summer of bar review

The thing about law school graduation is that it's rather anti-climactic. Sure you feel a great sense of pride when you walk across the stage after three long years of discipline and sacrifice to be handed the most expensive piece of paper you'll ever own. But the feeling of accomplishment is fleeting, because you know that you aren't really done with this arduous process until you pass the bar exam. And this knowledge hangs over you like a menacing storm cloud through each champagne toast and every celebratory meal with family and friends.

So I'm now the proud holder of a Juris Doctor degree from a regionally renown law school, but I'm not a lawyer yet. No, the bar exam still stands between me and the practice of law. The bar exam varies state by state, since the Supreme Court of each state has plenary power over who may practice law in their jurisdiction. Most states these days utilize a standardized test of common law principles called the MultiState Bar Exam (MBE), and then throw some essay and/or performance questions specific to that jurisdiction to drag the ordeal out for an extra day. But not Louisiana; Louisiana is special.

Because of Louisiana's unique history, being a relative late-comer to the nascent United States and all, the civilian tradition of Spanish and French law permeate and distinguish the law of Louisiana from that of her 49 sister states. And so the Louisiana bar exam is unlike that of any other American state. For starters, the exam is the longest of all the states, with 21.5 hours of testing over a three day period. Also, it's mostly all essay questions, with a sprinkling of short-answer and multiple choice questions thrown in for good measure.

I'll be sitting for the Louisiana bar exam in July. So my life for the next two months will pretty much consist of nothing but learning Louisiana law. I'm taking the de rigueur Bar Review Course, which lends structure and guidance to my studies, with lectures six days out of the week for the next six weeks. After the course term ends, I'll have three weeks to continue to study the materials on my own, according to their schedule but without the lectures. (I'll be sitting for the Mississippi bar exam in February 2013, which means I'll be doing this all over again come the first of the new year.)

The first week of Bar Review was overwhelming. The second week wasn't quite so bad, but only yesterday did I come to the realization that this feat of memorization is indeed possible. Prior to this realization, I had been actively banishing fears of failure from my mind, but I lacked a firm conviction that I could indeed conquer this material and formulate a sufficient command of the law that I will be able to demonstrate my minimal competence to the bar examiners. (Thankfully, the bar exam tests for minimal competence, not maximum mastery, as is the case with law school exams.)

So I'm now genuinely confident in my ability to do this thing. And that feels good. Despite knowing how incredibly tedious the next several weeks will be, and how hard I'll have to work, I'm sure that I can do it. I just have to accept that the contours of Louisiana law will necessarily permeate my every waking thought, and I will become a living, breathing encyclopedia of legal knowledge. So it goes that, with this update complete, I must return to making of flashcards on the classification of property and the dismemberments of ownership.

pro bono and a tangential rant

Pro Bono Publico: For the Public Good. That’s the literal translation of the Latin.

Usually shortened to pro bono, the phrase is now synonymous with free legal work above all else, both within the profession and to the public at large.

Most law schools these days require students to serve a minimum number of pro bono hours in order to graduate. (As it happens, my school was the first to introduce this requirement.) Generally, a student’s pro bono requirement can be met by doing a variety of tasks at a variety of organizations, so long as the work is uncompensated and law-related. Basically it’s legal community service.

At Tulane, the pro bono requirement is 30 hours. I was determined to complete this obligation before my summer session abroad and before my 3L year (which begins the week after I return home), so that I’ll have one less thing on my plate during my final year of law school. The way the timing worked out, I didn’t get to start my pro bono work until last week, and I just finished yesterday, which was less than ideal since it made our final weeks before the trip a little more hectic than the rest of the summer has been. Now that the obligation has been met, though, I’m feeling greatly relieved. (Not to mention super stoked about packing and departing in three days!)

For my pro bono service, I worked at the Lawyer Referral Service of the New Orleans Bar Association. It was a fairly easy job as far as I was concerned, because it required little of me other than a skill I perfected for 5 years at my paralegal job: fielding telephone calls, listening to folks describe their legal problems, and sending them to an attorney who can help them, if at all possible. So it wasn’t very difficult, even though it did require me to resurrect my Sweet Southern Girl telephone persona.

