Law school classes are very different from undergrad classes. Here’s how.
1. Cold Calling
One of the biggest differences from your undergrad experience is that most law school professors will cold call students from a seating chart or list of names. Law professors don’t like to wait for volunteers. What this means is that you’ll have to be prepared for most of your classes, instead of leaving things for last minute cram sessions at the end of a semester.
Law school is a lot like high-school. There are lockers, people carry backpacks, and everyone knows about everyone else’s business. We all know that high-school has certain defined social groups (see “The Breakfast Club”). This post is going to discuss the types of people that you meet at law school, both good and bad.
Now, we all know the classic variety of law students — the “gunners.” These are the students who stay late after class to talk to the professor, raise their hand for every volunteer question (and, evil of all evils, ask questions in the last two minutes), and brag about spending every waking moment in the library studying.
Heading into the second half of the semester, it was time last week to submit bids for Winter term courses. Six classes, ranked in order of preference, strategically reranked and fretted over to optimize the odds of a sufferable professor or subject, and – most importantly – submitted to Mrs. Burns promptly at noon on
I’m a rising 3L at Columbia Law, and I just completed a summer program at large law firm in Los Angeles. This post is going to discuss my experience at the firm. I’ve often heard that the time you spend as a summer associate is the best job you’ll ever have. I can now wholeheartedly
Your first year in law school will be full of standard courses in property, torts, contracts, civil procedure, criminal law, and legal research. These classes involve tons of reading and a single four-hour exam at the end. Most people don’t want to repeat this experience by taking more black letter classes in their second and third years. So as an alternative you can do something radically different by signing up for clinics.
Big tech companies are increasingly hiring law students to be summer associates (but not really associates since it’s not a firm). How does this stack up against a more traditional firm/government gigs, and what kinds of students should be looking into this kind of thing?
Have you ever had the opportunity to peruse a stack of law school applications? Specifically the Personal Statement/”Why Lawschool?” sections? You’ll find a pretty common theme across them: I’m going to lawschool to save X (where is X is “the orphans,” or “Brooklyn,” or “the blue-footed booby,” etc). X, in the context of Why Lawschool?, is pretty much never “SIFIs from overburdensome regulation” or “Microsoft from paying royalties on questionably-acquired IP.”
As you may have seen in coverage from The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Law School is considering changing its seal. In a social climate laden with cheeky editorials about excessive PC culture on college campuses – or, for that matter, in an election dominated by The Donald – it comes
This might just be a Florida Man thing, but according to a Florida Bar Association survey of women lawyers under the age of 36 (or in their first five years of practice) almost half could recount some instance of gender bias.
This is sad. But the future might be brighter. Law schools are trying to play a positive role in advancing women lawyers and dealing with prejudice and stereotypes.
Your first law school classroom experience might be strange, especially after 16 years of schooling. There are a number of different modes of learning and methods of teaching. Here’s a look at just a few: