Bar and Broken

maya I she/her I a 21 year old girl just trying to make it through law school

[bar-and-broken]

Law school diary!!!

📌About me

Hi, I'm Maya. I am 21 and am a first year student at Harvard Law School!!

this blog has been created for me to document my journey, so that one day when I'm a big successful lawyer i will look back at it and enjoy the fruits of my struggle better.

Hyperlinks!!🔗

Moodboard

Playlist to get me through this

Crossword game that i made as an assignment

[bar-and-broken]

First dayyyyy!!!!

Okay so today was my first day of law school and I knew college would be different from school, but I did not realise the gap would be this insane. My first class was Law of Torts, which is actually very interesting in theory. I spent most of the class feeling like a fish out of water trying to look sentient. Everyone around me seemed so certain of themselves, so articulate, so prepared. Meanwhile I was trying to look calm while internally buffering.

I know appearances can be misleading, but on day one it is very easy to believe everyone else got a handbook you somehow missed. People speak with confidence and suddenly you start treating that confidence as evidence that they know exactly what they are doing. Then you look at your own uncertainty and mistake it for inadequacy. 

but if i am being fair to myself, it was the first day. I am still adjusting, still learning, still figuring out how to exist in a completely new space. That does not mean I am behind. Anyway, hopefully tomorrow is less character building.

[bar-and-broken]

It's a weekend! Not really, I still have to grind:(

But at least I got some aesthetic pictures. This is what ill show my kids when they ask me how I was in law school.

i managed to finish almost all my readings for the upcoming week.

[bar-and-broken]

first cold call lol

okayyy so i got cold called today and honestly it was not as bad as everyone makes it sound but also i think i blacked out for like 40 seconds so who knows.

we were doing this crim law case about police questioning/confessions and the prof was like “what are the relevant facts?” and i did the normal law student thing where i said stuff like duration of questioning, warnings, whether the person had counsel, whether the confession was voluntary etc etc.

which was fine. like objectively i answered the question.

but the whole time i was thinking ok but who was the defendant? was he black? brown? poor? did he know what was happening? was the officer white? why does the judgment not tell us any of this? why are we pretending that fear only starts when the questioning starts and not way before that?

obviously i did not say any of this out loud because that is not how you survive a cold call in week 4 of 1L.

the prof said “good” after my answer and i was weirdly happy for like 2 seconds which is embarrassing but also whatever i am human.

but idk i keep thinking about this whole “relevant facts” thing. law school is very much like “focus only on what matters” but then it decides what matters in advance and acts like that decision is neutral.

anyway i survived and then immediately bought overpriced coffee as compensation.

🎧 currently: liability - lorde

[hersoulispinkk]

And what about it??

[bar-and-broken]

this is about me actually😋

[pittofdespair]

In law school, a professor I'd had for Torts asked in her Remedies class why courts are historically skeptical of Emotional Distress claims ,and I raised my hand and answered "Sexism." The professor laughed and looked delighted and was like, "Okay. Yes. Honestly that's the real reason." Then next class, she pulled me aside to tell me that she was so thrilled that that's what I'd taken away from her Tort class that she'd gone home and told her husband about it.

I have been chasing that high ever since.

[bar-and-broken]

this is basically how i wish to make my professors feel

[bar-and-broken]

i didnt know i was going to become a mother before coming here😒

So today was my first proper group project meeting and I think I learned more about people than the assignment itself.

In class, it is very easy to believe the people answering every question with full confidence are academic weapons who have life completely sorted. They speak like they were born case-briefing and somehow always look composed. From a distance, it is intimidating.

put those same people in a group project, though, and suddenly the illusion starts collapsing in real time. No one knows what the assignment is. someone is reading the instructions for the first time out loud like it is breaking news. someone keeps saying “guys we need to lock in” while contributing absolutely nothing. somehow i became a single mother of three children trying to keep us on schedule.

[bar-and-broken]

things my mom packed that were not in my suitcase

I called my mom today and she asked if I was eating.

not “are classes okay?” or “are people nice?” or “are you happy?” just literally “are you eating properly?” which is such a mom question but also made me want to cry for no reason.

i said yes even though dinner was coffee and half a bagel because i am not trying to get emotionally investigated on facetime.

i think being here is making me realise that some people come to law school with parents who know exactly what this is. like their dad is a lawyer or their aunt clerked somewhere or their family friend knows a professor or whatever. they know the language already. they know what to do at networking events. they know how to say things like “i’m interested in litigation” and make it sound natural.

and then there are people like me who are here because their parents worked insane hours and acted like it was normal. who treated every school fee like an investment. who never said “we sacrificed so much” but somehow made sure you knew without making you feel guilty.

i spent the whole day reading about justice in this building with portraits of people who definitely did not imagine someone like me sitting under them eating vending machine chips and panicking about citations.

law school people talk about opportunity like it just appears.

but opportunity is so expensive. not just money wise. sleep wise. family wise. dignity wise sometimes.

anyway my mom asked if i was eating and i said yes and then she said good, study well.

so i guess that is the plan.

study well. remember everything.

[bar-and-broken]

a few memes because i cant make it out otherwise

[bar-and-broken]

dad asked if law school is making me cynical🤨

Dad asked what we were reading this week and i tried to explain the whole thing very badly.

