Reasonably humbled

[Up early this morning thinking about my progress in law school. One of the things that sort of is good and sort of sucks about law school is each class's grade comes solely from each semester's final exams. The only real feedback we're getting is in the classes that are pass/fail. This is good because I hate projects with looming deadlines; I psych myself out and dread them and put them off until the last possible moment, and then I either do well enough or don't, when I know I could've done better if I'd pushed the shit out in a reasonable time. (Sidebar, Your Honor: Reasonableness is a huge concept in law. Y'know the idea of John Q. Public, with 2.6 kids and a home in the suburbs and a Winnebago parked in the driveway? Well, The Law is riddled with what the "reasonable person" {which, you can imagine, was, until recently, the "reasonable man") would do, or should do, or is required to do, usually for a "reasonable time" and in a "reasonable way." If you can remember that this totally fictional "reasonableness" standard is the basis of most law, you've got the thing half licked.) On the other hand, I'm a fantastic test-taker. Give me a quiz a week, even one of those standardized ones where you fill in the bubbles, and I'll shine more often than not.]

[So, finally, this week, some feedback. (Sidebar again, sorry, Your Honor. Also, in law, nothing means what it means in the outside world. Most professions have jargon that don't mean anything to that "reasonable person." Most people don't know from eclampsia or chromatolysis; they're jargon terms that needn't trouble us unless we're obstetricians or microbiologists. In law, however, there's the "term of art," which means that perfectly straightforward words like negligent, murder, or memo, mean something complete different, or at least maddeningly specific, from what any "reasonable person" would say.) In law, a memo(randum) is an analysis of the likelihood that a defendant's case will be successful. And we wrote our first memos and turned them into our perfectly pleasant, heading-into-middle-age, mild-manneredly gay Legal Research and Writing instructor last week, and he gave them back to us today, covered in cruel, green ink. This story has gone on too long already, which apparently my analysis of landlord-tenant negligence (you think you know what the words analysis, landlord, tenant, and negligence mean, but trust me, you don't; well, maybe you do) did NOT do. Yes, he warned us we would ALL have to do massive rewrites. But, I'm the stellar one-chance-test-taker. I hate having to go back and tinker with something, especially an essay, even though I know he (my instructor; are you paying attention?) is right.]

[The other major piece of feedback came from my first practice exam for Torts. All in all, I'd guess about a B/B- (though, of course, no letter grade until the end when it's too late to go back and fix it), although my discussion of Shopkeeper's Privilege (a merchant may detain someone she reasonably believes is stealing, for a reasonable time, in a reasonable manner; see how this works?) was Xeroxed and appended to the examples we got back of good answers, so yay.]

[In both cases, I thought I did better than I did, and in both cases, the problems are pretty easily fixable. Finals aren't for another month, and I have two weeks to do the memo rewrite. And, yes, I still love it there, slightly bruised ego notwithstanding.]

Previously Next