Laura Drake

I forgot to bring my book. To the open book exam. To the only exam that actually counted.

There are all kinds of scenarios you see frequently where seemingly otherwise-normal people go completely insane: sporting riots, Black Friday, anytime free food is introduced into a newsroom. In the past, upon viewing these events, I would think to myself “Self, in such a situation, you would not succumb to the crazies. You would likely rise above the desire to go nuts about something that doesn’t matter.”

Then I went through first-year law school exams, upon which I learned that I am apparently completely the kind of person who goes batty when faced with things that mostly don’t matter and even more insane when faced with something that does.

At UVic, the 1Ls had six exams in a 12-day period: Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday for two weeks. Here’s the thing: Five of those exams didn’t count. Not technically, anyway. At UVic, the year-long courses all have midterms from which the grade will only count if it’s better than the grade you get on your final. These are dubbed “help, not hurt” exams, a moniker I take issue with having gone through the “help, not hurt” exam period.

I stopped exercising. I stopped eating. I didn’t consciously try to stop sleeping, but I did anyway. For two weeks, no matter what time I went to bed, I would wake up hourly, occasionally actually sitting bolt upright, with my brain a jumble of different law-related thoughts. Not even fully formed thoughts, either, so it’s not like these nocturnal interruptions were helpful. It was only ever just little, unconnected fragments of thoughts from all seven of my classes.

Offer, acceptance, consideration…Multiple Access v. McCutcheon…trespass torts…three doctrinal requirements to complete a gift…Oakes test…

Et cetera. On a loop. Every night for two weeks.

Of course, there was one exam that did count. Our Law, Legislation and Policy course was only half a year, so the December exam was the final, the one that one prof described as “just hurt.” And, of course, it was for that exam that I did the craziest thing I did in all of the two-week exam period, possibly ever.

I forgot to bring my book. To the open book exam. To the only exam that actually counted.

Considering my panic level at any given point in those two weeks was generally situated at around a 7, the discovery that I would have to write a three-hour final that actually counted without my coursebook (which, by the way, is where I made all my notes) almost caused a stroke. Which is a really great physical and mental place to be in, by the way, just before you write an exam.

The only good thing to say about this is that once my blood started flowing again and I emitted a sound not unlike a cat being strangled, literally everyone around me who figured out what had happened to me simultaneously reached with their one hand to their own book and with their other hand to their wallet to get out their copy card so that I could run to the library and copy as much of their book as I could before the exam. Seriously, there were like 8 different people performing the exact same motion, some of whom I don’t even really know. It was a balletic example of the kindness and generosity of UVic law students. It was actually really heartwarming.

Of course, it also didn’t change how screwed I was. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say it did not go well. Try and at least learn from me, anyone who is reading this, to check your backpack twice before leaving for an exam so that some good might come of this. And if you have any tips on how to better survive the next exam period — the one in April that actually all counts — please, for the love of Christmas, pass them on.

Law schools tell you to strike a balance. It’s way easier said than done

Paradoxically, one of the most stressful things about the first few months of law school can be figuring out the best way to relax in a non-law way.

First off, primary law school activities suck up the bulk of your time. There’s at least 20 hours of class a week, plus 20-30 hours of readings. On top of that, now that it’s November, we’re also into midterms and assignments that have to be worked around classes and readings, so, if you round up, we’re looking at about 60 hours of first-order law school business.

Then there’s the secondary law student activities which, while not technically mandatory in the pursuit of a JD, are so universally viewed as necessary in the law school context that they might as well be degree requirements. Here we’re looking at things like joining law-related clubs, volunteering for Pro Bono Students Canada, attending lunchtime talks and seminars, networking with local lawyers and going to Canadian Bar Association events, etc. Depending on how keen you are, this is going to suck up 5-15 hours a week.

Finally, you’re also supposed to be making friends and comrades among your law class, which largely happens within the above-mentioned categories, but which also takes up post-school time. I’m not going to assign an hour value to this, because that would be weird.

On top of all that, law schools are constantly reminding us to strike a balance between school and life so that we don’t, presumably, all go nuts and turn into lawbots. If you look at the math provided above, though, this is way easier said than done.

