<p>Does anyone want to run through a day or week of what law school is like. I'm curious of how hard i am going to have to work to preform well. So if any law students or former law students would like to share that would be great. Thanks.</p>
<p>Pick up a copy of "Law School Confidential" by Robert Miller, which gives the best overview of law school there is.</p>
<p>Its boring with a side of tedious. If you don't seriously enjoy reading tons of legal books, at least your first year in law school, go into a different field.</p>
<p>If everyone who didn't "seriously enjoy reading tons of legal books" took Joev's advice, there wouldn't be enough lawyers to put together a single decent sized law firm.</p>
<p>I went out yesterday and bought Law School Confidential and couldnt put it down. A great book that i recommend to everyone.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If everyone who didn't "seriously enjoy reading tons of legal books" took Joev's advice, there wouldn't be enough lawyers to put together a single decent sized law firm.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I resent that. That is COMPLETLY untrue.</p>
<p>KB88,</p>
<p>I see from your other posts that you're a 16-year-old high school junior who has participated in some mock trials. I'll give you a pass this one time for your callow attack on my integrity. But just this once.</p>
<p>I've been practicing law for twenty years. I'm not sure that I've read "tons" of legal books, but I have read several times my considerable weight in such tomes.</p>
<p>I don't recall a single one of my law school classmates ever remarking that he or she "seriously enjoyed" reading that day's assignments. I recall more than one classmate promising announcing plans to ritualistically burn his or her case books at the end of the first year.</p>
<p>I seriously enjoy practicing law. I take enormous satisfaction in having done the serious reading required to be in a position to render valuable counsel to my clients. I know hundreds of lawyers. I don't believe I've ever met one who "seriously enjoy[ed] reading tons of legal books." Legal writing tends to be extremely dry and technical. Legal writers aim to persuade, to elucidate, to edify, to avoid being overturned on appeal. Rarely do they aim to entertain.</p>
<p>i know a guy who went to yale law, never went to class after the first year, still managed to graduate relatively high in his class. if you've ever been to the tucker max site, he says similar things about duke.</p>
<p>its different at a lot of places, but it seems a fair number of lawyers will insist they learned nothing in law school. just an observation, cause i doubt you'd ever hear anybody say that about med. school.</p>
<p>Goodness me...the temperature rises in this thread.</p>
<p>"i know a guy who went to yale law, never went to class after the first year, still managed to graduate relatively high in his class."</p>
<p>If you know anything about the Yale system of instruction, you'd better understand what you just said. <em>rolls eyes</em> </p>
<p>"its different at a lot of places, but it seems a fair number of lawyers will insist they learned nothing in law school. just an observation, cause i doubt you'd ever hear anybody say that about med. school."</p>
<p>Did those lawyers that learned nothing in LS pass the bar? <em>rolls eyes again</em></p>
<p>Greybeard:</p>
<p>"KB88,</p>
<p>I see from your other posts that you're a 16-year-old high school junior who has participated in some mock trials. I'll give you a pass this one time for your callow attack on my integrity. But just this once.</p>
<p>I've been practicing law for twenty years. I'm not sure that I've read "tons" of legal books, but I have read several times my considerable weight in such tomes.</p>
<p>I don't recall a single one of my law school classmates ever remarking that he or she "seriously enjoyed" reading that day's assignments. I recall more than one classmate promising announcing plans to ritualistically burn his or her case books at the end of the first year.</p>
<p>I seriously enjoy practicing law. I take enormous satisfaction in having done the serious reading required to be in a position to render valuable counsel to my clients. I know hundreds of lawyers. I don't believe I've ever met one who "seriously enjoy[ed] reading tons of legal books." Legal writing tends to be extremely dry and technical. Legal writers aim to persuade, to elucidate, to edify, to avoid being overturned on appeal. Rarely do they aim to entertain."</p>
<p>Since you do not know me well enough to assert that I am callow:
I'll give you a pass this one time for your callow attack on my integrity. But just this once.</p>
<p>"Since you do not know me well enough to assert that I am callow:
