Our friend Beagle has discussed what you might see at a law school orientation. My experience was very similar. For those who will be entering law school soon, take advantage of your orientation - meet your professors, learn the lay of the land and ask lots of questions!
Questions, as those entering law school will soon learn, are an essential part of the legal education environment. Having completed my first week of law school (and preparing to enter my second), I can safely say that you will often find the law (and law professors!) often brings up more questions than answers. This is because the law itself is often ambiguous, and the professors can exploit this ambiguity by twisting facts and asking students to weigh in.
Which brings me to the Socratic Method, a teaching style that is employed at most law schools. Unlike college professors, who typically lecture about a topic, law school instructors teach their students by asking them questions about the implications of the law, how and when it applies, and what goals it serves. (The Socratic method is named for the philosopher Socrates, whose incessant questioning would often drive his students to exasperation).
Sometimes the questions are easy: "Who was the plaintiff in this case?" Sometimes they require a bit of research: "What precedent did the court rely on to decide this way?" Sometimes they make you role-play: "Pretend you are the plaintiff's attorney - how would you argue?" And sometimes they require you to defend yourself: "Why do you think the defendant was negligent?"
The result is a level of professor-student interaction that I rarely saw in college. Students will raise their hands at every question like eager first graders. They are quick to form opinions or try and redeem themselves if their answer is wrong. Rarely do you get a straight "I don't know."
(Of course, it is against the student's interest to say "I don't know, because it suggests they are unprepared - a big no no in law school. If you are absolutely unprepared due to an emergency or a night of heavy drinking, some professors will allow you to give them a slip of paper explaining your lack of preparation at the beginning of class, no questions asked. This little slip of paper will spare potential humiliation. Be warned though, you can only do this a couple times a semester).
The Socratic Method allows law students to explore with the professor how seemingly concise laws (or more specifically, court decisions) can be interpreted in diverse ways. For instance, in a famous 19th century case involving ownership of a dead fox (Pierson v. Post for you property law buffs), half the class supported the plaintiff, while the other supported the defendant based on how they read the case.
Because students are constantly interacting with the professor, together they can come up with a better understanding of the law than if the professor was just lecturing.
The disjointed nature of the Socratic Method will likely frustrate note takers. "Should I write down everything that's said?" they may ask themselves. Fear not - after a few rounds of questions, the professor will usually step back and offer some explanations. Be sure to pay attention for these moments, and take notes as if the professor were lecturing. While your fellow students are certainly very smart, you do not need to take down their answers unless you feel it helps you better understand the material.
There is one significant downside to the Socratic Method. While it fosters greater class participation, in the hands of some professors it can create unnecessary stress and even fear among students. Some professors will pick a student and spend perhaps 20 minutes questioning them - and only them - about a case, analyzing their opinion of the law, why they think that way and what they would do if the facts were different.
When a professor uses the Socratic Method in this way, it creates fear in the classroom. Students who are still trying to understand the case will avert their eyes, hoping not to catch the professor's attention. They do not want to look like a fool for buckling under questioning - indeed the students are more likely scared of being humiliated in front of their fellow classmates than the professor (though there is the issue of unpreparedness as mentioned above). During orientation, one woman who received an early taste of the Socratic Method was brought to tears.
In my experience so far, the use of the Socratic Method has been more gentle, with professors treating it like a conversation rather than an interrogation. In my torts class however, the professor is a bit more abrupt, though still convivial. He will cut off students who do not give the right answer (I personally was cut off after 2 words), and will respond with "Absolutely not!" when students offer a wrong question. And yet, he is perhaps the most beloved of all the professors by my section!
I am told that in the next few weeks, law school will start to get even more difficult. That may well lead to more difficult questions, and more Socratic confrontations. But even though I know that my improv skills aren't the greatest, I know that many of my classmates are in the same boat. We'll have to survive the Socratic Method together.
Postscript: Like my colleague, I, too will begin tagging my posts for ease of use. Forgive us if our tags may not be uniform in the beginning!
