body’s lowest energy time. So to prepare, I take practice tests every day from 1 to 4. At 1 p.m., I am a brilliant law student, seeing angles everywhere! By 2 p.m, I’m starting to miss some stuff. But after 3 p.m., I’m Gump again, having difficulty even following the narrative thread of those fanciful elaborate scenarios I need to be insightfully analyzing.

My law school exams are open-book. Professors secretly laugh at that. They know that while you are allowed to bring in mounds of material, you won’t have time to look at it. If you bring in very well-organized materials, students have, at most, time to double check one or two things. Any longer and you won’t have time to finish the test.

You earn points by seeing how many legal issues you can find and discuss. A law professor actually compared it to a “Where’s Waldo” book. This is because unlike other professions, law teaches you to make things as complicated as possible. So the more problems you can find, and the more ways you can argue about those problems, the better lawyer you are.

The other interesting thing about law school exams is that they don’t deduct points for the wrong answer! (Remember, there ARE no right or wrong answers in law school.) However, because your time is so limited, every two minutes you spend writing that “life is like a box of chocolates,” is two minutes you won’t be earning any points.

But it’s my night off tonight. I will be relaxing and playing games with my family. Tomorrow will be soon enough to once resume my search for Waldo, this time in Contracts, while fighting my Inner Gump.

Is Civil Procedures Civil?

I am currently in the midst of studying for my first law school final, Civil Procedures on Tuesday. It is 70% of my grade. My other two finals, in Torts and Contracts, will be 100% of my grade. No pressure, huh?

Civil Procedures is mostly about learning the rules in lawsuits. For example, we spent DAYS on where you can file suit. First you have to look at General jurisdiction to determine if there’s either personal or specific jurisdiction. There’s a bunch of factors to consider on each. Sorting that out just gets you to the possible states.

Next, you move on to venue, which is what court you want to use. If you want to be in federal court, rather than state, you have to see if your case qualifies either through subject matter or diversity. There’re rules for each of these. And then there’s more rules about what the other side can do (and when) if they aren’t so wild about your carefully-considered court choices.

Studying jurisdiction was less fun than learning Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. This was a unit I called “Lawyers Behaving Badly.” Rule 11 kind of puts the "Civil" is Civil Procdures. It covers what the judge can do to lawyers who don’t work and play well with others. One case we studied involved an attorney who threw Barbie dolls at a discovery conference when his client was suing Mattel. Even if you haven’t had the advantage of three months of Civil Procedure classes like me, you probably can guess that this wasn’t condoned by Rule 11 F.R.C.P.

But it occurred to me today, that with all those rules, I hadn’t learned any rules on actually TRYING a case in court. I’ve got two and half years left. Maybe they’ll get to that eventually. And it’s actually a very small percentage of cases that get anywhere near a courtroom. But in the meantime, if the opposing counsel tries to throw Barbie at you, I can tell you it’s not allowed.