Six months down: A recap on first semester

It's the end of February. Spring break has begun, giving me a chance to reflect a little on the intense six months or so that have gone by at NUSL. The many classes taken, cases read, social events attended, people met, and projects accomplished make it difficult to describe the experience easily or briefly. With that excuse, I won't attempt to do either.

The class of 2013 is somewhere around 220 students. We are broken up in to 12-15 person sections called "law offices" (LO). The members within each law office share a schedule and will work on a social justice project throughout their first year of law school. The social justice project involves analyzing, investigating, and making recommendations on an issue to a client organization. Prior to coming to NUSL, I was told that the social justice project can be pretty intense and that some LO's end up having strained relationships.

My LO is looking at the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act law that was passed last year and analyzing how it affects low income elders in Massachusetts. It has been intense and the program has asked more of us than it seems we have time for. However, I've been blessed to work with a great group of people. We can disagree openly for the benefit of our product. I admire the people I work with and have been positively influenced by the unique experiences that each of them bring. One previously worked in government, another with HIV education in Africa, another with business, another was a teacher, and another has a strong commitment to making sure that each person gets heard, etc.

My classes last semester were tough. In addition to Social Justice and Legal Writing, I studied torts, civil procedure, and property. In general, the reading was plentiful and classes were more interesting than I had imagined they would be. Torts was my favorite due to my professor and the way that cases were written. Professor Parmet, my torts professor, has a knack for public speaking. She is short and thin physically, but her animated personality was huge and sometimes intimidating. Her wit was sharp, probably from years of piercing holes in the arguments of her students and boldly voicing arguments that none of us dared to make. While she was tough and detail oriented, she made torts fun and interesting.

Civil procedure, a class that is notoriously confusing and complicated, was taught by professor Lucy Williams. Professor Williams has her roots in poverty law. Before attending her class, I read other student's comments about her on ratemyprofessor.com. The positive comments stated that she is sweet, teaches a lot of material (more than necessary), and is passionate about the subject. The negative comments said that she is all over the place and changes the subject all the time. The positive comments were true in my experience. The negative comments were less true about Professor Williams and more true about civil procedure as a subject. As a subject, civil procedure is all over the place. Civil procedure involves interdependent rules, statutes, and case law that guide procedure in all phases of civil litigation (lawsuits that aren't criminal). Because everything is interdependent, it is difficult to provide an explanation of one rule without going into another interacting rule. It's confusing until the very end, when it all comes together as we were assured by Professor Williams. Her teaching style was helpful as she treated civil procedure as a profound, interesting, and urgent topic. She always stressed that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure book didn't provide answers as much as it provided room for making arguments.

My property class had its own benefits. Professor Baumann gave a lot of flexibility in creating arguments and experimenting with the doctrine. She was less about providing us with clear answers than allowing us to make arguments (as long as they were sound). I enjoyed the idea that property is not as concrete of a concept as we generally believe. Rather than being one unified concept of ownership, we walked away from class knowing that it involves a group of rights and responsibilities such as the right to exclude others, the right to include others, the right to transfer ownership, etc. Some of the terms in property have remained the same since the 1600's or earlier in England. For that reason, many terms in property have no connection to our common understanding of the words as they are used today. Fee simple, fee simple determinable, and to the heirs of his body are commonplace terms in property law that seem strange and nonsensical outside of law school. That made the subject a little more difficult. Professor Baumann emphasized the importance of the underlying reason for the rule or statute. If the reason or purpose of the legal rule wasn't present, we could argue that it should not apply to the current facts.

Two of my professors relied on what is known as cold calling. This is a teaching method where professors will call students and ask them questions about the cases, usually without warning. Because we are in class with about 75 students, cold calling is an effective incentive for completing the assigned reading. It can be nerve wracking or incredibly rewarding. To ease some of my nerves, a classmate and I discuss cases at the gym in preparation for class. It's been really helpful so far.

Exams were a marathon in themselves. The exams are presented as a several page story or fact pattern. Tucked away in the fact pattern are legal issues. Our task is to identify the issues, state the applicable legal rules and caselaw, and then analyze the issues through those rules. For each class, it's a four hour process that results in 12-18 double spaced pages being written at NUSL. Don't ask me how. It just kind of happened.

With last semester down and half of this spring semester to go, I feel like I'm more familiar with what is required for law school. To describe it in one sentence, it has been more work than time allows. The great part about it is learning to figure it all out and feeling capable after pulling it off. The difficult part is how overwhelming it can be and maintaining a sense of vigilance, knowing that there is not enough time to do an amazing job on every task. So far, I'm still really glad to be here and have enjoyed everything it has to offer.