Possibly to address this exact issue, some law schools have started building in institutional mechanisms to help law students deal with their school/life balance. Duke University Law has an actual course devoted to well-being. Yale University’s law faculty has started offering yoga classes to its students.

Superficially, these seem like kind of a nice idea. Law schools are finally owning up to the pressures placed on students and doing something to give them a hand. Practically, though, I don’t think I can really get behind them.

When you’re a law student, you spend most of your waking hours in the law building. It is the physical nexus of all the things that are stressing you out at any given time. There also can be, for some people, a weird kind of pressure to spend more time in the law building when they finish class and notice that they’re the only person heading for the bus stop when everyone else is library-bound.

So to situate relaxing activities inside the place from which all the stress is emanating seems really counter-intuitive. If you want to take a yoga class to help de-lawschoolify, it’s far better to take one as far away from the law school as physically possible and without other law students present, as opposed to in the building you already spend the bulk of your time and surrounded by people with the exact same kind of stress as you, after which chances run at about 100 per cent that someone will be like “Hey, want to hit the library? It’s right there!” Even worse would actually be to have homework for a class on well-being. “Sorry, I can’t go to the bar, I have to do my happiness homework.”

To my mind, if law schools really want to give students a hand maintaining a life outside their walls, they should simply keep schedules as tight as possible to allow for maximum time as far away from the school as one can get.

Within the bounds of what it’s appropriate for, it’s the best

As a child, if given the choice between spending time with a human or spending time with a book, 99 times out of 100 I would take the book, and the other one time it was probably only because my mother had physically taken my book away on that particular occasion. Books were my friends, and we were the very best of. In library contests where children had to move a paper totem along a wall advanced by minutes read, my little hot air balloon was often idling at the far end of the wall before half the others had even left the start gate.

In light of the hours upon hours I now find myself reading every single day, in retrospect, I kind of wish I had spent at least a little more time outside or developing the social skills that are probably going to atrophy over the next three years of law school.

Everyone tells you how much reading there is in first-year law school, but no one (read: me) really believes it until you get there. A few days before class started in September, some of the first-years were meeting up for lunch when our smart phones all went off with an e-mail from the Assistant Dean. It included, among other illuminating facts about first-year law, that we would probably be assigned 300 to 500 pages of reading a week.

“Okay, but not really,” we (again, read: me) said. “They’re probably just trying to scare us.”

Whether this tendency to believe things in the face of all evidence to the contrary will benefit or harm me in a legal career is yet to be seen. However, the Assistant Dean, unsurprisingly, was not lying. If anything, she was lowballing the estimate.

On any given night of the seven days of the week, I would say I have between two and five hours of reading. The real kick in the pants, too, is that all my amassed hours of childhood (and adulthood) reading has contributed very little to my ability to read what is assigned from law school. In fact, law school in large measure requires the same approaches that one used to learn to read the first time, like following the text with your finger to guide your eyes. The biggest thing, though, is having to pause three or four times a page to look up a phrase (frequently, and I would argue unnecessarily, in Latin) that you can’t quite figure out. And it is on this point that I would like to virtually kiss the feet of the originators of Wikipedia.

I will pause here to note that there are many objections to the use of Wikipedia in academic endeavours, and many of these are valid. I would never, nor would I ever advocate, relying on Wikipedia (or any other secondary source) as the first path of learning something. Nor would I ever cite Wikipedia in an assignment or even in class. My point is, there are limits to Wikipedia’s utility, but within the bounds of what it’s appropriate for, it’s the best.

I’d argue that Wikipedia’s main area of appropriate usage, in relation to law students, is its ability to put into plain language the dozens of new words or phrases we run up against when cracking into those 60-120 pages of nightly reading.

Real life example: Last week, for my property law class was assigned a really interesting case that had to do with the tort of conversion. As a precursor to reading, our professor suggested that we figure out what “conversion” was and my brain was all like “Duh. Conversion is either when you change one unit of measurement to another or that thing that Coach Taylor occasionally talks about on Friday Night Lights. Case closed.”

