I didn't feel well all of last week and Friday it finally turned into full blown illness. I've had a fever of about 100 from Thursday night through to today.
Just because you're sick in law school doesn't give you a free pass to quit doing work. I planned on going to the library this weekend and working on legal skills until the cows come home but I don't think its a good idea for me to ride my bike around like this. I've taken the opportunity to review and outline for all my classes. Here is an update, class by class, of what I work on.
Legal Skills:
I hate this class. Its time consuming and the lectures are worthless recitals of powerpoint slides. The handholding through writing a research paper makes me especially agitated. In every other class you are presented with material (tons of it) and the professor guides you through it. That is not the case for this class. They spoon feed you everything.
The first assignment was a disaster. They pitted all the 1Ls against each other in a competition for the same books. The professor for whatever reason didn't see this as a problem until the due date came up and almost no one had turned in the assignment due to the line for books. Then the rules changed and we were allowed to use online resources. We will likely never use those books again. I think it would have been far more beneficial to get acquainted with lexis and westlaw than it was to waste hours waiting on books in the library.
Pros: I got better at writing out citations.
Cons: The ratio of time spent to material learned is all out of whack. The bluebook has mistakes in it and you have to find an overburdened TA to show you the correct way to cite. The professor seems to think this is high school.
Criminal Law:
This is a great course. Everything is clear and concise. My outline looks good and the hypotheticals are fun. The TA for the course is a brilliant guy and he is excellent about picking out and mapping out what we need to know for the exam.
Pros: The hypotheticals are like interesting puzzles you get to solve. The TA is fantastic.
Cons: It is sometimes ambiguous regarding what we need to know for the exam and tangents the professor goes off on because its something of interest to him.
Contracts:
I understand the material in this class the best. Its all really clear and my outline looks good. We just finished up consideration.
Pros: The professor is great at clearing up misconceptions after class.
Cons: This isn't a con for me so much as it is for everyone else. The professor presents the material in a really intuitive sort of way which gives the illusion of understanding to a lot of students. If you read the material and think about it though you still have lots of black letter law to memorize for the exam. It doesn't matter that it seems intuitive, you get points based on what you can put down on paper. You have to do the reading and the supplement reading to understand what the reading says about the law.
Property:
This class goes at a slow pace. I enjoy it the most. The material is really cool and the professor is excellent. I felt bad being sick in his class and visibly struggling to pay attention this week.
Pros: The slow pace allows you to keep up with reading in other classes. The readings given to you get straight to a clear point about the law regarding property. The TA is wonderful an reviews outlines.
Cons: There really are no cons to this class.
Civil Procedure:
I read and read and read and I think I get 'it' then I go to class and realize I know nothing. This is somehow my worst class. There are set rules that come into play in the timeline of an action. It seems very cut and dry until you get in there and the professor asks questions until you have completely lost track of what the rule is and your brain feels like it melted out your ears.
Pros: The rules are easy to memorize.
Cons: The application of the rules is difficult. The professor has a tendency to follow a bad thread with a student who gets called on and didn't read or didn't understand the material. The professor tries (often in vain) to lead students through to the correct answers. I wish he would question less and lecture more. The more bad answers he gets out of students the more confused I get about the correct answer .
The above has taken over my life. I work from 6am - 6pm every weekday only taking a break to eat for 10 minutes or so in the morning and at lunch. The weekends I sleep in and generally do about 4 hours/ Saturday and Sunday.
UCSD and CWSL Update:
The student news paper (The Commentary) had a big article about the relationship between UCSD and CWSL. I would provide a link to the article but after a lazy google search for it I couldn't find one.
UCSD set up a committee to work out a merger with CWSL.
http://gradlife.ucsd.edu/2009/04/gsa-announcements/
Its looks more and more like a done deal. I suppose there is something holding up the process though.
