...but if chased with beagles only...

Just another law school studyblr. Starbuck. 3L. Environmental, Disability, and Cultural Heritage Law. Chronically ill, perpetually anxious. They/Them/Their. Main: vip3rpilot.

[vip3rpilot]

Trying out a new beer tonight (Armadillo Hero, from Revolution Brewing). I took a sip and got a somewhat concerned look on my face. Wife: “…no good?” Me: “No, it’s really good, just…hm.” *takes another sip* “So, I got a six pack of beer from ALDI when we were studying for the bar, and it tastes a lot like that. Which is great, both beers are great - “ Wife: “Well, that’s good, then!” Me: “ - except now this beer tastes like bar prep.” *takes another sip* “Sorry, specifically, this beer tastes like Secured Transactions.” Wife: (studied Secured Transactions at the same time but didn’t have any of the ALDI beer/doesn’t drink much) “Well, it probably won’t taste like Secured Transactions to me!” *hand them the can, they take a sip* “N-no, this tastes EXACTLY like Secured Transactions.” So uh. Revolution, my dudes? Love your beer, you make a mean IPA, Freedom of Speach is a household favorite, as a two-lawyer household we love all of your Constitutional Law puns, but I regret to inform you that the otherwise lovely Armadillo Hero tastes uncannily like a Secured Transactions lecture and it is STRESSING us OUT.

[swordlawyer]

Good to know our brains are now hardwired to associate otherwise lovely experiences with bar prep. Wonder how long that’ll last.

[kindacompetentlawstudent-deacti]

law school is hard

Law school is hard because: 

- because you need to be disciplined 99.9% of the time.

- because it is a lot of work that will overwhelm you every single week.

- because some days it will not seem worth it.

- because some nights you will be in the library until 3 am and still not be done.

- because you will be challenged.

- because sometimes, you have to actually put your morals and principles aside to learn about new topics.

- because you will cry. not may. not if. you will.

- because learning about other people’s problems can be really draining on your mental health.

- because sometimes you have to watch things you wish upon no one. but you have to. because you need to know what, when, how and who.

- because the expectation of being academic excellence is there. but so is imposter syndrome. 

- because at the end of the road, in a twisted way, it will be worth it. 

[12b6]

[swordlawyer]

So...I passed the bar last month.

I can’t get my license yet because one of my employers is impossible to contact and another doesn’t exist anymore so my character and fitness application is in eternal limbo, and because I need to retake the MPRE, but hey

I passed the bar

[swordlawyer]

Bar Exam

*screams internally*

The bar exam is tomorrow.

My wife and I have been studying non-stop for an exam that was supposed to happen in-person in July, then in-person in September, then remotely in October. There are so many issues with the software, not to mention myriad privacy concerns.

COVID-19 has turned an already-stressful exam into a literal nightmare and I just want it to be over.

[vip3rpilot]

Law in the Time of Corona

The US hasn’t been hit quite as hard yet as some other countries, but we are also distinctly unprepared to deal with the current state of the pandemic, and things are going to get worse before it gets better. I live in a state with a decently high number of confirmed cases, and guaranteed many more unconfirmed cases.

Law schools in the city started announcing a transition to online courses earlier this week, but my university held out until this morning. Classes are suspended until March 23, and then will go online until the end of the semester. That means my Natural Resource Law class was my last in-person law school class. I’m not sure how soon I’ll be going back to school after I get my JD, so it was very bittersweet. No word on if commencement will be cancelled or just postponed. 

The first exam law students have to pass to get licensed is the Multi-state Professional Responsibility Exam, which I am slated to (re)take tomorrow. As yet there are no plans to cancel or postpone the exam.

My place of work will update us tomorrow on whether they intend to institute a remote work policy; it was briefly alluded to that they might consider closing entirely for some period of time. As the majority of our employees are disabled and chronically ill, and most of the people we serve have multiple risk factors, this isn’t really something we can sleep on.

I had been planning on going into work tomorrow and taking the exam tomorrow like normal, but the vaguely-ill feeling that had been percolating all day morphed /very/ quickly to a prolonged, rib-shattering coughing fit, that lingered on and off for hours, and was accompanied by vomiting, numbness and tingling in my hands and jaw and shortness of breath. It’s likely unrelated (I have most of these symptoms reasonably frequently, but the cough came on so suddenly and was so severe that it’s a bit perturbing) but I’m definitely going to play it safe and stay home from work, and likely from the exam. This would mean I don’t get to retake the exam until August, a month after the Bar (and immediately before my wedding) which would be worrying to me as it pushes back my trajectory for licensing, but there is a very good chance that neither the Bar nor the wedding will happen quite as planned so it’s hard right now to feel too panicked about pushing back a testing date when everything is so uncertain.

