Crap, it just got worse.

So, I was telling the significant other about a case I am working on at work. And this is what I said to him:

"The court really should have denied the motion for change of venue because based on the decedent's county of residence and based on (State Statute) that allows for venue in the defendant's place of residence, venue was proper in (this county)."

I then stopped myself. Turned to him and said "How in God's name do you put up with me."

And then he laughed, and laughed, and shook his head.

Diary of a 1L

[Preface: I realize this is long, but it didn't seem right to split it up.]

March 15
Dear Diary,
I got my admissions letter from law school today! I can’t believe that I’m going to law school. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve wanted to be a lawyer. After seeing Erin Brockovich, reading John Grisham, and watching endless Law and Order marathons my dream is finally going to come true! I can’t wait until I can get out there and start fighting for the little man. There is so much injustice in this world and I feel like I’m being called to fix it. The impoverished need someone to fight for their rights and their cause. Just think – a mere 40 months from now and I can be the one fighting for their rights. I’ll never sell out like so many slimy lawyers do – justice will be served – I will be a public defender. I’m so excited!
Love,
The Soon To Be 1L (that’s what they call first year students!)

April 24
Dear Diary,
I attended the admitted applicant day at the law school I’ll be starting at in the fall. I met the dean, and some of the current students – everyone is just so nice! I was on a tour of the law library and noticed all of the students scattered throughout. Everyone looked so intelligent and professional, hunched over their laptops and surrounded by stacks of impressive-looking books. One of the tour guides said that law school can be challenging at times, but I’m not worried. I’ve gotten all A’s since kindergarten and always been at the top of my class. I was valedictorian in high school and undergrad was a piece of cake for me. I graduated magna cum laude without much effort. Plus, I got a 165 on my LSAT, and that is supposed to be a good judge of how I’ll do in law school, so I know that I’ll do just fine. There are over 20,000 people a year graduating from law school so hard can it actually be? It’s going to be great. I’m going to get so involved. They have this thing every Thursday night called “Bar Review” (it’s a play on words – because once you graduate you take the bar, but bar review is actually going out to the bar – isn’t that clever?), there are over 40 student organizations (something for everyone!), and even this dance called the Barrister’s Ball. Law school is going to be awesome!
Love,
I Can Hardly Wait!

August 22
Dear Diary,
We had orientation today. I met some really fantastic people. Everyone seems just so nice and friendly! It will be refreshing to be around smart people. Just think – we’ll all sit around and discuss the public policy and moral philosophy behind the law. I’ll be one of those law students in the library, deep in discussion. I can’t wait! I had my first official law school class. It was great, we were so involved – the prof was calling on people and asking us about this case that they had given us to read and brief. Briefing is so easy. Kind of nice just to summarize the case up: facts, issue, how the court ruled and why. I think it’s going to be a great tool this briefing. They served us lunch today, had the financial aid counselor come and talk about taking out loans, and all of the student organizations had representatives there to talk to. I put my name on about 12 of the mailing lists. This is going to be so great! Alright, well its late and I need to go finish reading these assignments for class tomorrow. (Can you believe that they give us homework before the classes actually start? Isn’t that so cool?)
Love,
I’m Going to be the Best Law Student Ever!

August 23
Dear Diary,
I survived my first day of classes. It wasn’t so bad. I got a syllabus in each of my classes and the prof put us in seating charts. Kind of strange to be in a seating chart – that hasn’t happened since high school! And almost all of the profs have attendance policies. Do you really think that I will miss more than 7 days of your class? Come on, I’m an adult and that is a lot of class to be missing. I did already get called on in Civil Procedure today, good thing I had read the case for today. He asked me a couple of tough questions, but I nailed them. It wasn’t so bad. I think everyone else was impressed that I knew what I was doing. I don’t know why people complain about this Socratic method. Well, tomorrow is my long day and I’ve got 10 pages to read for Contracts, 12 for Civ Pro (I think that’s going to be my favorite class!) and some stuff in my legal writing book. That’s not so bad – its only 22 pages and 3 cases total. That should be nothing.
Love,
I’m Finally a 1L!