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Of Labels and Orientation
Greetings, law fans!
When Perry and I started this blog, we agreed to do about one (substantial) post per week each. I believe he has indicated that he is working on something about classes to be put up soon, so keep a weather eye open for that. I, on the other hand, ran into a bit of a snag. I had originally intended to keep up with my string of "how-to" posts and write on briefing cases, since I learned how to do it in undergrad and my orientation this week showed me that it's a surprisingly rare skill for incoming 1Ls. However, I soon learned that there will be a workshop at my school next week on this very topic, and I felt that it would be remiss to not scope that out first and get a sense of their suggestions. Furthermore, I did not want to write a lengthy treatise on this only to generate a brief "oh yeah by the way" addendum next week or try to fit it into the existing post. So that's out for this week.
Which leaves me only to make a brief announcement that I will from here on out be including tags in my posts for easy reference to aid enterprising legal scholars. I feel like, if our intent is to convey our experiences for future students, it would be helpful if they could quickly access anything they desire to read about without skimming across the entire blog. I haven't discussed this with Perry yet, so I will only be instituting it for my posts for now to experiment a little. Please pardon our dust.
Orientation concluded yesterday. I don't care much for orientations by and large, and I won't get into the boring details about it, but even I couldn't help but glean a few useful tidbits from the process. The chancellor made quite a good introductory speech on Wednesday telling us that we were entering a service profession and that we must avoid feeling superior by virtue of becoming officers of the court. Our goal, in whatever field of law we pursue, is to serve. We are to be mouthpieces for our clients, to translate their desires, needs, fears, and wants into the complex legal language that our country's far-too-fragile rule of law demands. I think this is the message I'm taking into year one, and hopefully beyond.
The two other main themes, derived from this main one, were pro bono work and professionalism. In the first vein, we were informed that the ABA recommends attorneys to devote 50 hours per year to pro bono work - which translates into about a week's worth of work total. We were further told of the myriad of opportunities that we would have to do pro bono work of our own by volunteering to provide free legal services for the homeless, immigrants, and others who daily fall through the cracks (all under the supervision of a licensed attorney, of course). I feel sure that this will be in my future in some way, though perhaps I will wait until my second year to get deeply involved. It was nonetheless good to hear that there is force behind that "service profession" claim.
On the topic of professionalism, we were constantly reminded not only that we are building our reputation now but also that the colleagues we meet with in class will be our firm partners, the judges we appear before, the elected officials who make and enforce laws, and the adversaries we meet in the court room. A far cry better than a bitter reminder, as was the case in the past, that a full third of us will not be there next year (they actually made sure to reassure that virtually all of us will graduate).
I don't feel like I've adequately expounded on these themes or addressed them with requisite eloquence, but let them remain there as a guide as we embark on this journey through law school. The time to commence the journey has come at last.
I had better start on that civil procedure reading...
~PAX
When Perry and I started this blog, we agreed to do about one (substantial) post per week each. I believe he has indicated that he is working on something about classes to be put up soon, so keep a weather eye open for that. I, on the other hand, ran into a bit of a snag. I had originally intended to keep up with my string of "how-to" posts and write on briefing cases, since I learned how to do it in undergrad and my orientation this week showed me that it's a surprisingly rare skill for incoming 1Ls. However, I soon learned that there will be a workshop at my school next week on this very topic, and I felt that it would be remiss to not scope that out first and get a sense of their suggestions. Furthermore, I did not want to write a lengthy treatise on this only to generate a brief "oh yeah by the way" addendum next week or try to fit it into the existing post. So that's out for this week.
Which leaves me only to make a brief announcement that I will from here on out be including tags in my posts for easy reference to aid enterprising legal scholars. I feel like, if our intent is to convey our experiences for future students, it would be helpful if they could quickly access anything they desire to read about without skimming across the entire blog. I haven't discussed this with Perry yet, so I will only be instituting it for my posts for now to experiment a little. Please pardon our dust.