Between May and September, my fiancee and I were going to 1) graduate from the same law school at the same time and be adorable, 2) take the Bar, and 3) get married. It’s a very big year for us and it will be no matter what happens. And as somebody who is reasonably high-risk, and who has family, friends, and community members who are definitely high-risk, I am very glad of all the precautions that are being taken. I just also can’t stop myself from making lists and plans in my head for hypothetical emergency situations that will likely never come to fruition.

Fiancee and I realized the other day that I really missed my calling as a doomsday prepper. I gotta say, my lifelong obsession with dystopian apocalypse scenarios has done a lot to prepare me for this, and I guess accidental pandemic wedding would be Very My Aesthetic. 

I hurt my ribs and shoulders from coughing and have a wicked headache but can’t sleep. Everything is so tense and charge that I can feel the electricity of the world radiating in my bones from eight stories above the street.

The financial, legal, social, and of course medical implications of this are going to be with us for a long time, and all I can do is hope that we’re able to take something away from it all; we are not prepared, and this will happen again. The least we can do is learn from our mistakes.

I didn’t intend for this to get so somber but I’ve been doing my best to stay positive for the people around me and I have so many ~feeling~ that I guess needed to get shared. Stay safe, y’all.

[swordlawyer]

Long, rambling post about the state of COVID-19 in my community. I am VERY grateful that we’re taking this seriously, but I was admittedly still pretty heartbroken when I walked out of the law school this morning after my last class. Online wont’t be quite the same, I know.

[swordlawyer]

Just found out that a friend and classmate of mine will be joining my organization as a law clerk! I met up with her for coffee today to discuss the group, the work we do, and the office dynamic, and it was a good chance to reflect on my experience so far. This is the happiest I’ve ever felt at a job, which bodes well!

[swordlawyer]

Last week went well, and made me slightly less angry than Week 1. Biodiversity continues to be my favorite class (image above is from last week's reading) but Genetics is high on the list. We talked about eugenics last class, which was obviously very heavy, but the conversation around it was productive. Related to law but not school: I got my first paycheck for a legal job! I've basically never been paid to use any degree I've received, so that was exciting. [Image is of a textbook open on a blue, fuzzy blanket. The textbook is open to a page that is subtitled "Ways of Protecting Biodiversity" and there is an image of elk lying down on a stretch of land, captioned "The National Elk Reserve". On the edge of the frame there is a hand holding a drink.]

[blacklinguist]

reblog + tag your mbti type and your major / area of study … im tryna see something

infp + linguistics (sociolinguistics)

[swordlawyer]

For day 3 of the semester, a very washed-out picture of the view from my seat in Genetics and the Law. I’ve taken every course this professor has offered. She was my property professor, and I loved her. I’ve taken Law and the Life Sciences and Food and Drug Law with her in the past, and my fiancee tutored for her. The day we got engaged, this professor sent them an email asking how it went, and was so excited for us. I adore her! And she teaches some amazing courses. Genetics and the Law is going to be incredibly interesting. The preliminary readings focused on foundational genetics, both the history and the science, which was largely review for me, but useful review. We spent much of the first class talking about privacy issues in genetics, and the implications advanced genetic testing has for criminal justice, discrimination, and government surveillance. This is my largest class of the semester at 15 people, and I really love these smaller classes; they’re well-suited to discussion and lively debate, which is obviously an integral part of an effective law school experience.

Natural Resource Law continues to be excellent. The same professor teaches Natural Resources and Biodiversity and Ecosystems Management; I was part of the student hiring committee that selected her as one of two new environmental law professors for our institution, and I continue to be impressed with her. She’s brilliant but approachable, which can be a hard line to toe. And her passion for both subjects comes across immediately. We spent part of class today talking about the tragedy of the commons as it applies to natural resource management; I’ve talked about the Tragedy of the Commons in contexts ranging from philosophy to political science to literature to property law, and there’s always some new side of it to discuss or apply to the topic at bar.

It’s too cold out to be worth walking home during my two-hour break, so I’m in the library until Women in Leadership tonight. I haven’t got class again until next Tuesday, so I’m giving myself a bit of a break to rest and relax. One more class, eight hours of work, then a three day weekend!