But I’m very pleased with the experience, because it demonstrated for me in a very concrete way the continued need and demand for quality legal services. There’s a Big Worry among my cohort of law students about job scarcity upon graduation, because big firms aren’t hiring at the rates they used to, but since folks continue going through the law school grind, there’s no shortage of lawyers. Of course this leads to increased competition across the board, but particularly in areas like government which used to be something of a safe harbor for law students without impressive GPAs. So there’s lots and lots of law students right now, all across the country, fretting about where and whether they’ll get jobs after graduating. And their worry is actually well founded, because the system which perpetrated $100k+ salaries for newly-minted lawyers is, IMHO, unsustainable.

The thing is that there’s no shortage of need or demand for legal services. (I knew this going into law school, and it’s the reason that I’m not worried about my prospects for enjoying a decent standard of living after graduation; it’s just nice to have been viscerally reminded of this fact during the course of completing my pro bono requirement.) Even still, most newly-minted lawyers are not equipped to meet any of this need or demand for legal services, because all they know about the law is from the classroom and their casebooks. Most law graduates simply lack the real world experience to walk off out of the classroom and into the courtroom if they hope to competently represent anyone’s interest.

And that’s tragic. The way I see it, legal education is severely flawed in many ways. It’s something I hope I can work towards changing once I get my fancy credentials, which I'm one step closer to having now with my pro bono requirement out of the way.

summer vacation, 2L version

Two weeks into my summer vacation, and it's feeling a lot more like summer than vacation.

Things were lovely for a little while: the last front of cool, feel-good air moved through New Orleans, which naturally led to picnicking and walking in the park. Hubby and I enjoyed a lovely date night downtown. I luxuriated in several days of post-exam-relaxation, sleeping late and generally doing very little other than watching the Netflix. I re-read a comforting familiar dystopian novel for fun and at my own pace. And even though I fought a little fever bug and played nurse while Hubby did likewise, it was a lovely respite indeed.

But then there were chores to be done, and plans to be made, and business to handle. Because even though I'm not actively a law student at this moment (attending class or reading cases) there's always business to be done relating to my chosen career path. And having a home means there's always chores to be done. So it's not feeling very much like a vacation any more, even though I'm not punching a clock or going to class. Meanwhile the warm temps and high humidity have returned to ensure that it is feeling very much like summer.

At least I have roughly another month to tackle things at my own pace before it's time to get back into student mode for summer school. Which will be very bizarre indeed, seeing as how I'll be physically on vacation from home at the time, studying international human rights law at the University of Amsterdam and living in a flat in Jordaan, Amsterdam.

Bizarre, but incredible. Even though I have plane tickets and passport in hand (and two homework assignments already!), it's still somewhat unbelievable to think that I'm going to study abroad this summer. I've never before left the US, and I've always been a non-traditional student. I'm not quite sure how it happened that I'm now one of those twenty-somethings heading off to spend 5 weeks in Europe.

But it's totally happening. This is going to be an amazing summer vacation, even if there is some summer school thrown into the mix!

free time put to good use

With my 1L year now behind me, I've found myself with a certain amount of free time that I haven't known since last August. Even though I'll be doing summer school and wage-earning legal work in the coming months, I'll still have more free time, comparatively, than I did during that hectic 1L year. So, I have two big projects in the works:

A Container Garden
This winter I got the garden bug something awful, and I've been mentally planning an herb and tiny vegetable garden for many months. But I acted the Good Law Student, and focused the bulk of my time and mental energy towards my legal studies, putting off the garden until after the end of the semester. Thus it was with great pleasure that I started buying herbs, tomatoes, peppers, soil, and containers this past week. And this evening, after the sun was low in the sky, I planted and planted until I ran out of soil. One tomato plant remains, and I'll fetch more soil tomorrow and get him settled in his container.
In all, I'm growing two tomato plants, three pepper plants, a rosemary bush, and an herb garden. I'm most proud of my herb garden, because of my ingenious container solution. See, there's been an old non-working charcoal grill sitting in our courtyard since we moved here. (Since ours was stolen almost immediately upon arriving here, we had hoped that we could salvage the old one, but no such luck. It refuses to function as a grill.) So I threw away the lid and the grates, lined the vents with cheesecloth -- so my soil wouldn't fall out the bottom -- and used it as a super-sized planter.
It worked perfectly! It contains my entire herb garden: basil, parsley, mint, sage, cilantro, dill, thyme, chives, and oregano. The creepers -- thyme and oregano -- are toward the front edges so they can do their thing and cascade down the side of the grill, and the tall boys -- mint, parsley, and basil -- are toward the back so they can grow high unimpeded. Delicate cilantro and dill are in the middle, where they can be protected by the shade of the taller growers. (Rosemary has its own pot since its a perennial here in NOLA.)
The veggies are each in their own separate, large pots. I wish I could share photos. I have some, but since my laptop is dead I'm without a good way to get the photos off of my memory card...