I'll give you a pass this one time for your callow attack on my integrity. But just this once."</p>
<p>Honestly...Stop.</p>
<p>I used to love to read. Then I went to law school.</p>
<p><========== Declares A New Season Of Love And Harmony On Cc.</p>
<p>KB88,</p>
<p>I didn't say you were callow. I said your attack on my integrity was callow. (You did, after all, nakedly assert that something I said was "COMPLETLY [sic] untrue.") I said nothing about your integrity.</p>
<p>It is COMPLETLY untrue. You made a sweeping generalization.</p>
<p>I am sure there is AT LEAST enough lawyers who love to read tons of legal books to make -- AT LEAST -- one decent size lawyer.</p>
<p>I am one of them. I began reading cases through various legal web sites, studying the law, and just reading legal news. I find it extremely fun. At times, my legal fun comes at the expense of my homework.</p>
<p>Greybeard:</p>
<p>Your an established lawyer already, right?</p>
<p>Do you have any advice on how I could go about improving my arguing techniques, reading skills and writing skills.</p>
<p>Please view my thread: A life changing decision. Also located in this Law School category</p>
<p>"Rarely do they aim to entertain" (I am assuming you mean entertain loosely, not in a sense for the juries enjoyment).</p>
<p>Gerry Spence, does that name ring a bell?</p>
<p>KB88,</p>
<p>Here are some things you can do now to improve your reading skills and writing skills:</p>
<ol>
<li> Buy a copy of "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk and E.B. White. I first read it when I was about your age, and have made a practice of reading it once a year since then. It's less than 100 pages long. (That book tells you the proper way to refer to a book is to underline its title; I'm not sure how to do that with this text editor.)</li>
</ol>
<p>E.B. White was a long-time contributor to the New Yorker, author of Charlotte's Web, and one of the English language's great stylists. Strunk was his professor at Cornell. Here's a blurb from the cover (quoting a writer in the Boston Globe) that sums up my feelings about the book pretty well: "No book in shorter space, with fewer words, will help any writer more than this persistent little volume."</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Every word matters. Pay strict attention to what is being said, and the context in which it's being said. To take the silly little example that started this dialogue, the point I was making (in somewhat jocular fashion) was that few lawyers will tell you they seriously enjoyed reading "tons of legal books" in law school. To use another example at the risk of sounding petty, let's look at another of my statements: "Legal writing tends to be extremely dry and technical. Legal writers aim to persuade, to elucidate, to edify, to avoid being overturned on appeal. Rarely do they aim to entertain." There are authors (such as Gerry Spence) who attempt to write for a general, lay audience. These are not the sort of books that are assigned in law school.</p></li>
<li><p>Get a copy of the American Heritage Dictionary. Every time you come across a word you don't know, look it up.</p></li>
<li><p>Read a lot of polemical essays. When I was approximately your age, I read ten volumes of collected essays by William F. Buckley, Jr., who's a decent stylist, though a bit of a sesquipedalian. (See number 3, above.) Bookmark the Drudge Report, and read all of the columns linked there. As yourself which ones you find to be persuasive, and think about why. </p></li>
<li><p>Develop good habits. Edit your writing. Aim for grammatical perfection, even if you're sending an IM, an email, or posting something on-line. "The Elements of Style" will help with this.</p></li>
<li><p>Don't spend all of your time in your room. There's actually a lot of socializing and talking on the phone involved in practicing law. Seek out other people your age who are serious about clear thinking, good writing, and effective argumentation, and argue with them in a friendly fashion.</p></li>
<li><p>Read everything Scott Turow has published. (He's a Harvard Law School graduate with a creative writing degree from Stanford who writes novels about lawyers. You should find the subject matter extremely enjoyable, and he's a great prose stylist.)</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Don't use ALL CAPS!!! It's considering screaming. :D</p>
<p>YES, ERIC...IT IS! :D</p>
<p>Greybeard - Thank you for the excellent, thoughtful advice as to how a student can improve his/her reading and writing abilities. I just printed off your e-mail and plan to get a copy of "The Elements of Style" for my son who will be a college sophomore. Whether or not my son chooses to become a lawyer, your overall advice for any student is still well-taken. Thanks again!</p>