This is how the case defined conversion: “conversion-a tort that protects against interference with possessory and ownership interests in personal property.”

At which point my brain was like “No mention of measurement has been made, and it seems unlikely this is what Coach was imploring the Panthers to do. Harmonization of previous known definitions of conversion has failed. Wikipedia?”

Conversion is a common law tort. A conversion is a voluntary act by one person inconsistent with the ownership rights of another.^[1] It is a tort of strict liability.^[2] Its criminal counterpart is theft.

The two sentences are basically the same, but the one on Wikipedia managed to snap the legal meaning of “conversion” to the grid in my head by using plain language that the strict definition given in the case was not, and it did it in about three seconds. It’s pretty hard to argue against the utility of that. And it’s phenomenal how many of the terms and phrases I’m coming across for the first time have fully written and referenced Wikipedia entries.

How did people live before the Internet?

Photo by nojhan

When an event is hosted by multiple law firms it’s kind of like speed dating

There are a lot of things that happen at law school which, I presume, people get quickly used to and absorb into their normal conception of the way things are and how they work, but when first encountered as a wide-eyed first year can seem strange and foreign and completely intimidating, especially given the wide variety of backgrounds from which first-year law students come. Most of those backgrounds, I assume, don’t include going to wine and cheese events.

UVic’s first wine and cheese event, hosted by big Calgary and Vancouver firms in town to conduct interviews, was on Monday. The event invitation went out to everyone, and like so many things I’m confronted with that involve new experiences, my first instinct was to hide under my couch at home until the event had passed. Journalism, the subject of my previous career and degree, is many things, but it is not generally considered to be fancy. Nor am I, for that matter. Wine and cheese events, on the other  hand, seem entirely predicated on fanciness. Moreover, that was about the extent of my knowledge on the subject — that these things are fancy. Outside of that, I had no conception whatsoever of the things that were meant to happen there, who was supposed to go and who we were supposed to talk to.

Then, of course, I had the following conversation that is kind of like a first year law student Mad Lib, repeated ad nauseum for the first few weeks of school, when there are roughly 18 billion things for us to attend:

Student A: Are you going to [X] tonight?

Student B: I don’t know, I was thinking about it, but I’m not sure. I have so many readings to do, and no one to go with.

Student A: Me too. Hey what if we went together?

Student B: Brilliant! Then we wouldn’t be alone! I’m sure [Students C-Z] would also want to come too. Then we’d be a group, so if nothing else we can stick together.

This is how, on Monday night, instead of doing the readings for my first Torts class, I ended up with three of my classmates heading to the Wine and Cheese event we knew nothing about, except that we had to dress in business attire.

As it turns out, a Wine and Cheese hosted by multiple law firms is kind of like speed dating. The firms sat at tables lining the room, and upon entering we were given a map and bios of each firm present. The responsibility to strike up a conversation with any given firm representative fell upon the students.

This was slightly awkward, insofar as myself and the people I was with were acutely aware that we currently have nothing to offer these people. Monday was actually the first day of real classes for us, so the entirety of our legal knowledge consisted of about two hours of our first Property Law class. We were all of the opinion that practising lawyers would have very little interest in talking about the fundamental principles of property rights.

So what we did instead was to go up to any representatives at a table who looked bored or lonely, introduce ourselves as first years who had had one day of formal instruction, and ask if they had any general advice for us on the first day of class looking forward to the rest of our careers given that most of us have no clue what we want to do, let alone how to go about doing it.

Everyone was really friendly, and quick with helpful general advice, like first-year law grades matter less than any other line on your transcript. That you don’t need a law job after first year if you don’t feel comfortable getting one. That big firms are largely the same in terms of the areas of law practised, so what can be most important is finding one where you fit in personally. That we shouldn’t panic (which is something we’ve been hearing a lot lately, usually because we’re all panicking.)

So, in the end, it was a completely worthwhile thing to go to, even though none of us went expressly to schmooze or “make connections,” which is often other students’ stated purpose for going to these kinds of functions.

And if nothing else, we got a free dinner. I will say this: “cheese” is a misnomer. There was an unbelievable array of delicious, plentiful food there; so much so that we cancelled our post-event dinner plans to go home and digest . . . and get those Torts readings done.