Orientation concluded yesterday. I don't care much for orientations by and large, and I won't get into the boring details about it, but even I couldn't help but glean a few useful tidbits from the process. The chancellor made quite a good introductory speech on Wednesday telling us that we were entering a service profession and that we must avoid feeling superior by virtue of becoming officers of the court. Our goal, in whatever field of law we pursue, is to serve. We are to be mouthpieces for our clients, to translate their desires, needs, fears, and wants into the complex legal language that our country's far-too-fragile rule of law demands. I think this is the message I'm taking into year one, and hopefully beyond.
The two other main themes, derived from this main one, were pro bono work and professionalism. In the first vein, we were informed that the ABA recommends attorneys to devote 50 hours per year to pro bono work - which translates into about a week's worth of work total. We were further told of the myriad of opportunities that we would have to do pro bono work of our own by volunteering to provide free legal services for the homeless, immigrants, and others who daily fall through the cracks (all under the supervision of a licensed attorney, of course). I feel sure that this will be in my future in some way, though perhaps I will wait until my second year to get deeply involved. It was nonetheless good to hear that there is force behind that "service profession" claim.
On the topic of professionalism, we were constantly reminded not only that we are building our reputation now but also that the colleagues we meet with in class will be our firm partners, the judges we appear before, the elected officials who make and enforce laws, and the adversaries we meet in the court room. A far cry better than a bitter reminder, as was the case in the past, that a full third of us will not be there next year (they actually made sure to reassure that virtually all of us will graduate).
I don't feel like I've adequately expounded on these themes or addressed them with requisite eloquence, but let them remain there as a guide as we embark on this journey through law school. The time to commence the journey has come at last.
I had better start on that civil procedure reading...
~PAX
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Law School Admissions
Greetings, legal enthusiasts! Our friend, Perry Mason, has already offered a brief overview of our purpose here - to chronicle our own adventures through 1L and beyond that might benefit future generations of aspiring lawyers. There is little else new I can say on the matter except to re-phrase it in my own words: we hope that we can de-mystify the law school experience and offer advice based on our experiences. Since I have yet to officially begin my own law school journey, I thought I would cover for my inaugural entry an overview of some strategies to adopt for the admissions process.
As law school approaches rapidly (unlike my friend, Mr. Mason, I will not orient until next week), I find myself casting my mind back to a year ago, when applications had yet to begin, and recalling the four-letter word of law school aspirants - the one that begins with "L" and ends in the past participle of "sit." See, as any law school applicant will soon learn, the admissions process is often brutally efficient. Unlike the disparate affair - perhaps better thought of as a "shotgun approach" - endemic to undergrad admissions, law schools conform to the singular, deity-like monolith that is the Law School Admissions Council. This has its advantages, such as cutting down wasted paper and wasted time. The first simply because the entire process is online. The second because, while most schools will still require a small supplemental portion or an idiosyncratic essay ("In less than 500 words, tell us what appeals to you about UC Irvine and why you would be a good fit here"), you will fill out your personal information once, when you open your lsac.org account, and from there on out that information will be automatically filled out on the main application for each and every school you apply to. Genius - makes the College Board look like a slipshod anachronism.
The result of this is a national system of law schools that is fairly unified. It's a delightfully federal system in many ways. But it does have its drawbacks as far as the students are concerned. And the LSAT is one of them.
Standardized testing is, of course, highly convenient for almost everybody involved - schools have a ready-made standard to judge applicants and students face a unified body of criteria to meet, rather than having to go through a confusing process for each individual school. The natural downside of this, however, is that a slip-up here can have detrimental effects on all future prospects, at least until the scores expire in five years. Unlike undergraduate schools, many of which are slowly moving away from reliance on the SAT and other standardized tests as a basis of admission, law schools hold dearly to them. In fact, the LSAC has made something of a science out of helping students calculate their chances of admission based on their score. If that particular link is perhaps a little too theoretical - we are lawyers, after all; we get the court to subpoena mathematicians to do this stuff for us when we need it - plug-n-play calculators can be found with a quick Google search, such as this one, to generate a list of school and show your probability of being accepted. The point of all of this? Your law school admission will essentially come down to two things: your LSAT score and your undergraduate GPA, and the LSAT score is a fair bit more important than your GPA. Other factors contribute as well, but these are the top two, bar none.