Updating My Online Presence
This is a big project. First, I'm going to sever this blog from my professional life. I'll still provide updates as to what's going on with me and my legal career, but I'm not going to make an effort to steer clear of the mundane. This blog is going to be geared at folks who know me IRL and who want to know what's going on in my day-to-day life.
Second, I'm going to create a whole new blog dedicated to legal issues and the kinds of things I'm interested in professionally. Ya'll will be free to visit over there, but I won't feel like I'm boring you with my legal interests.
Third, I'm going to compartmentalize my website, separating the personal from the professional. This will entail making a legal sub-domain which will serve as the portal to my professional services, accomplishments, interests, etc., leaving the main site much as it is now, although I do intend to redesign it a bit.
So this is a big project, but one which will be somewhat enjoyable (because I am, after all, an old-school HTML geek) and wholly worthwhile. Stay tuned for links to the new pages as they get up and running.

Otherwise,
I been enjoying spending time in the kitchen without feeling guilty or rushed. This weekend I made fresh-squeezed lemonade, a crock-pot roasted chicken (the leftovers of which are soon to become chicken salad for lunch), from-scratch jambalaya, and from-scratch fettuccine alfredo with prosciutto, mushrooms, and green onions. Not only were the results of my hard work in the kitchen yummy, but I relished in the slow pace of it all. Yay for kitchen therapy!

So I'm all poised to make the most out of whatever free time I can squeeze out of this summer.

a 1L no more and other law school news

My first year of law school is officially over. Yay!

The feeling of accomplishment is immense. I can only imagine how good it will feel to get that JD in hand come 2012...

The exam period was daunting, but I survived. No word yet on grades; they'll be weeks in the coming.

In the midst of it, though, I was dealt a major set-back: with two exams down and one to go, my laptop died. It wasn't completely without warning; Mr. Lappy had been giving me fits when powering up and when waking from sleep, so I had been regularly backing-up my Absolutely Essential data, but I haven't yet managed to save all of my digital photos or archived e-mails. Alas, I remain hopeful that I can salvage those things some way or another.

Luckily, my trusty old ThinkPad, with his dead battery and held-on-by-one-screw-screen came to the rescue so that I didn't have to hand-write my Constitutional Law exam. He'll serve my portable computing needs for the summer, and at home I can share hubby's desktop, and by mid-August I should be able to save up for a new laptop. I will not, however, be buying another HP. Instead, I'm looking to custom build with AVADirect, so that I can tailor my computer for doing what I need it to do: helping me to be a better law student and someday-soon-lawyer.

So, with my 1L year behind me, I'm all geared up for a busy summer. I've got my judicial internship, and not one but 2 part-time law clerk jobs for local small firms. And I'm taking a summer externship class. Although summer school means I'll be super-busy, it will be a good thing because I'll start my 2L year with more credits than students who don't do summer school, which will mean a lighter class-load at some point in my law school career. On top of that, the externship meets Tulane's "skills course" requirement, which is a fancy way of saying that you can't graduate without doing hands-on legal work for class credit. By getting that requirement out of the way now, it will be one less thing to worry about down the road.

The externship involves two components: classroom and field placement. During May and June I'll have class 1-2 times per week, and then during July I'll be working in the Family Law Unit at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. Classes start on Thursday, so I haven't really had much of a break, and the way things are looking I'm not likely to get much of one.

Not that I really mind working through the summer. I'll get some great experience and it will feel good to be working again, but I hope that at some point we can plan a few weekend trips here and there to visit friends and family in Mississippi...