Image: Getty Images

If you answered yes to all the above questions, Congrats! You were at the first day of UVic law with me.

1. Did you have to actively concentrate to avoid stepping on or kicking a bunny on your way to class? (Yes/No)

2. Did the Dean of your school give the following speech: “Look at the student on your right. Now look at the student on your left. You just made two new friends!” (Yes/No)

2a. Did the Dean then give you prescribed time to enter your new friends number in your notebook or cellular telephone. (Yes/No)

3. Did an elder from the Coast Salish nation welcome your class and remind you to be grateful for your family and friends who helped get you to school? (Yes/No)

4. Did the Dean, several times throughout the morning, ask you to look into your neighbour’s eyes and tell them they deserved to be there and/or various other positive affirmations about their self worth? (Yes/No)

5. Did you get a bag full of swag that included, among other things, an eco-friendly water bottle? (Yes/No)

If you answered yes to all the above questions, Congrats! You were at the first day of UVic law with me. If you answered No to any, I’m sorry. Your day was probably way less awesome than mine.

(Now I’m excited. This is starting to seem less scary and more fun…)

I mean, I am excited. Or I was. Abject fear has been slowly overtaking excited as my dominant pre-law school emotion.

Blogging might be light in the next two or three weeks as I enter what the French call le panic mode.* For one thing, I’m departing Edmonton by car for Victoria in slightly more than a week and I have packed … (looks around apartment) zero things.

So that constitutes, rough estimate, about 20 per cent of my stress. The rest resides in this little knot in my stomach that explodes into full-body terrors, usually right after someone says something like “School starts so soon! Are you excited?”

I mean, I am excited. Or I was. Abject fear has been slowly overtaking excited as my dominant pre-law school emotion as orientation day approaches. This is normal, probably, but it’s not enjoyable.

For example, the other day I was talking with UBC law professor David Duff during which he proffered this little nugget:

“At the end of the day, when students get to law school, they’re all in the same pool. There’s always this phenomenon whereby law students have always been above average and, by definition, half of them are not going to be above average.”

I think I managed to continue talking, but there’s also a definite chance I stopped conversing and devolved into making tiny rodential squeaks as my brain was like “Me. It’s me. I’m totally going to be below average. Oh my God. What am I doing? I’m going to spend $–,— just to fail and I’m going to have to move in to my parents’ basement and live there for all eternity waaaahhhhhhhhh.”

I’m sure I felt this way as a 17-year-old heading across four provinces to start my undergraduate degree, but I don’t remember, because in my own mind I can fold the space-time continuum so that 17-year-old me is also 25-year-old me who is imbued with the knowledge that undergrad was not only completely achievable but amazingly fun and therefore has no fear, and tells 17-year-old me this and we high-five in my memory and retroactively erase all the fear and doubt I had eight years ago, leaving me only with my current fear and doubt.

Well, that, and Google. If you type something along the lines of “Law school won’t kill me, right?” you can turn up a treasure trove of living, breathing current-and-former law students willing to help out with friendly advice. Some of my favourites are here, here, here and here.

Also, advice is also welcome in the comments section. For the meantime, I’m going to start packing … or curl up in the couch in the fetal position. TBD.

*La mode panique? That can’t be right, because I think that means the panic fashion. Oh, small town Alberta high school French. You have forsaken me.

Who else is out there doing this? And do they, also, freely admit the trashiness of their legal texts?

I should have picked Queen’s law:

Art Cockfield is one of the few professors who use sex and violence to help teach the Income Tax Act and international tax law.

The Queen’s University law instructor writes books that combine traditional textbook style information with a fictional case study story that he freely admits are trashy.

His book Manager’s Guide to International Tax contains a murder-mystery novella involving a corporate power struggle set in a Napa Valley winery. Student Edition of the Income Tax Act has a senior partner in an accounting office take her junior associate hostage and threatens to kill him unless he can answer questions about some shady business dealings.