I knew this as I was going into my LSAT, and you probably have a least a vague sense of it by now without me telling you all this. There's a lot of pressure packed into the LSAT, more so than perhaps any other test (except perhaps the Bar exam, which I would know nothing about at this point). Looking back, I had a lot of disparate advice and, while I certainly managed well enough, I wish I had had a unified body of guidelines to go with in my preparations.
When my friend and I started this blog, our purpose was to provide our own thoughts on law school and offer a helping hand to those who will come after us. I think we would be remiss to not include a mention of some strategies for tackling admissions in general and the LSAT in particular. Therefore, I am compiling a list of five key tips that I think would be useful to law school hopefuls, based both on what I did and what I failed to do (I won't say which is which!).
1. Start Early
This seems like a no-brainer, but it has to be said. Don't procrastinate on getting on with this, especially if you're taking the September test and facing the tantalizing seduction of kicking back over the summer. Commit to at least an hour a day a few months beforehand. Give yourself time to both go over the strategies given to you and take multiple practice exams. Score yourself continually and isolate those areas you need to improve upon and get to work on them.
This also goes for applications. Some schools use rolling admissions (including a number of very good ones, such as UC Berkeley), which means the earlier you apply the better your odds at landing a spot. Even if your top choice doesn't practice rolling admissions, you'll feel better if you get it out of the way so you can focus on finishing off your last year of undergrad strong.
2. Buy a Good Book
Don't bother with overpriced tutoring lessons. There's nothing you'll get from paying an individual hundreds of dollars to train you how to take the test that you won't get from finding a good practice and strategy guide for about thirty bucks. If I may recommend one, Kaplan makes an excellent guide. Be sure to read it cover-to-cover and do all of the practice exams. They really do work quite well on training your mind to tackle some of the more difficult portions of the test, especially the logic games. In this light, the answer sheets are almost as important as the meat of the text itself - a good book will include detailed answers to the multiple choice questions, demonstrating exactly why the right answer is the right answer.
Also, non-LSAT-related materials can be helpful, too. If you want to read the "Very Short Introduction" series' book on logic, that can help put you in the right mindset. Heck, I even heard of someone who readAlice in Wonderland as part of a preparation regimen, hoping to benefit from the word games and logic exercises inherent in the story.
3. Don't Write Off the Writing Section
The essay portion of the LSAT is not reflected in your ultimate score. Do not let this prevent you from taking this seriously. In law school, you will need to be able to write effective arguments clearly and concisely. The LSAT is good training for this skill. Even though the writing portion is not scored per se, it is nevertheless sent to your law school admissions offices with the rest of the results and considered. Just because there's no numerical value assigned to it does not mean it has no impact.
The same can be said of your admissions essays (more commonly referred to as the personal statement). Whether you end up as a litigation lawyer or not, you will still need to be able to advocate effectively, and the personal statement shows admissions offices how well you advocate for your chief client - yourself. There are many ways to approach the personal statement, and Top-Law-Schools.com offers some top quality guidelines for doing so. The most important things to consider are your writing style and where you are currently sitting in terms of GPA and (if you have your scores) your LSAT. Some good approaches are to highlight your interest in the law and whatever relevant experience you might have in the field.
4. You Will Have a Law School Adviser. Use This Person.
On your lsac.org account, there will be a small section with the name and contact number of an individual designated as your law school adviser. This person is usually a law professor somewhere (mine happened to be one from the law school associated with my undergraduate campus). It is in your interest to contact this person. The adviser will be able to help you identify your problem areas on the LSAT before you go into it, look over your personal statements, and work through whatever other messiness may arise throughout the process. This person is there to help - make use of that.