September 15
Dear Diary,
Sorry, I haven’t had time to write. I’ve been really busy lately. The Defenders for the Poor Group has finally kicked things off so I’ve going to those meetings during my lunch time, and the profs have really started piling it on. My Civ Pro prof seems to love me. He calls on me almost everyday – it must be because I’m so prepared and know all of the answers to his questions. I haven’t missed one yet, but all of this reading is an awful lot of work. Between all of my classes I’ve been reading around 40 pages a night. In undergrad I could skim 40 pages in under an hour. Unfortunately law school takes a little longer. But I’ve been getting everything done and only spending about 5 hours a night on studying. And briefing every case (all freaking 10 of them a night) is getting a bit annoying, but I’m sure that I’ll be happy I did it when I start studying for finals. Speaking of which, I’ve got midterms coming up in three weeks, so I’d better go work on my outlines some more.
Love,
A 1L

October 2
Dear Diary,
Law school fucking sucks. Fucking midterms. I had one yesterday, another tomorrow and this damn memo is due next week. On top of all of this we’re supposed to be continuing to prepare for class each day. And my Civ Pro prof seems to think that he should call on me every single day. Doesn’t he know that I’m prepping for midterms and don’t have time to read freaking 50 pages every night? I don’t have 12 hours each day on top of class to deal with all of this crap. Oh, and I just got my first quarterly interest statement for my loans. It was only for a month and it was $120. At this rate I’m going to have over $3,000 a year in interest accruing. Great. Can this get any worse?
Later,
A stressed 1L

October 21
Thank God for Fall Break. I’ve never been so looking forward to a week off in my life. Well, if you can even call it a week off. I have another damn brief that was assigned last week and is due three days after I get back. WTF? One of the profs was like, “Oh, yeah, go to Mexico for the week. Have a good time.” But they expect me to spend 50 hours on this brief. If I could go to Mexico right now it would only be to buy more valium.

December 6
I cut myself for the first time today. I just sat there and watched the blood run down my arm and drip onto my Contracts book.

December 13
Finals are over. I haven’t slept or showered for three days. I’ve been living off of vending machine food for the last week, and if it weren’t for the fact that there is a Starbucks nearby that is open until midnight I would have killed someone by now. All of those nice people that I met at the beginning of the year? Yeah, they are no more. Share an outline? Hah. Rip pages out of my book when I go to the bathroom. Bitch.

I’m going to drink myself into a stupor, pass out and not think about anything – specifically why the hell I decided to go to law school – for at least three days.

January 15
I got my interest statement for the last three months of my student loans. It’s $804. I want to dropout so bad. But if I do now, I’ll never make enough money to pay off the loans I’ve already taken. Fucking law school. They suck you in with promises of nobly pursuing a profession held in such high regard. Who are they fucking kidding? At this point, I’ll be lucky to get a job chasing ambulances.

February 4
The LSAT is bullshit. 165 my ass. Doesn’t matter what you got on the damn test, how you did in high school or undergrad, you are not going to get A’s in law school. This shit is hard. No wonder why there were all of those students in the library on a Saturday afternoon with books stacked around them. You want me to write papers, read 70 pages a night, and get called on in class and have to spout it all back at you? Are you trying to fucking kill me?

March 21
Law school is bullshit. It’s like being back in high school, only with a lot bigger egos and a lot more alcohol involved. The Barristers Ball? It’s fucking prom. If I have to listen to one more bitch describe her damn dress to me, I’m chopping her up into pieces and stuffing her in my locker. Bar Review? No one fucking goes. It’s not that law students don’t drink. It’s just that we are all closet alcoholics. Apparently it is not socially acceptable to be drinking from a flask in the middle of Con Law. Nor is it socially acceptable to go to bar review, order a pitcher of beer and then drink it all – directly from the pitcher. At least I’m getting smarter: everyone that sits around me just thinks I drink a lot of coffee, no one knows that it is just straight gin in my travel coffee mug every morning.

