On Monday of this past week, I started law school classes, and so far I’m really enjoying it!
Unlike the first week of classes in most undergraduate courses (affectionately known as “syllabus week,” where often we just review the syllabus in initial classes), law school starts out pretty intense, with lots of required reading and case briefing. Which makes sense - there’s a lot of material to cover and the usual add/drop period doesn’t really apply since first-year law students (aka 1Ls) take only required courses with an assigned section. I do slightly regret not looking more at my syllabi before classes started, since I was scrambling a bit over the weekend before classes to do it all. I am finding it easier now, though. I’m still learning about case briefs and sorting out which method works best, but I’m getting better at understanding what to look for so that the reading doesn’t take up all my waking hours.
This semester I’m taking Civil Procedure, Contracts, Legal Practice (aka a research/writing course this semester, the second half of it in the spring will cover oral advocacy and negotiation), Torts, and Criminal Law. I’m probably most excited about Legal Practice, since I enjoy writing and am looking forward to doing legal writing. Contracts is also very relevant to the kind of work I’d like to do and my professor actually worked at the National Labor Relations Board (gotta go to his office hours soon to talk to him about that!). The other courses are still important, of course, and I like the professors in all of them which is great. Torts in particular has had some really interesting readings.
One thing that a lot of 1Ls are nervous about is “cold calling,” perhaps most famously immortalized in the Legally Blonde clip from Elle’s first day at law school - instead of taking volunteers, students are asked at random to answer class questions. It’s based on the Socratic method of teaching by asking questions and trying to guide students to figure out the answer (or possible answers) for themselves, and the general thinking is that it works well for law, which is often open to many possible interpretations. However, it can be intimidating and potentially embarrassing, especially if your professor is hard on people who get something wrong or aren’t prepared for class.
Most UConn law classes seem to do a modified version of it, which we call the “on-call” system. After the first couple of classes, professors break us up into groups (one used our TA assignments, one went alphabetically by last name, and…well, I don’t know what the 3rd one did) and note in the syllabus or a shared doc which groups will be on-call for particular classes. If you’re on-call, you may be called on to explain a case and answer the professor’s questions about it, so it’s smart to spend extra time with the readings before class. If you’re not on-call, you’re still responsible for doing the work and knowing the material, but you won’t have to answer questions about it in front of 70 other people. In 2 of my classes, one of which is much smaller than my others, professors generally skip cold-calling and take volunteers to answer questions, but will call on people if they haven’t been speaking up at all.
More importantly, they aren’t unkind or trying to embarrass anyone who gets something wrong. I had this experience already in Contracts - I tried to answer a question about the case assigned, but gave an answer about a different part of the bases for appeal than the professor was asking about. And it was fine! He corrected me and moved on to another person, and I felt a little better when it took him a few tries to get someone who grasped what he was looking for. (Granted, professors likely treat “clearly read the case but misunderstood a detail” differently from “clearly didn’t do the reading,” but still.) In a way, I’m glad to have ripped the Band-Aid off and experienced that flubbing something when called on isn’t the end of the world.
I also think this is where being a little older and having more work experience is helpful. I’m used to presenting things and having to answer questions on the spot! I joked to my mom that, if anything, professors’ questions are easier than polling clients’ questions - I can be pretty sure that a professor’s question will be relevant to the reading and class material, but a client’s question might be entirely out of left field. And I answered client questions for years! I may have gray streaks that are more visible than I’d like in my student ID picture, but I can damn sure answer questions and not freak out.
(I use this picture to show I’m not kidding about the gray streaks. My Civil Procedure professor made notecards with enlarged versions of our ID pics for all of us to write down how to pronounce our names and some basic info about ourselves so he can get to know us, which is a very kind gesture, but oh boy, did I not enjoy seeing how prominent the gray is getting.)
One other thing about being older - for the most part, it really hasn’t been a big deal. I may have panicked slightly upon seeing my Torts professor and thinking she might be younger than me (per LinkedIn, she’s actually ~3 years older than me and I just need to ask about her skincare routine), but it really hasn’t been a big deal. Everyone around me is going through the same experience, which is a bonding experience even though we’re coming from different backgrounds. And though 11 years is well above average, many of my classmates took some time away from school to work before going to law school. Probably the only thing that’s meaningfully different is how much back pain we get from carrying around casebooks - those fuckers are heavy, and the first couple of days I was definitely bringing too much stuff to class, which was not good for my shoulders/upper back or the knot I sometimes get at the base of my spine. I have a good-quality backpack and I’ve learned that I can pack lighter for class, so it’s getting better, but I’ll definitely have to take good care of my back!