5. Don't Stress Out Too Much.
Feeling a little anxious about the LSAT and admissions is probably healthy, but don't over-sweat it either. I know of people who literally burn out in the process. This does not help you. Remember to pace yourself. Start off early in preparation, but don't plan on doing eight-hour marathons daily. Law school will be hard enough without you killing yourself before you're even in the door.
I won't pretend that the law school admissions process is easy. But you can certainly take steps to make it easier on yourself and your family. Perhaps the last piece of advice I would offer is to not get discouraged. Thousands of people get into law school yearly - you will find the place for you out there. Not getting into your top choice will by no means determine how well you do in your legal education and career. You alone will decide that.
And being wait-listed isn't a death sentence for your chances, either - I'm proof of that.
~PAX
As law school approaches rapidly (unlike my friend, Mr. Mason, I will not orient until next week), I find myself casting my mind back to a year ago, when applications had yet to begin, and recalling the four-letter word of law school aspirants - the one that begins with "L" and ends in the past participle of "sit." See, as any law school applicant will soon learn, the admissions process is often brutally efficient. Unlike the disparate affair - perhaps better thought of as a "shotgun approach" - endemic to undergrad admissions, law schools conform to the singular, deity-like monolith that is the Law School Admissions Council. This has its advantages, such as cutting down wasted paper and wasted time. The first simply because the entire process is online. The second because, while most schools will still require a small supplemental portion or an idiosyncratic essay ("In less than 500 words, tell us what appeals to you about UC Irvine and why you would be a good fit here"), you will fill out your personal information once, when you open your lsac.org account, and from there on out that information will be automatically filled out on the main application for each and every school you apply to. Genius - makes the College Board look like a slipshod anachronism.
The result of this is a national system of law schools that is fairly unified. It's a delightfully federal system in many ways. But it does have its drawbacks as far as the students are concerned. And the LSAT is one of them.
Standardized testing is, of course, highly convenient for almost everybody involved - schools have a ready-made standard to judge applicants and students face a unified body of criteria to meet, rather than having to go through a confusing process for each individual school. The natural downside of this, however, is that a slip-up here can have detrimental effects on all future prospects, at least until the scores expire in five years. Unlike undergraduate schools, many of which are slowly moving away from reliance on the SAT and other standardized tests as a basis of admission, law schools hold dearly to them. In fact, the LSAC has made something of a science out of helping students calculate their chances of admission based on their score. If that particular link is perhaps a little too theoretical - we are lawyers, after all; we get the court to subpoena mathematicians to do this stuff for us when we need it - plug-n-play calculators can be found with a quick Google search, such as this one, to generate a list of school and show your probability of being accepted. The point of all of this? Your law school admission will essentially come down to two things: your LSAT score and your undergraduate GPA, and the LSAT score is a fair bit more important than your GPA. Other factors contribute as well, but these are the top two, bar none.
I knew this as I was going into my LSAT, and you probably have a least a vague sense of it by now without me telling you all this. There's a lot of pressure packed into the LSAT, more so than perhaps any other test (except perhaps the Bar exam, which I would know nothing about at this point). Looking back, I had a lot of disparate advice and, while I certainly managed well enough, I wish I had had a unified body of guidelines to go with in my preparations.
When my friend and I started this blog, our purpose was to provide our own thoughts on law school and offer a helping hand to those who will come after us. I think we would be remiss to not include a mention of some strategies for tackling admissions in general and the LSAT in particular. Therefore, I am compiling a list of five key tips that I think would be useful to law school hopefuls, based both on what I did and what I failed to do (I won't say which is which!).
