Law School Discussion

The #1 piece of advice I can give you is this, and the irony is obvious:

Forget the advice, do what has always worked for you, and you will do fine.  When you get there, you will get advice from every professor, dean, current student and custodian as to how to be a good law student.  Some will say brief every case and work on your outlines hourly. Others will say screw briefing and work on your outlines sometime after commencement.  Some will tell you that professors are just a bunch of blow-hards and you have to learn from the book. Others will tell you that the professor's word comes from the mouth of baby Jesus himself, and you should just forget about the text.  The anxiety tends to build as you go to class and see some people with their faces buried in their laptops, transcribing everything that comes out of the professor's mouth, others showing up to class with their entire text book annotated and indexed with color-coded sticky notes, and still others showing up with their book still in the shrink wrap in November.  This can leave many people uncertain as to how to proceed, and many people end up pursuing study methods that are ineffective to them, simply because someone told them that it is the best way to study the law.   

Forget all of it.  In order to get this far, you have likely already developed some method by which you are comfortable cramming loads of esoteric information into your brain, storing it at least for the duration of an exam, and applying it in a reasonable fashion to a question presented.  If you find yourself sitting down to work on an outline, and two hours into it you realize that you are gaining nothing from it, then stop that.  If you get midway through week one, and you find that you are doing fine with the cases and the briefs are of little help, then stop that.  If you find that skimming the cases gives you a good understanding of the concepts involved and you spend a lot of time taking margin notes that you never look at in class, then stop that.  Likewise, if you are sitting in class or reading and find that you have no idea what is going on, or you take a practice test and realize that you are completely in the dark, then consider finding a new method.  Forget what the internet geniuses and all of the law school experts tell you to do, and just do whatever it is that helps you get your own brain around the law.  If you can do that, you'll be fine.

Quote

"Nothing you can do is going to help much."

So my doom is unavoidable? I should just welcome it with open arms?

Yep. It's the end of your world as you know it. But you should feel fine