The Neallys

Kerry: School Days

Kerry: School DaysIt’s funny. Columbia is very competitive. But I never feel that I am competing with anyone but myself. We are all in a super-intense environment but we are all in it together. People, strangers, started coming to me after class and asking questions. I had no idea why. I had gotten through being called on—professors used the seating chart to select an unsuspecting student for a question about a case, the damn Socratic method long used to make us “think like a lawyer”—and once that happened you did not have to worry about it again for the rest of the term. I was doing the prescribed reading of fifteen pages of our casebooks—each chiefly containing court opinions—a night. It was far different from college lectures. We read a case and the professor asks about the principle it articulated, drawing out our answers so that we understood, we hoped, the point.

Then the exams. This too is different. Most are open book. You can bring whatever you wanted to. Books, notes, rosary beads. Which sounds great until you realize that everyone else can bring their own things in. Because we aren’t being tested on facts like when was the Battle of Gettysburg or what was the meaning of a passage from “Pride and Prejudice.” You get a fact pattern and need to explore all of the relevant legal issues that arise. There are rarely the right answers. It’s all on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand stuff.

Putting all of this together meant that preparation was crucial, and that was the point of the study group. Work together on course outlines and go over the principles again and again. Sure, there were pre-packaged outlines built around a particular casebook. But I did not trust them or myself. I had to do my own outline. And so I did and I shared it with the others in the group, as they shared what they had done.