1. Start Early
This seems like a no-brainer, but it has to be said. Don't procrastinate on getting on with this, especially if you're taking the September test and facing the tantalizing seduction of kicking back over the summer. Commit to at least an hour a day a few months beforehand. Give yourself time to both go over the strategies given to you and take multiple practice exams. Score yourself continually and isolate those areas you need to improve upon and get to work on them.
This also goes for applications. Some schools use rolling admissions (including a number of very good ones, such as UC Berkeley), which means the earlier you apply the better your odds at landing a spot. Even if your top choice doesn't practice rolling admissions, you'll feel better if you get it out of the way so you can focus on finishing off your last year of undergrad strong.
2. Buy a Good Book
Don't bother with overpriced tutoring lessons. There's nothing you'll get from paying an individual hundreds of dollars to train you how to take the test that you won't get from finding a good practice and strategy guide for about thirty bucks. If I may recommend one, Kaplan makes an excellent guide. Be sure to read it cover-to-cover and do all of the practice exams. They really do work quite well on training your mind to tackle some of the more difficult portions of the test, especially the logic games. In this light, the answer sheets are almost as important as the meat of the text itself - a good book will include detailed answers to the multiple choice questions, demonstrating exactly why the right answer is the right answer.
Also, non-LSAT-related materials can be helpful, too. If you want to read the "Very Short Introduction" series' book on logic, that can help put you in the right mindset. Heck, I even heard of someone who read
3. Don't Write Off the Writing Section
The essay portion of the LSAT is not reflected in your ultimate score. Do not let this prevent you from taking this seriously. In law school, you will need to be able to write effective arguments clearly and concisely. The LSAT is good training for this skill. Even though the writing portion is not scored per se, it is nevertheless sent to your law school admissions offices with the rest of the results and considered. Just because there's no numerical value assigned to it does not mean it has no impact.
The same can be said of your admissions essays (more commonly referred to as the personal statement). Whether you end up as a litigation lawyer or not, you will still need to be able to advocate effectively, and the personal statement shows admissions offices how well you advocate for your chief client - yourself. There are many ways to approach the personal statement, and Top-Law-Schools.com offers some top quality guidelines for doing so. The most important things to consider are your writing style and where you are currently sitting in terms of GPA and (if you have your scores) your LSAT. Some good approaches are to highlight your interest in the law and whatever relevant experience you might have in the field.
4. You Will Have a Law School Adviser. Use This Person.
On your lsac.org account, there will be a small section with the name and contact number of an individual designated as your law school adviser. This person is usually a law professor somewhere (mine happened to be one from the law school associated with my undergraduate campus). It is in your interest to contact this person. The adviser will be able to help you identify your problem areas on the LSAT before you go into it, look over your personal statements, and work through whatever other messiness may arise throughout the process. This person is there to help - make use of that.
5. Don't Stress Out Too Much.
Feeling a little anxious about the LSAT and admissions is probably healthy, but don't over-sweat it either. I know of people who literally burn out in the process. This does not help you. Remember to pace yourself. Start off early in preparation, but don't plan on doing eight-hour marathons daily. Law school will be hard enough without you killing yourself before you're even in the door.
I won't pretend that the law school admissions process is easy. But you can certainly take steps to make it easier on yourself and your family. Perhaps the last piece of advice I would offer is to not get discouraged. Thousands of people get into law school yearly - you will find the place for you out there. Not getting into your top choice will by no means determine how well you do in your legal education and career. You alone will decide that.
And being wait-listed isn't a death sentence for your chances, either - I'm proof of that.
~PAX
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
The Law: Serious Business
Welcome to Last Law Student Standing! This blog is written by two California law students who are just beginning their legal education. In this blog we will share our experiences about law school, discuss how to survive the arduous process and share our thoughts on the law in general. We hope to update on a regular basis, assuming we are not buried alive under a pile of Torts homework (and if we were, we'd surely hope someone was negligent).
I want to start with an anecdote from my orientation. After completing registration and shelling out hundreds of dollars for books I, along with a few dozen other first year students, took a tour of a Federal District Courthouse. I had assumed that we were simply getting a tour of the building - which admittedly was a bit more impressive than the county courthouse near my home town).