April 17
Shitcockfuckballs. Where did I put that bottle of Jack?

May 9
It. Is. Over. You can find me at the country club this summer. I’ll be the one with the baseball cap on the John Deere mower. Apparently that’s about the only thing I’m qualified to do after my first year of law school.

There May Be Hope: Why I am Moving to New York

Skip Law School, Be a Lawyer Anyway
Can law school dropouts really join the bar?

By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004, at 5:36 PM ET

The New York Daily News is reporting that Benedict Morelli, the attorney representing the plaintiff in the Bill O'Reilly sexual harassment case is a law-school dropout. Can someone who never graduated from law school really join the bar?

Yes, though only in Morelli's native New York and six other states: California, Maine, Vermont, Virginia, Wyoming, and Washington. Despite the American Bar Association's strong insistence that all lawyers possess a J.D. or LL.B degree from an ABA-approved law school, it's up to the state bar associations to determine their own criteria for membership. For example, 20 states plus the District of Columbia allow graduates of foreign law schools to sit for the bar examination, while two states (California and New Mexico) and the District of Columbia extend the same privilege to applicants who've taken correspondence law courses.

In New York, where Morelli heads his own law firm, the requirement is that a prospective lawyer must have completed at least one year at an ABA-approved law school. After that, the future attorney can fulfill his educational requirements by engaging in something called "law office study" or "clerking for the bar"—in essence, an apprenticeship at a law firm. Such apprenticeships were standard in the 19^th century, before the proliferation of law schools: Neither Abraham Lincoln nor Clarence Darrow, for example, graduated from law school. But lawyers who took this route are a relative rarity nowadays, and there are usually fewer than 400 students nationwide pursuing law office study at any given time.

The apprenticeship's requirements vary from state to state. California asks that, after their first year of clerking, apprentices take an exam termed the "Baby Bar," meant to measure whether the subject is keeping pace with his on-campus friends. Only apprentices who pass the Baby Bar are allowed to continue for another three years, at which time they're considered ready to take the full-scale bar exam. In Vermont, the apprentice must simply fill out a progress report twice a year, for four years, to update the bar association on what they've learned while working.

Law office study is obviously appealing to many nontraditional students, particularly those who'd rather not foot the $100,000-plus bill for attending a top-flight law school. But there's an important caveat, too: Apprentices tend to do worse on state bar exams than their peers from academia. According to a Los Angeles Times survey from earlier this month, just 20 percent of that state's apprentices have passed the bar exam, versus over 50 percent of law school graduates.

Roll Tape?

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Take That Prof ConLaw!!!

For those wondering how I did on the 24-hour three questions ConLaw final. Here is how bad I bitch-slapped the prof. Take that professor ConLaw!!! Suck it!



To all my fellow bitches - Enjoy your summer!!!

-Scalito

A look back at our 1L year: A timeline

**Dates are approximate people, I barely remembered my name after finals was over - mostly because I was drunk.

April 2005: We all attend the "Admitted Student" day at our school. We all have stars in our eyes that we got here in the first place, and everyone is scared and excited. Soon, we would just be scared.

August 2005: Orientation week. This is where many of us met our what I lovingly call "clingers." Those whom all law students immediately talked to in an attempt not to be the only classmate with no friends and no one to talk to. Of course these types of relationships don't generally last long in law school, because you usually find people you like better (and that part will follow shortly.)

September 2005: First week of classes. Man were we nervously excited. We all sat waiting to see if we were really gonna have to do the Socratic Method ("please just don't let it be me.") And the most amusing part, we all payed attention completely to the professor and took thorough and detailed notes. AIM was not yet discovered. None of us really knew each other yet, so we were still hanging with the first week clingers. That and like I said, no AIM, we thought we really wanted to learn.

Early October 2005: Reality sets in. Briefing sucks, classes suck, readings suck and most importantly, our social lives have completely been taken over by law school. Outside friends want nothing to do with us because we are boring and are always reading. That, and every story we hear has a "tort" attached to it, and of course, we have to mention this all the time. "So and so got in a car accident? Did she hire a lawyer, cause that might be a case of negligence." Yup - we are now losers.

