Law School Discussion

I like the crim law case where a bunch of people are involved in a shipwreck and floating around on a raft. They decide to kill and eat the weakest person, but then they're saved. The question is whether their actions were excused by "necessity" and whether they should have waited longer before eating him, etc. Gross.

well, that explains it!

i didn't attend WNEC, but i just spent the last couple of months there taking bar/bri and the bar exam. compared to my LS (which i love, but whose facilities SUCK), the campus is beautiful. it really was a pleasure being there this summer. the people are friendly, everything is clean and in good working order, etc.

**disclaimer -- not an attorney, so not qualified to give advice,

but here's my two cents anyway--

since he's just a subletter, i would doubt that you have to go through the legal eviction process. i could be totally off base, since i know nothing about connecticut law and am merely a law graduate studying for the bar. but since he is your sublessee, the contract is between you and him, not him and the landlord. i would think that you could just get in there when he's not there and change the locks or something. he's not on the lease; you are.

i agree that WNEC is a decent school. i didn't go there, but am from western mass and pretty familiar with the school. if you want to work in wmass, i think you'll be fine. if you want to work elsewhere, you probably won't be any worse off than if you went to any other T4 school. if you had an awesome LSAT and GPA, you probably wouldn't be considering WNEC in the first place, so it might be a good option for you.

while i agree it is a good school, i have just one quibble: a WNEC grad landed a job paying $500,000 right out of law school? did i read that right? i call bull.

OP, as i'm sure you've gathered from the other posts, often the amount of work that a law student has to do is inversely proportional to the quality of the school: the lower-ranked the school, the more competitive the atmosphere and thus the more stressed out the students might be.

i'm sure there are exceptions, but many of the lower-ranked schools fail out a certain percentage of the first year class as a matter of course -- in other words, no matter how well you do and how well you understand the material, if you are in the bottom, say, 20% of the class, you might get kicked out anyway.

not to say it isn't tough to be a harvard law student (i can only imagine it would be difficult), but at the higher ranked schools, there is less likely to be this hyper-competitive atmosphere, and the exams are more likely to be open book.  this doesn't necessarily make the exams easier (since memorization won't get you anywhere on these types of exams), but it does relieve the stress of trying to memorize a bunch of stuff by rote.

so, the amount of stress your boyfriend/brother go through in law school may have a lot to do with the quality of and exam/grading policies of the schools they attend.  also, their natural intelligence will have some impact on how much they have to study. while everyone does have to do a fair amount of reading to do well, some people pick up the concepts pretty easily while others struggle. and it's more complicated because re-reading the material doesn't necessarily help -- it's not like undergrad where there's a book with a list of what you're supposed to "learn" written in it (well, i guess there are -- study aids). so doing more work doesn't necessarily equal progress if you're not getting it. 

the good news is that once things start to click -- a couple of months into the first year, maybe -- life gets a lot easier. and once they survive an exam period or two, they'll stress out a lot less.  being supportive and helping to contribute to a calm "home life," as another poster suggested, is a great way for you to help. i think it's great that you're taking such an interest.