But when we arrived at the court house, we learned that we would be observing a live trial! Despite being immersed in the law almost 24/7, many law students don't see the inside of a court room until their second or third year.
Watching a trial live is nothing like reading it or watching it on TV. You can feel the tension in the air between the two sides. The plaintiff, an older man who worked for a major delivery corporation, was suing the company for economic losses. He alleges that after being injured, the company dismissed him and did not give him the rights that are guaranteed by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The plaintiff's lawyer had called an economist to the stand to demonstrate how much the man lost.
To an observer, the economist's testimony was long and often dull. But observing the two parties was very revealing. The man stared straight ahead - he never glanced over at his former employer. The defense team looked distinguished in their fine suits.
Cross examination time. The defense lawyer appears cool and collected - he asks the economist whether he considered various scenarios, a tactic he hopes will show the jury that the economic losses are far less than what is suggested.
The testimony drags on. The judge calls a side bar conference and the lawyers dutifully march over. Interestingly, a buzzing noise seems to fill the room, which drowns out what the group is saying.
When it's all over, the plaintiff rests, and the court adjourns. The judge, an alumnus of my school, walked over to us and took questions from the audience. He had a lot of good things to say, and even a word of wisdom: "Some of you look pretty exhausted. You don't know what exhausted feels like...yet."
The whole courtroom episode taught a valuable lesson in itself. To borrow a phrase about the Internet: the law is serious business. The plaintiff has been injured and claims he needs help. The defense on the other hand says it can't compensate injured workers who have not followed the proper reporting procedures.
The law touches just about every aspect of our lives. To study it and understand it is a great honor, but perhaps also a burden. As lawyers, we have the power to make a person's life far better, or potentially miserable. But our journey, as the judge told us, is just about to begin.
Here goes nothing.
----
I want to start with an anecdote from my orientation. After completing registration and shelling out hundreds of dollars for books I, along with a few dozen other first year students, took a tour of a Federal District Courthouse. I had assumed that we were simply getting a tour of the building - which admittedly was a bit more impressive than the county courthouse near my home town).
But when we arrived at the court house, we learned that we would be observing a live trial! Despite being immersed in the law almost 24/7, many law students don't see the inside of a court room until their second or third year.
Watching a trial live is nothing like reading it or watching it on TV. You can feel the tension in the air between the two sides. The plaintiff, an older man who worked for a major delivery corporation, was suing the company for economic losses. He alleges that after being injured, the company dismissed him and did not give him the rights that are guaranteed by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The plaintiff's lawyer had called an economist to the stand to demonstrate how much the man lost.
To an observer, the economist's testimony was long and often dull. But observing the two parties was very revealing. The man stared straight ahead - he never glanced over at his former employer. The defense team looked distinguished in their fine suits.
Cross examination time. The defense lawyer appears cool and collected - he asks the economist whether he considered various scenarios, a tactic he hopes will show the jury that the economic losses are far less than what is suggested.
The testimony drags on. The judge calls a side bar conference and the lawyers dutifully march over. Interestingly, a buzzing noise seems to fill the room, which drowns out what the group is saying.
When it's all over, the plaintiff rests, and the court adjourns. The judge, an alumnus of my school, walked over to us and took questions from the audience. He had a lot of good things to say, and even a word of wisdom: "Some of you look pretty exhausted. You don't know what exhausted feels like...yet."
The whole courtroom episode taught a valuable lesson in itself. To borrow a phrase about the Internet: the law is serious business. The plaintiff has been injured and claims he needs help. The defense on the other hand says it can't compensate injured workers who have not followed the proper reporting procedures.
The law touches just about every aspect of our lives. To study it and understand it is a great honor, but perhaps also a burden. As lawyers, we have the power to make a person's life far better, or potentially miserable. But our journey, as the judge told us, is just about to begin.
Here goes nothing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)