Mid October 2005 (The bitches meet): I meet Calculating Bitch, and through her Class Bitch. We make quick friends the three of us because we are desperately needing to get away from our clingers and are pretty much just looking for a way out. Calculating said to me, "wanna study?" and since she seemed at the time smarter and less annoying than my current clinger, I readily agreed. Class Bitch I met through her, and she was just as bitchy as myself and Calculating. Common bitchiness = instant friends. Calculating then introduced us to John Roberts and warned, "He's really quiet at first, but the stuff that comes out of his mouth once he gets comfortable....." She was not kidding. The things I learned from that man in the last year I hadn't ever heard of in my life, and I went to an urban "ghetto" high school people. He's a wealth of jokes in humor in bad taste. Again, instant friends. I then introduce them to Lance Ito, who has the ability to get completely drunk on a regular basis, and is a constant smart-ass. You guessed it, friends to all. Scalito is introduced to the rest of us, as Class and Calculating already knew him, and his more demure and yet biting commentary fits in well.

End October 2005: Midterms, panic ensues.

November: Grades from midterms - panic, confusion, disgust, and we quickly start to see that this is just not going to be fun at all. As John Roberts pleasantly puts it, "I feel like I just had a truck parked in my asshole."

Early December 2005: We start talking and hanging out with Sandra Gay, who has as sick a sense of humor as the rest of us, and lo and behold is also attempting to break free from an early law school friend. AIM BEGINS TO TAKE HOLD. Chat rooms are created where things are said that should never be said in public. It's great.

Mid to Late December: Finals - we all decide we hate law school. We study hard for the first exam (once even at my house, although vodka was involved at that 'study session.') Not so much for the second one, and barely at all for the third.

Winter break: We all try to do something that is not at all law related. Anything.

January 2006: Back to classes, and this time we're not so naive. Okay, so the first day we all try to tell ourselves "this semester I'm not going to chat, I'm going to pay attention." That lasted at most, a week. Especially once we got into Crim Law. Good lord, that class was boring.

**Key point: We start the blog. We figured, law school sucks and our school provides constant stories, what better way to pass the time than to make others have to hear about them?

February 2006: Continued lull in our motivation. Notes? "What notes?" Outlines? "Ah, I'll do it at the end." Briefing? As Sandra Gay says, "Christ on a bike, fuck no." Also, we add i'll be anita you play thomas to the blog, as she enters our chats on AIM and blows us away with her bitchiness and smart ass comments about us.

March 2006: Midterms - not so much panic this time, mostly because we realized from first semester that they don't really mean a damned thing. I'm not sure I spent more than an hour for each class studying, really.

April 2006: We start to realize that hey, finals are coming. Damn. Maybe I should've payed attention in class instead of chatting. Then remembering, "oh right, that wouldn't matter anyway." All future law students should learn that you really don't need to pay attention all the time anyway, most of what you need to know for exams you will learn while studying for them.

May 2006: FINALS - we start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's faint, but it's fucking there and it's all that's keeping us going.

May 8, 2006: The day that will live in infamy: We're done!!!!

To all my fellow bitches: lots of love to all, and I hope you're all hung over too. To all the other law students out there who are not yet done with the year, hang on, it's f-ing sweet when it's done.

T-Minus 8 Hours...

...until we are all 2Ls.

But Houston, we have a problem: our Con Law exam stands between us and freedom. And unfortunately, Motivation seems to have forgotten we have an exam, and hasn't bothered to show up.

Please come back baby. I promise not to hurt you any more. I promise it will be like old times; I'll drop the cynicism and care about school again. I'll go back to being a bright eyed, eager, idealistic law student!

On second thought, fuck that shit. I like being jaded, not to mention Motivation gave really lousy head.

Now, what to do about that pesky exam? If only I had decided to go to one of those heathen secular schools, an offer of oral sex might actually get me out of the exam instead of getting me kicked out of law school. I guess I will have to content myself with typing up my outline and being a nelly bottom for the curve.