One of the few professors? Who else is out there doing this? And do they, also, freely admit the trashiness of their legal texts? I’d really appreciate it if anyone who’s had Art Cockfield could weigh in on how sexy and/or violent his tax law classes are. Also, whether or not his texts stand up to this guy’s standard for legal writing.

I guess my last post got some hackles up south of the border.

I guess my last post got some hackles up south of the border:

But is the LSAT pointless? Recently, a Canadian online newspaper asked why the great land of Canadia, home to mounties and maple trees, would eliminate the MCAT from medical school consideration while maintaining the LSAT as one of the principle determining factors for law school admission. The writer, Laura Drake, then postulated that the LSAT actually doesn’t test anything needed for law school/legal work.

*Waves frantically south of the border* Thanks for visiting! The author here is a fun, snappy writer, and you should check out the post, Why the LSAT is Useful, and one Canadian Newspaper is not.

. Now, on to some quick points.

1. I don’t think I actually postulated that the LSAT doesn’t test anything needed for law school or legal work. When I said it has nothing to do with the law, I meant the literal law. Current legislation, rules of evidence, civil procedure, etc. A lot of people who have never taken the LSAT are under the impression that the test includes those things, and I was simply pointing out that it doesn’t.

2. I also never said the LSAT was pointless, and if I gave that impression, then my bad for being unclear. What it does test — logical reasoning, analytical reasoning and reading comprehension — are probably useful for most things in life, law school inclusive. What I was more doing was try to start a conversation about whether its the best and, more importantly, only way to measure ones abilities at those things.

3. Maclean’s is actually a magazine, and I personally find it pretty useful at times. My own use to the universe, however, is definitely up for debate.

Asking someone what they got on the LSAT ranks somewhere between asking someone what they weigh and asking them how much money they made last year

The whole deciding, applying and accepting process for law school is a long and arduous process, of which the most time-and-mind consuming of it all has got to be studying and writing the LSAT. *

If you ever need to disabuse your mind of the notion that knowledge of the law is a prerequisite for law school, take a gander at a sample LSAT one day. The six-sectioned, nearly-five-hour torture exercise has precisely nothing to do with the law and everything to do with one’s ability to generate locker assignments for oddly-alphabetically named fifth graders who are possessed of complex social structures that would erupt were Betty forced to share with Carly.

Still, it’s mandatory. And thus, it becomes all-consuming for those considering law school, between studying for it and asking other people how they studied for it and obsessively checking law schools’ median LSAT scores for last year’s entering class against your practice results, et cetera.

The strange thing, though, is that even though the only point of writing the LSAT is to award test-takers a score which they will use to apply for school, asking someone what they got on the LSAT ranks somewhere between asking someone what they weigh and asking them how much money they made last year on the list of societally unacceptable things to inquire of people that will always garner you cock-eyed disapproving looks but rarely get you an answer.

I started studying for the LSAT last February and wrote last June, and for the first time in more than a year since I received my score, someone flat-out asked me what I got. I’m in Victoria at the moment, setting up my place for the forthcoming school year, and while opening an account at the video store around the corner, the clerk asked what brought me to the city, and upon hearing my answer the first words out of his mouth were “What did you get on the LSAT.” Literally, just like that. I almost high-fived him for being so forthcoming, being someone who is both naturally nosy and was just previously paid to ask strangers intrusive questions.

It turned out that he’s in the middle of studying for the LSAT himself, which is exactly the position I was in more than a year ago. Just like our curious video clerk, I too constantly asked previous writers how they did on the LSAT, only to frequently receive such maddening non-answers as “Well, I did well enough to get into law school.”

Even on the Internet, where everyone is cloaked in a veil of anonymity, there is a reticence to share LSAT scores unless prompted**. Over at lawstudents.ca, each Canadian law school has its own message board, and each of those has its own variant of an IN! thread, in which applicants post messages when they get in to said school. Now, every single one of these threads is populated by applicants who haven’t yet heard back, and every single time the same thing happens over and over throughout the life of the thread:

1. Someone posts that they’ve been accepted to school X, with very little other info.

2. Someone else immediately responds, asking poster 1 what their stats are, ie, LSAT score and GPA

3. The original poster responds, gladly willing to furnish such info on request, but almost never having put it in the original post, despite knowing that these are the only things the people who use these boards really care to know, so that they may judge their own chances of getting an acceptance letter in the near future.

