IMHO

Law School Redux

My second-to-the-last column for the Star. Written on Justin's Mac notebook in his apartment on St. Marcel (soon to be home for the next month, complete with cable TV and DSL, yahoo!!).

LAW SCHOOL REDUX

The last time I was in a law school classroom was a good five years ago, and I still can remember that feeling of terror that gripped my soul, made my palms sweat, and paralyzed all speech patterns as soon as the school bell rang (to think that I was the teacher then).

And so I swore off anything remotely related to legal education (which probably explains my aversion to watching The Practice or Your Horror, er Honor) and blissfully plodded through my career aided only by that wonderful thing they call PhilJuris, Supreme Court circulars, and gossip from fellow lawyers about some new ruling or another. But then again, I’ve always had a short memory, or, to put it even more precisely, a masochistic streak, and one day a few weeks ago I found myself back in the classroom, getting (or at least trying to get) educated, and falling asleep in the middle of a lecture.

I guess the fact that I’d be learning more about the law at the Sorbonne in Paris deluded me into thinking that this time around would be different. Or that I’d be exchanging intelligent conversation on jurisprudence with a hundred other lawyers and law students from all over the world in one of Paris’ oldest universities. But some things never really change, and I’ve finally come to the conclusion that law school is truly hazardous to your health.

Mental and otherwise, I mean. When I first got my casebooks and materials for two classes, I knew right then that this wasn’t the most brilliant idea I’ve ever had. Lugging two tons of material back and forth and trying not to accidentally assault anyone in the Metro with your heavy load is definitely not fun. What’s worse is trying to make heads or tails out of all the weird comparative law cases they ram down your throat while the whole City of Lights is exploding all around you.

Trying to stay alert in class after a night of serious drinking (now I remember why and how [ex-writing partner] and I acquired the habit in the first place) is still something I haven’t quite mastered yet, despite all the years of trying to stay alert in court after having had one too many. Stale law professors likewise seem to be a universal curse, and I immediately reverted to my old habits of passing bitchy notes and playing hangman with my seatmate, just to keep me from passing out from sheer boredom. I also began to digest cases again, a tedious task made even worse by my anal tendency of writing notes in different colors of ink.

Speaking of which, there are a few things that are different from the good old days at Malcolm Hall. A laptop is now de rigeur, which in my opinion takes the discipline out of selective note taking; although it qualifies you for a job as a court stenographer. I’ve had to resist reaching back and slapping the girl behind me who was annoyingly tapping away, transcribing everything but the drool that came out of our professor’s mouth. And all those lovely American case series books were so much different from our pathetic photocopied text books that we used just to get kickbacks from our book allowances.

But aside from that, I kept getting a strange feeling of déjà vu, especially while discreetly snacking in the middle of Professor Picard’s dissertation on the French appellate system. The sinking feeling I used to have walking back home to face a ton of reading material was back, with the recurring nightmare of not making it in time for your exam then waking up in a pool of sweat, realizing with relief that you passed the Bar seven years ago. The weirdest thing was that one of my lawyer friends actually lived through that…after we had studied through the whole night, he almost had a coronary (in the process giving me one as well) when he couldn’t get his laptop to print out his notes for the open book finals until five minutes after the exams had started. Tsk tsk, so much for laptop notes; give me a notebook and pen any time.

Relationship dynamics are pretty much the same as well, confirming my theory that law school is just one big professional high school. Cliques immediately started to form from day one, although for the first few days we had a tendency to travel in big, noisy hordes that could never get a table at the tiny cafes. After that, the wheat was separated from the chaff : the nerds who traveled halfway around the world to get an education locked themselves in their dorm rooms, the clubbers hit almost every dance club in Paris til the wee hours whilemiraculously making it to class the next day, and the drinkers managed to discover some of the nastiest pubs on the planet in an effort to find a place where people spoke English. Some kids, barely out of their teens, tried to hook up with anyone and everyone willing and able, which provided this aging soul with hours of entertainment pleasure. Then there were the usual ugly rumors spread about who was going out with whom, and who liked who, and who was in bed with whoever the night before. That too was entertaining for a while, before I started to get sick of adolescent behavior.

But now that finals are over and almost everyone has gone off somewhere, I remember why those four years in law school were some of the best of my life. I did some crazy things, studied my butt off, survived the ordeal intact, and made friends for life. And that’s how I’m feeling right now, hanging out in vacation mode with a few buddies from both ends of the earth who I know I’ll not forget any time soon. This brief excursion back to law school was well worth the experience, notwithstanding the damage done to lungs and liver!

18 August 2002

posted by Honey Oliveros @ 8:49 PM