One of the things I’m starting to do, but was tricky at first, is to work out a routine. Having worked from home more or less full-time since 2020 and fairly flexible hours for a few years before then, I got pretty used to setting my own schedule, and having classes at specific times requires a little bit of readjusting. Case in point: I just didn’t eat lunch on Monday. Normally when working from home, instead of 3 meals, I’ll have 2 larger ones - one around 10 or 11 AM and one in the evening. I hadn’t eaten much before my morning class, but it was enough that I wasn’t yet hungry during my 12:30-2 break and thought my time was better spent in the library doing my reading. Cue a very ravenous me descending on the library cafe at 4 PM after class.
I’m getting better at it, though. Drive to campus for class in the mornings with a stop for Diet Coke and a breakfast sandwich before leaving Meriden, use the lunch period to either go to a student organization meeting (a lot of them are during that lunch window and they often serve pizza) or grab a sandwich and more Diet Coke from the cafe and do class reading. Afternoon classes until 3:30 or 4 depending on the day, then a few hours in the library to make sure I’ve done all the assigned work/reading for the next day’s classes. I usually leave campus around 6:30 or 7, which is nice because traffic leaving Hartford has generally cleared by that point (which blows my mind after so many years in DC - what do you mean rush hour ends so early?), grab dinner on the way home, and try to get enough done before leaving campus that I can leave my backpack and casebooks in the car and focus on snuggling Molly and relaxing once I’m home. I don’t have classes Fridays, which is great, but I do have to work on Sundays. My goal is to go to Meriden’s public library on either Fridays or Saturdays for a few hours of extra studying time (it’s newly renovated and wonderful) and have one day a week where I don’t have to work or study and can rest. But I know that might not be realistic come portfolio and finals time!
I’ve also noticed a couple of odd things about law school. One is that people arrive to class early, at least so far. I got to my first class, Civil Procedure, a few minutes before it started and only a few seats were left. I thought I’d be smarter before Torts on Tuesday morning and made myself leave earlier so I wouldn’t be awkwardly scrambling for a seat, but it was still quite crowded in there when I arrived 15 minutes early. Even when I had a student organization meeting end half an hour before Criminal Law, in the same building, and took a bathroom break before going upstairs to take a seat for class and review my notes, seats were already filling up!
The other is that professors like to use assigned seating - the seat you pick initially is your seat for the rest of the semester. This makes some sense for cold-calling; they want to know our names and where to look when they call on us. I wasn’t expecting it, though, since it definitely wasn’t the norm as an undergraduate! Fortunately, 2 out of my 3 professors who use assigned seating warned us during the first class that during the second class, they’d pass around a seating chart, and from then on we’d have to stay in the seats we chose for that class. (Unfortunately, the 3rd one is the aforementioned Civil Procedure class I arrived merely on time to, where I will now have the seat in the middle of the back row until December.)
I’m also looking into how to get involved on campus and meet people. I went to meetings for the Public Interest Law Group and Lambda Law Society (the LGBTQ+ group for law students) this week, I have a couple more upcoming meetings on my calendar for the next couple of weeks, and I went to the student organization fair to learn about/get in touch with others. One of the things I like is that many of the organizations emphasized that they’re low-commitment, with monthly-ish gatherings and events. I feel like that makes it easy to explore more groups and attend things I’m interested in without having to worry if I can’t make it all the time!
I am considering entering a competition, though. One thing that many second- and third-year students mentioned during orientation is that legal employers particularly like to see involvement in either legal journals or competition teams, and indeed it seemed like all the students who spoke on the various panels were involved in at least one. You can’t join a journal as a 1L, though I would like to as a 2L/3L (fingers crossed for Law Review, though the Public Interest Law Journal would also be cool). Competitions, however, are open to 1Ls. From what I understand of labor law, I likely won’t spend much time in a courtroom, and Mock Trial and Moot Court seemed pretty intimidating - they go to regional/national competitions and go up against other schools, and have their own process for picking who represents UConn on those teams.
However, I am interested in the Negotiation and Dispute Resolution Society. The goal is to develop skills on negotiating and dealing with arbitration outside of a courtroom, which seems much more likely to be something I’d do often as a union-side lawyer. Collective bargaining contracts don’t negotiate themselves! They have a competition in the fall for 1Ls, where we negotiate a side in a simulated dispute as a team of two. It’s coming up fast (preliminary rounds are in less than two weeks), so that’s a little scary, but it’s still something I’d like to try. I’ve signed up for the competition, and I’m going to go to Litigation Night to see their example and the workshop they’re holding next week to review/practice negotiation skills. Wish me luck!
It’s been a busy week for sure, but a good one, and I’m happy and excited about what’s to come!