The penultimate week

My first final is civil procedure. It is next Saturday at 8am.

I recovered fully from being sick. I lost 10 pounds but I'm gaining it back. I didn't weigh very much to begin with.

I rolled through studying this week. I'm at the 70 hour mark between classes and study hours. I worked with a few study groups, took practice tests and updated all my outlines.

I have some positive and negative remarks about California Western. I'll start with the negative and end with the positive:

Negative:

-The library is not open 24 hours. This is odd. I like being there late and studying. I guess this is somewhat of an uproar as there is a facebook group and a petition to leave the library open. The general feeling is that the tuition is at an all time high and the student services are at an all time low.

-The attrition rate weighs pretty heavily on the student population. It makes everyone stressed and depressed.

-This last comment isn't so much a complaint about the school as it is something I feel like venting. There is one student in my section who for whatever reason has gone out of his way to become disruptive in class. I think he claims he will be in the top 5 or 10 percent. I have my suspicions.

Positive:

-The review sessions put on by the Women's Law Caucus are very helpful. I went to a contracts review session and they gave me an outline to augment/ correct my own with. They also taught me how to engineer an attack outline and how to approach my contracts exam.

-The tutors are extraordinarily helpful. They even proctor practice exams. The tutors also give feedback and help explain complicated hypotheticals and practice problems. They also cut straight to what is applicable to the exam.

-My legal skills professor is very pleasant. She went over my final memo for the class and gave some helpful suggestions.

Evaluating myself:

Property - I did well on the practice exam. I even nailed a pretty hard future interest problem which had language that could be interpreted two different ways. You had to determine the intent of the drafter and argue for two different parties. I like the future interest problems.

Criminal Law - I did well on the practice exam. The professor for this class wants very concise answers and does not like irac. I feel like I am going to be OK during this final, but its the kind of test that if you misread a question or miss the call of the question you could bomb the final.

Contracts - This class gets a mixed review. The professor wants us to essentially write an essay about everything we have learned and apply it to a fact pattern. This means outlining the course during the exam and sticking in facts. I am fine with this. However, the format makes me uncomfortable. Its a race horse issue spotting exam. The professor also only allows 90 minutes for the essay portion and then you are not allowed to go back and edit it.

Civil Procedure - I have a firm grasp on the material for this course. Unfortunately, so does everyone else. I think the professor scared everyone into studying like mad. Another negative point is that the exam is going to be 'easy' according to the professor, which means it will be difficult to differentiate myself from the rest of the group. This is also an exam where if you misread the question you can bomb the final.

Legal Skills - The final memo is all that is required. There is no final. My legal skills group is a 1/4 of the full section. My group has some good writers who certainly communicated with the professor more than I did throughout the semester. I had my professor look over my paper and outside of a few minor errors everything seemed ok. I have my doubts as to whether I will get the A. I certainly will not fail or anything, but I don't know how my writing reads compared to others. From what I can tell the top papers are somewhat of a toss up as to who gets the A and who gets a B. This class is not included in the GPA to determine if the school asks you to leave or not.

If I took all my finals right now I would not fail them. Hopefully I can polish things up a bit and get a few As. But who knows? Nothing in law school is a given.

Sick as a dog

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.