It's officially been a month since I started law school! And I'm happy to say that things are going well. As you can tell by the picture I shared here, I've developed a note taking system that works for me that involves lots of doodling and color coding.
So much of law school so far is reading dense texts (mostly cases) and then "briefing" them. I admit I was intimidated when I was thrown into this new world and suddenly everyone was talking about briefing cases and I had no idea what that was, but it's really just a way of making sense of different cases in a way that most efficiently helps you understand them. Even these past few weeks I've refined my method of reading, highlighting, and taking notes, and I feel proud of that small feat. Here's an example of what a case brief in my notes looks like.
And this is what that case in my textbook looks like, so you can see the color coded highlights that help me brief it into my notes.
I have always been a sucker for taking organized and pretty notes so this fortunately has helped me a lot this past month! Law school has also been a great excuse for me to continue patronizing my favorite pen and stationery store, JetPens. I did not even know refillable highlighters existed until I went on their site wondering if they did and clicked on a tab there. My desk looks like a mini retailer for them at this point and I'm not mad.
Classes are still challenging, of course. I don't know how to answer every single question the professors ask in class, but as cheesy as it sounds, I feel like I'll be fine with my new friends around me who are all really helpful at talking through problems together and so much fun to have around.
Since I know what it's like to wake up and force myself to go to classes I feel apprehensive about, I am pleased to say that I am not feeling that here. I was worried that I would be overwhelmed by the course content and frustrated by it, and that I would have to suffer through my first year, but I'm glad that I have incredible professors who always connect our theoretical topics in class to real world issues and look at them critically. Every case is a story, however difficult it is to parse out at times, and as somebody who is deeply interested in others' stories this base line appreciation for them has been beneficial.
At this point in my studies I have gained a new appreciation for the ways the law can touch all parts of our lives and how it attempts to make sense of everyday life as a human being. It's kind of like anthropology, but far more concerned with regulating how people behave rather than purely examining how people behave. I think the connections between the two are too understated, and I will be keeping them in mind as I move forward.
Before I sign off, while I ended up having a chance lunch with two friends at Qdoba yesterday, they asked me the age-old question: what kind of law do you want to do? The answer I gave them went something like this (though not as well thought out), and it's a culmination of some of my thoughts thus far, based off my experiences in the last three years prior to starting law school.
My answer to this question is two-pronged. On one hand, my heart has always been in international work, whatever that means. When I worked on the family separation crisis with lawyers and human rights defenders from Mexico and Central America, I felt like it was just the kind of work I would like to continue doing, because it involved collaborating with like-minded people on causes that aren't confined within one country's borders while operating within the legal system. The work was also supporting a lawsuit filed against the US government for atrocities it committed; in that vein, I'm really interested in the ways lawyers can confront systems of power and oppression that cause these crises in the first place. At my job I got to use Spanish every day and think about places beyond the USA, even travel to them. I also didn't feel weird as a privileged westerner coming to a different country for so-called "development" work, which is what so much of international work currently is. It felt right to work in solidarity with migrants alongside people from their own countries, rather than purely from the perspective of a US citizen "serving" them.
On the other hand, working at a nonprofit was difficult. I thought it was something I just had to deal with until we started organizing my workplace to join a union. I realized that solidarity did not just have to be a global thing wherein I feel connected to the struggles of people from completely different worlds than the one I operate in–it could also be highly localized. During the unionizing process I saw how my working conditions and quality of life improved, and that of my colleagues as well. I loved it so much that my union rep took notice and asked me to work with the union, and from there I helped organize other workplaces in the nonprofit sector. And that's what brought me to be interested in the labor movement and labor law.
If there were some way to combine the two, I think that would be a dream.
"Wow," my friends said. "You've had a busy three years!"
And now I have another busy three years ahead of me. Until then, I can't wait to see what will happen and how my current dream might manifest itself.
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