Sunday, September 04, 2005

Pressing Forward

I wept at the devastation in New Orleans, even as I continued to study and prepare for classes last week. I know everyone will be doing what they can to help the victims of the natural disaster as well as the unnatural disaster of the slow response that followed.

My PrePlan is serving me very well. Being able to see all my assignments in one place helps me keep a handle on things. If I feel a panic going on and I can look at the plan and see that I am accomplishing things, pretty much on schedule.

Although there is always a lot of reading, the cases are interesting. I'm learning to read the cases for the correct reasons. Each class has a particular doctrine you're supposed to learn, so a case may have many issues, but if I'm in Civil Procedure, the professor is only interested in my grasping the procedural question at hand. The same is true in my other classes. The funny thing about it is that your mind will still synthesize what you're learning in other classes, and I suppose this is the whole point. They break down all the doctrinal law issues so you can get a grasp on the points of law. Once you get into practice, you have to be able to bring out all the various issues in a case, whether they be tort, criminal, procedural, property rights, etc. Of course, as a lawyer you would specialize in a particular area, but it's important to be able to advise a client on general issues of law, especially if they will need to go to a different type of lawyer for other issues.

I'll update this blawg more often, but you can find an "official" diary at www.law.txwes.edu. Just click on the link at the bottom right for the diary of a first year law student.

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