I suppose the reason that it’s so verboten to either voluntarily disclose one’s LSAT score, or to ask what someone else’s is, is that if the conversation is taking place between two applicants or law students, unless they got the exact same score, such a discussion immediately ranks the participants in a supremely uncomfortable way by which the superior score-getter fears being seen as smug or a braggart and the inferior score-getter immediately feels subpar and both are keenly aware of both their own and the other’s feelings, neither of which are pleasant.

Accordingly, even though the LSAT is something for which people prepare for months, and which the only point is to get a score, once you’ve got the score you’ve worked so hard for, the only people who ask what you got are those who have no comprehension of the whole process or what a score between 120 and 180 even means, and so just nod pleasantly and blankly when you tell them and then immediately ask what kind of law you want to practice.

*The second-most is the personal essay, which I actually hated far, far more than the LSAT and accordingly spent far less time on, but will be discussed in a later blog post.

**Which is exactly why I have just written a 750-word post on the LSAT without voluntarily disclosing my own score.***

*** In case it hasn’t become obvious, I’m about 300 pages into David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest right now, which is why I’m probably going to be moderately annoying for the next month or so w/r/t using footnotes and so such.

To be perfectly frank, I still don’t think I know what a good reason to pick one law school over another is.

I don’t know how most incoming law students spend their summer before school, but I personally opted to quit my job two months early for a hiatus from thinking and in order to have enough time to move cities without causing undue stress.

I spent the first two weeks of my newfound temporary freedom on vacation in Ottawa, where I lived for six years before I moved to Edmonton. I also have a lot of family here, so basically I’ve spent the last two weeks frantically running around trying to meet up with people I haven’t seen in awhile. An interesting pattern emerged in the majority of the conversations, wherein at some point the person I was meeting with would lean back and just look at me and say, “Why Victoria?”

To be perfectly frank, I still don’t think I know what a good reason to pick one law school over another is. The most common advice I heard was to go to school close to where you want to practice, because it’s just easier to get jobs at employers the more proximate they are to your school. Another frequent piece of advice is to go to a school that specializes in the kind of law you think you want to practice, but as previously discussed in this space, I’m not sure that’s something m0st people really know. In the States, rankings play a huge role in what schools people aim for, but that’s not the case up here.

So, given that I’m quite flexible on where I’d want to practice and what kind of law I want to do, when people ask me why I picked the University of Victoria’s law school over the others I was accepted to, a little part of me panics because I don’t have one good solid answer. I generally sort of throw out a combination of any and all of the following points:

• The current and former students of UVic law school have got to be the happiest unrepresentative sample I’ve ever canvassed. Literally everyone I’ve talked to who went or goes there has nothing but fantastic things to say about the law school, it’s professors and course options and fostered attitude of non-competitiveness. It’s kind of stunning. This is not true of any other law school I’ve come across in this country
• UVic’s law school is smaller than most, and having grown up in a town of 5,000 people, I’m slightly agorophobic. I had to drive in Toronto last weekend and it took me an hour for me to stop shaking from the stress of it.
• UVic has cheaper tuition than most Canadian law schools. I believe it’s lower than everywhere except Quebec schools for Quebec resident.
• I’ve never lived there before. Most everyone, including myself, expected that I would go to Ottawa when I was accepted there because of the aforementioned family-and-friend factor, but this seemed like more of an adventure.
• It doesn’t snow in Victoria. This is almost certainly the worst reason I have, but it is, nonetheless, one of my actual deciding factors. I had to give UVic an answer on admissions by February 1 this year, and while I’m sure there were practical reasons for that date, I’m also sure that it’s a shrewd marketing technique on the part of the law school because the weather is complete shit everywhere else in Canada on Feburary 1.

That’s pretty much it. I kind of cringe at the lack of law-related reasons on that list, but that’s kind of my whole point: What is a good reason to pick a law school? I’d love if other incoming law students could weigh in in the comments about why they h0nestly picked their school.