The Truth about Law Students
With the first Legal Research and Writing assignment comes the truth: Harvard Law students are just a bunch of overachieving, ultra-competitive stress bunnies after all. We pretend we don’t really care about grades. We try to act relaxed and laid-back, like we actually believed the Dean when she said, “The competition is over, and you won.”
But the minute we’re told to look up x number of sources on the “inevitable disclosure of trade secrets” doctrine and that it shouldn’t take more than an hour to do, all hell breaks loose. People spend three hours, five hours, a day and a half on it–and this is for the two-credit class that is graded pass/fail. I spent two hours on the assignment, and I feel like a slacker.
The secret’s out. We care. And if you get in our way, we will cut you.
September 22nd, 2005 at 10:22 am
Ha! Fifty-seven minutes. What are they going to do, fail me?
September 22nd, 2005 at 11:07 am
So the moral of the story is One-L is a total work of non-fiction?
September 22nd, 2005 at 2:10 pm
T: Impressive. I wasted time by reading things instead of just skimming for sources, but I still don’t think I could have finished under an hour.
Taco John: It’s too early to say how crazy things are gonna get here, but I stand by my reading of One-L as one man’s story of driving himself crazy. If you want, you can work all day and never do enough. Or, you can do nothing and skate by. I think most of the people here are aiming for something between One-L and Brush With the Law, with varying degrees of success.
September 23rd, 2005 at 12:21 am
45 mins…but then I don’t go to Harvard…
September 23rd, 2005 at 6:33 am
Dude…ouch. Oh, my pride…
Yeah, I’m a legal research failure. So what, you wanna fight about it?
September 23rd, 2005 at 7:59 pm
Three and a half hours, and mine still sucked.
It’s not that I’m ultracompetitive — I was just confused.
September 24th, 2005 at 10:07 pm
I have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to be similar at my school. We all pretend to be laid back and relaxed, guaranteed job yada yada, but when those assignments are handed out… watch the stampede. I’m expecting people to show up to class on Monday having already read entire packets.