Welcome

Welcome to the second year of lawschool! The beginning of the second year is initiated with the call of little attention. Frankly, the boundary between the first and the second year is a blurry line between finals and searching for a summer job. So for those of you who were there with me for my first year either in person, at the distance, or in my virtual imagination of mysterious readers of my blog, I shall take this moment to thank you for your support, friendship, readership, comments, and patience and I welcome you to my official beginning of the second year of law school.

I have a good feeling about this year. I knew so little about the law or law school last year that I did not have too many expectations to be either disappointed or fulfilled, but now that I have been at this for a year, I have a little better idea of what this law thing is all about. I can say the same thing about blogging. When I first started to blog, I did not really know what I wanted out of the experience or how exactly I would use the medium, but I have grown to really value blogging as a creative outlet, and I hope to use this blog even more efficiently and hopfully more enjoyably than even last year. Probably every law school is filled with individuals like myself who had dreams of some sort of writing career in the past. Lawyering does afterall consist of a lot of reading and writing, but legal writing is, at least at this point, fairly rigid and until you are a judge, no one really wants to hear your opinion. Most legal writing is more like plagerism where you are recapping the applicaple law to a specific set of facts and using the law to make arguments about the way those facts should be be understood. Blogging, on the other-hand, is mostly opinion, and that is one of the reason it is so refreshing. Finally, law school is pretty absorbing, so keeping a journal of my experience of the law is like keeping a journal of much of the activity of my days.

I will be working on the links and such to this blog over the next couple of weeks, but the ball is rolling. Once classes start again, I will continue to post "Classic Lines from Law School Lectures" and I hope to resurect the "Law School Gossip" that was the subject of some posts last year. I will also use this space as a dumping ground for legal articles and sites that I find on the web that caught my interest. And hopefully soon I will be able to comment on work in the legal profession. The second year has the reputation for being the year when you work the hardest at law school, the first year being an intro, and the third being the time when students are just ready to be done. In all this I feel like I will be looking for the answer to one simple question, a kind of leitmotif throughout this blog. That question is goes something like: how does one do meaningful work in the law? What does it mean to be a lawyer or a law student today? what is the place of law in the greater scheme of society? what is my place? basically, how am I going to find meaningful work? and since the law will be a part of my life for probably most of the rest of my time on this planet, how do I make this work my own? How do I go from an uninformed student who sees the law as an interesting intellectual inquiry to one who can feel, live, understand, and make a life out of work in the law?

It might seem like that is more than one question, but they are all getting at the same point. On top of getting a job and learning as much as I can at school, answering that question is an essential next step in my legal education and understanding myself.