Basically I was like ok so the reading is about how law is obviously oppressive and has been used to do horrible things but also people still use law because sometimes it is the only language powerful people will even pretend to listen to.

and he was like “so law is both the problem and the solution?”

and i was like yes exactly except more depressing.

I think before law school I had this very neat idea that either you believe in law or you don’t. like either you are the rights/equality/constitution person or you are the system-is-fake-and-everything-is-power person.

but now it feels more like you have to hold both thoughts at once which is annoying but probably true.

law can be prisons and borders and police and property and all these very violent things dressed up in procedure.

but law can also be the thing someone uses when they have no money, no influence, no one picking up the phone, nothing except a claim that says “you promised me equality and i am here to collect.”

idk maybe believing in law does not mean trusting it. maybe it just means knowing when to use it, when to expose it, and when to stop pretending it is innocent.

Dad said “sounds like you are learning.”

am i though. or am i just becoming more annoying at dinner.

🎧 currently: the lakes - taylor swift

[bar-and-broken]

downloaded the casebook pdf and immediately started fighting with it

Today's crime reading was about whether a confession was “voluntary” and I fear my brain refused to behave normally.

The actual casebook was very clean and professional and like: facts, issue, holding, reasoning, questions, done.

Meanwhile I was in the margins asking things like: voluntary according to whom? relevant according to which room? Why does fear only matter when doctrine can see it? Why is “ordinary discomfort” treated like a neutral phrase and not a whole political project?

anyway i annotated the page because apparently this is who i am now.

screenshot and drive link here lol if anyone is interested in reading what I thought about in class today: https://drive.google.com/file/d/177Z3wTx95YavKe_Cn8Hg0yRE5LPhlbzs/view?usp=sharing

[floral-ashes]

Law students expect infinitely more coherence from the law than the law is able to provide.

Nothing about criminal law makes sense. Teaching criminal law is an exercise in pretending it makes sense just long enough for students to be able to write an exam about it.

My internal monologue during course preparation: “Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha, I hope my students don’t ask about this.”

It’s not that I don’t know the topic well enough to answer. It’s that I have a table of Supreme Court decisions where they give five different answers to the question.

And yes, of course, I can just tell them it doesn’t make sense. I can remind them that the system exists to reproduce racial capitalism, not to make sense. But that’s deeply dissatisfying to most of them. They want certainty, otherwise they feel like they’re not on track to becoming a competent lawyer.

[bar-and-broken]

meritocracy discourse should be illegal before 10 am🙄

Someone in class said affirmative action makes admissions “less meritocratic” and i swear the whole room did that thing where everyone gets quiet but in a fake casual way.

like suddenly everyone is VERY interested in their notes.

I hate this conversation because people say “merit” like it is this clean little thing floating in the air and not something built out of money, tutoring, legacy, unpaid internships, confidence, english, passports, parents who know how institutions work, and like 400 other things nobody wants to count.

I wanted to ask what merit means when some people inherit libraries and other people inherit debt.

I wanted to ask why sounding confident is treated as being smart.

I wanted to ask why “objective standards” always become objective after the room has already been arranged for certain people.

but obviously i did not say all of that because i do actually want to pass this class and not become the diversity debate girl in week 6.

So I just underlined “equal protection” like three times and pretended to be normal.

later in the bathroom this other girl from my section looked at me and went “yeah, i know.”

nothing else. just that.

and honestly that was enough.

things the room called neutral today:

legacy admissions

knowing what a clerkship is before october

unpaid internships

saying “my parents’ friend” and somehow meaning a federal judge

confidence

pretending history ended right before applications opened

Anyway, law school is fascinating because everything is made up but also the made up things have consequences which is rude.

🎧 currently: brutal - olivia rodrigo

[bar-and-broken]

the end of first year🥲

I finished my first year of law school and first of all, college is hard. like genuinely hard.  not “omg assignments :((” hard. I mean waking up, showing up, managing deadlines, pretending to have long-term goals, feeding yourself, replying to emails, and functioning like a person hard. Also, making friends from scratch is not for the weak. 

Honestly college is not for everyone, which is completely fine. some people realise they hate academics. some people realise they would rather do literally anything else. valid. deeply valid. I personally feel like law school is much harder than any other field out there. Law school is like if college hated you personally. Suddenly everything is based on cases written in ancient english, everyone is competitive in a casual way, and every answer somehow depends. you read 40 pages to say one sentence in class and still get humbled.

also law school has some of the most confident people I have ever seen. people will speak for six minutes straight with no clear destination and somehow sound correct. Meanwhile I knew the answer and still spoke like I was being held hostage.

This year was mostly me oscillating between “I am built for this” and “I should open a bakery and disappear.” Weirdly, I am enjoying this experience. It’s stressful, chaotic, slightly unhinged, but good. I think I like that I am being pushed like this. I like that I am learning more about how I think, how I handle pressure, and what I am actually capable of. As a person of colour, I learned another kind of skill too: how to hold multiple consciousness at once. how to learn the language of institutions while noticing when they were not built with people like me in mind. how to discuss neutrality while recognising whose realities are treated as universal and whose are treated as side notes. how to belong in a room while still seeing it clearly. I am kind of excited for what comes next.

Update!! I got my grades and im so proud of myself