3L

I survived my 2L year.

And I’ve been avoiding the law school ever since. After going there almost every week for a year and a half, it’s been nice to be away from it for a while.

Compared to my 1L year, 2L ended somewhat abruptly. Grades were posted quickly and there was no journal competition tacked on to the end of the year. Quite suddenly I switched from being a 2L to being a “rising 3L.”

That means, of course, that I have only two semesters left; and consequently only two more exam periods. (Let’s not talk about the bar exam.) Finals are a small part of the semester, but being nearly done with them is still a relieving thought.

One of the perks to being a 3L is it’s much easier to answer the question, “How much school do you have left?”, which is an unexpectedly hard query in the middle of a three year degree. Stating I’ll be finished next spring is so much easier than trying to explain I’m somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3 of the way done.

A friend told me last year that during 1L they scare you to death, during 2L they work you to death, and during 3L they bore you to death. That hasn’t quite been my actual experience, but it does roughly parallel the mental experience of law school. 1L was intimidating and intense. 2L was grinding. 3L looks, thus far, like something to wade through in order to get the required number of credits.

But, I have a few months of break before discovering whether the 3L part is true. For now I’ll be staying away from South Henry Street and enjoying the broader delights of Williamsburg and the Mid-Atlantic region.

Trying to Be a Currant Bush

I keep hearing people talk about how nice our spring days are. I do a mental double-take each time because, due to the end of the semester and the outside temperatures, it feels like summer to me.

The semester isn’t completely over, but nearly so. I took my two finals last week, which leaves me with one writing assignment and about 20 hours of research to finish. It feels good to be almost done.

My finals were fine. The Religion Clauses test was the most laid back final I’ve taken in law school. It was only two and a half hours and it was a subject I enjoy. My Employment Law test was similarly worry-free; it consisted mostly of short answer questions rather than essays and the time passed quickly. I couldn’t work myself into much effort to prepare for either one. I made a short outline for Religion Clauses and I took my Employment Law notes for a 5½ mile walk around the neighborhood; but besides that, my mind was just done studying.

Or maybe I’m just not as stressed about finals as I was before. I’ve finally realized that even if I don’t feel I did well on a final, the likelihood of actually failing is pretty slim. Maybe my mind has realized it’s just not worth the worry.

So why did I worry so much before? Maybe it’s just the nature of law school. Someone described it to me this way: law school makes you feel small. It makes you feel like you can’t make a difference and you aren’t big enough to succeed, let alone thrive. It makes you feel like you aren’t living up to expectations. Law school is rough on self-confidence.

But maybe it’s okay to feel small for while. It brings to mind Elder Hugh B. Brown’s story of the currant bush (a nice summary of which was given by Elder D. Todd Christofferson). Maybe feeling small is the Gardner’s way of letting me know I’m still a work in progress. There are still things to prune and branches to grow. The fruit will come later; for now, I just need to keep being a currant bush.

___________________

There are thousands of these
flowers around the neighborhood.

Tidbits:

• One of the foundational cases for the Supreme Court religion clauses doctrine is Wisconsin v. Yoder, commonly abbreviated to Yoder.  As we were discussing the development of Supreme Court doctrine in class one day, my professor accidentally suggested that for certain cases, we should “look to Yoda.”
• Calling on the force for constitutional interpretation isn’t necessarily a bad idea. One opinion I read summarized some of the religion clauses doctrine this way: it’s constitutional, except when it’s not.
• Some of the confusion is because the Supreme Court refuses to be bound by a single analysis in such a sensitive area. One common analysis they use, the Lemon test, is apparently a zombie. Though the justices don’t really like it, they can’t seem to help applying the test on occasion. It keeps cropping up like “some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried” (Justice Scalia, concurring in Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School Dist., 508 U.S. 384, 398 (1993)). See? It’s a zombie.
• In Employment Law, we talked about the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which (due to the ease with which employees can take advantage of it) has been called the “Friday and Monday Leave Act.”
• We also talked about a case that is in my professor’s “you can’t make this stuff up” category: it was a case of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) willfully violating the Fair Labor Standards Act. Not a good idea.
• Then there was the trade secrets act case. To sue regarding a trade secret, an employer has to take reasonable measures to protect the information from disclosure. Apparently in one case, the judge came into court and told the employer he had just Googled the so-called secret information. That case didn’t last very long. 

The goslings are out.