Some folks have expressed a bit of curiosity as to what exactly I’m doing right now- something a little more specific than ‘studying law’.
The long answer (well, about three pages printed) is this fairly funny article from one of my profs.
The short answer is this:
one semester worth of books
Man, educational standards ARE going down – that was a week’s worth of reading on my course. Granted, I only ever read the introduction and the conclusion, but hey.
Nice collection. I don’t move in till Sept 16th, and classes start around the 23rd.
Here is what I’ll be doing on my first year of the LLB:
* Public Law I (Constitutional Law)
* Common Law I (Law of Contract)
* Law of Property I (Land Law)
* Criminal Law
That looks about right: http://flickr.com/photos/frankenstein/16531993/
You will learn to hate the Blue Book before you’re done….
Luis, you are using the same Civ Pro book as my first-year students. Maybe you guys can meet up in cyberspace and swap notes.
What perhaps isn’t obvious from the photos is that you virtually never actually read the entirety of any casebook, cover-to-cover, in any class. Casebooks are designed to be overinclusive, so the same book can be used for a 3-, 4-, 5-, or even 6-hour course. To be sure, there is a ton of reading your first year, but not 7,000 pages’ worth, if that’s any consolation. :-)
Tim: I am very curious about the coming wave of collaborative note-taking and brief-writing. Feels like a wiki would be way better than the pile of .doc files we have for old class outlines. I’d been assuming that would be per-school, but yeah, I guess some of it will be cross school too. If your students all start going to a wiki on tieguy.org during class, will you hold it against me? :)
And I figured I don’t read all of it- but now you’re spoiling the impact on my friends and family and reducing their sympathy for me :)
Far be it from me to suggest that any 1L isn’t deserving of all the sympathy, care packages, etc., that friends and family can muster. Thanksgiving is the worst of it, as I recall; you have the whole family together and everybody wants to hear about how school is going, and all you can think of is the fact that finals are less than 3 weeks away and you are way behind on your outlining. Ah, happy times. :-)
And actually, when I was in law school I took Federal Courts with the late Charles Alan Wright (kind of a legendary figure), who used his own casebook, and we did indeed start the first day on page 1 and proceed in linear fashion through to page 900 or so over the course of the semester. So you just never know.
My flippant suggestion to the contrary notwithstanding, there’s actually probably not a whole lot of cross-school student discussion. Partly it’s because every prof has their own spin on a subject matter; we all choose to highlight different things. Mary LaFrance at UNLV co-wrote a casebook on IP law that both she and I are using this fall to teach 3-hour survey courses, and having seen her syllabus, I bet there’s not more than about a 20% overlap with mine. There’s also the problem of diminishing returns to scale — every single one of the nation’s 40,000 or so 1Ls will be reading Erie R.R. v. Tompkins in first-year Civ Pro, but the case isn’t that tricky, and discussing it on a group wiki with 1,000 other people isn’t likely to yield many more insights than discussing it with 5 classmates over lunch. But as my last post on Info/Law suggests, I would love to see more collaborative efforts at putting legal educational resources online, and that includes student resources like outlines and the like. Wikiversity might be one vehicle for this, but if tieguy.org is another vehicle, I’ll be all for it. :-)