Three days before I had my unexpected surgery, I took my first law school midterm. I thought I did okay on it, especially the essay portion which was the majority of the test. Seems I slightly over-estimated. I passed and did, in fact, do better than the mean score, but I was not happy with my grade. I’m still not. 

Seems that when one writes a law school essay response, one must include every single bit of information, no matter how obvious it seems. In my case, for example, I got nailed for not explaining how/why B. Obama is a public figure (this is important because in libel cases, if you are a public figure, the rules are different than if you are a regular person). I actually wrote “Obviously, Mr. Obama is a public figure…” Seems to me you’d have to be living under a rock not to know who Obama is, but no, I had to express it clearly. Poo.

I also got nailed for not explaining whether the publication in question was libelous, but again, I didn’t think I needed to since the instructions said to write a memo with suggestions for how to defend against the libel claim and once you show that the party in question is a public figure and that there was no “actual malice,” then it really doesn’t matter if it was libelous or not.

So now I know–explain everything like you are talking to someone with a good vocabulary who has been living under a rock for the past 50 years. And that’s what I’ll do on the final.

And then today, I got an email from the school which let me know that there was a first-day reading assignment. Okay, no big deal. I kinda figured that would be the case. The email tells me that I need to read an entire book before the first day and, because books are included in my scholarship, that I can pick up mine next week sometime. Curious, I looked up the book online. It’s a whimsical little pamphlet…of almost 300 pages! Called Reading Like a Lawyer, it weighs 1.2 pounds. That’s more than Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (paperback) weighed. Oy.

So, a week from Monday, that would be the 4th, I have my final for this summer course. Then on either my birthday or the day after, I have registration stuff and must pick up my books. The 21st is orientation, and classes start the 22nd. So much for enjoying any time off and/or finishing my own book that I’ve been writing. 

Im starting to wonder just what I have gotten myself into. Yikes!

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