Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I've heard its overrated. The law schools let in too many people compared to how much actual demand there is for law graduates. The only reason to go to law school if you are in the top tier school because that's where all the law firms go to recruit.
Is it as gruelling as it sounds? Reading case law every waking hour? Are the profs like the one in "The Paper Chase"?
The 1L year is tough, but lots of people manage to make it work. The trick is making the workload lighter for yourself. Many of your professors tell you not to use canned briefs like Gilbert or Legalines, and not to use hornbooks. That's crap; use them. Just don't bring them to class. Brief the major cases from your casebook, but don't sweat the note-cases.
And any professor who acts like the one in The Paper Chase is probably either senile, laughed at, or playing with you. That doesn't mean you won't find tough profs or jerks. But they aren't the norm.
There is nothing wrong in using a commercial outline or treatise to help you understand a confusing concept. The problem is that they are also enablers for some really bad habits like blowing off class, surfing the net during class, not taking good notes, not preparing your own outlines to learn the material, not reading cases, and not briefing cases. If you fall into those bad habits you are on a path to be a B- student.
I didn't find the first year of law school unbearably difficult. It's a long time ago, but if I recall correctly we had about a hundred pages of reading per week, per class, so the volume wasn't overwhelming. it is true that the approach to legal reasoning and the analysis needed to be prepared every day was a challenge, but again, not that bad.
The questions I would be asking are whether you know right now that you really want to be a lawyer, whether you have the discipline to do the work through three years of law school and decades of practicing law, and, perhaps most importantly, whether you can afford to go deeply in debt at a time when there is no assurance that you'll find employment to enable you to pay your school loans back.
To give you an example of what I'm talking about, when I took the bar exam in 1979 one of my classmates told me that there was only one guy in our class who didn't have a job yet, and I have every reason to think he was correct. By contrast, I recently heard that of last year's class at Vermont Law School, a respectable school and very well respected in environmental law, only 40% have jobs a year after graduating, and only 15% of this year's class have jobs.
Even if you convince yourself that it won't apply to you, I don't like those odds.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