[swordlawyer]

Day 2 went well yesterday, but was exhausting. Wednesday is my long day (four hours of class, a three hour break, then four hours of class, going til 9pm) but I live close enough to campus that I can go home during the break. I think I'm going to enjoy all of my classes, but Mental Health Law is going to be a bit of a trial. Not only is it from 7 to 9 at the end of a long day (somewhat ironic for a mental health class, no?) but there's a student in the class who…to put it gently I do not get along with. He was in my 1L section and we butted heads frequently, including a fairly ugly in-class exchange during a discussion of Obergefell (the major US federal marriage equality case). I do not trust his ability to be compassionate and understanding while discussing mental health law and policy, and I know him to be prone to asserting his own convoluted moral philosophies as though they were binding law, or more appropriately gospel truth. Predictably it took less than an hour for him to start on a hyper-conservative tirade on the natural rights of parents as paramount to all other rights, relying on the erroneous concept that parentage is determined by flesh-and-blood relations, rather than being a legal status conferred upon individuals regardless of biological relation. As an adoptee who intends to adopt my own children, family as a biological ultimatum is not a concept I have any amount of patience for. I am more than willing to go toe to toe with him over topics about which we disagree (in the two and a half years I have known him, that has been literally every single thing we have discussed together) but it is disheartening to have to deal with somebody who actively triggers my fight-or-flight response during a class dedicated to mental health. The good news is he managed to visibly piss off virtually the entire class, including the professor, during the first class so at least I'll be in good company. Special Education Law went really well, and I even managed to convince my fiancée to sign up for it, so we'll have one last class together. It's right in their wheelhouse, since they've worked in special education law in the past and wanted to be a teacher before coming to law school. We did an exercise in the first class that asked us to pose as representatives of different special education advocacy groups in our city, and the disability rights group I work with was one of the assigned groups, so I had the opportunity to talk fairly extensively about my organization and the work we do, which was refreshing. This is also an issue very near and dear to me, as my brother had a behavioral plan in place when he was in public school and I would have benefited greatly from having a plan, but since my ADHD and OCD weren't diagnosed until law school and the minor dyslexia I likely have is as yet undiagnosed, and I was doing well enough to not raise any red flags, I was never identified as a student eligible for special education plans, which meant I struggled quietly but internalized my challenges as personal failings rather than failings of the educational system.  The special education system in the United States is getting progressively better but it's still leagues away from where it needs to be. Biodiversity and Ecosystems Management was incredible. This class is basically why I came to law school, and I loved every second of it. Human Rights in the Global Economy was fascinating, but I've only taken one international law class before so I'll have a lot of catching up to do! I'm going to try to do summaries of my days like this when I can, which will hopefully contain fewer diatribes in the future. I don' really expect people to be that interested in my day-to-day schedule, but these snippets force me to reflect on my day and what I learned, which helps a ton.

[swordlawyer]

Classes

This semester, I am taking *deep breath*

Natural Resource Law

Human Rights in the Global Economy

Biodiversity and Ecosystems Management

Special Education Law

Mental Health Law

Genetics and the Law

Women in Leadership

and a weekend-long seminar on Diversity in the Law.

I’ll be at work Mondays and Fridays and for a few hours on Tuesday, and in class Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I...may also be lowkey considering signing up for another session of swordfighting, retaking the course on Italian Longsword and working towards hopefully getting an invitation to join my local swordfighting guild. I’ll wait and see just how completely exhausted I am though.

[swordlawyer]

So...I may have signed up for the maximum number of credits this semester, which translates into 7 classes, or sixteen hours of in-class time per week. And I may have also committed to 19 hours a week as a law clerk. And am running two student organizations.  And planning a wedding.  While chronically ill.   I may have overcommitted myself this semester but I'm genuinely deeply excited about everything I'm working on. But, I definitely need some accountability. So, back to lawblr I go. My goal is to post regularly about what I'm studying and the progress I've made, and maybe try the 100 Days of Productivity again. (I'm very forgetful, so the problem isn't actually being productive, but simply posting about it.) Let's do this.

[swordlawyer]

Getting back into the studyblr mindset with some Cultural Property Law and lo-fi background music.

Cultural Property Law is a wonderful intersection of so many of my interests and as a former archaeologist this week's reading is VERY EXCITING.

[swordlawyer]

From this morning: about to tackle the first exam of the semester, and my first take home exam of law school.

Finished it a few hours ago. Took nine hours and was brutal, but I'm proud of how hard I worked!

[swordlawyer]

Roadblocks

Spent another looong night in the ER last week and my whole schedule has been thrown off. Trying to readjust and restabilize, so original content will be slow for a while.

[joanna--studies]

hi, can you rec me any blogs that post law school content so i can keep up w The Motivation

Hi there! I only follow two law blogs. 

@legallystudies

@lawschoolruinedme

If you are a law school related blog please like this post so we can find you! 

[swordlawyer]

Want more law content than my fledgling studyblr can offer? Check out some other great law school blogs!

[swordlawyer]

Day 2/100

Another boring picture today as I've hardly left my desk. Started logging my work about 6 hours [using the Chrome Focus extention] so it feels like there's not much to show, but I wrote nearly 20 pages today so that's not nothing! Another 10 or so to go by Tuesday which is certainly manageable.