The Elusive Top Ten
My sleep schedule, such as it was, got all shot to hell when I stayed up all Monday night before the Property exam condensing an Emanuel’s book and typing it into my notes. This may well be the absolute worst way to study for an exam, but when you’ve put it off all semester and the prof doesn’t allow commercial outlines, sometimes you find yourself in an unsavory position.
Around 3:30 in the morning I got to a section on mortgages, and I didn’t recall us talking in class about mortgages in any depth, so that bit of my outline looks like this (pretend it’s indented properly):
C. Financing Devices: Mortgages, Deeds of Trust, and Installment Contracts
1. christ i hope this doesn’t come up on the test
First question? “If Bart mortgages his house to Mort, and then Bart sells the property to Pam….” Argh.
So that exam was horrible, but not more so than everyone expected. Meh. With all the grading done on a curve, I’d rather have hard exams anyway. It’s no fun when an omitted detail or one multiple-choice question separates the A’s from the A-’s.
Overall I think I’m going to come out with lower grades this semester than last. My preparation for these exams has been about the same, maybe a little more slacktastic, but most of my classmates seem to be at the top of their games this time around.
If I do end up disappointed I only have myself to blame. As always, I should’ve started studying earlier, say, more than two days before each exam. And maybe I could have stayed awake through a few more afternoon classes. In any case, I’ll have plenty of time to mull over how much better I could have done during the upcoming week-long journal write-on competition.
Have I explained this? I don’t think I have. Legal academic journals, unlike those in most other fields, are published by law students. Most of the articles are written by professors and other academics, but the students do all the editing and publishing work.
Each school usually has a top journal, called the law review, that publishes on all kinds of legal topics, and several others on specific subjects. Houston has five or six, I think (International Law, Health, Business & Tax…). Being on law review is basically the most prestigious thing you can do in law school, at least in a generic academic sense.
It’s been my goal ever since I started law school to make it onto law review. Tedious editing and cite-checking? Sign me up! No seriously. I live for that stuff.
You join a journal at the end of your 1L year. The Houston Law Review allows the top ten percent of the 1L class to “grade on,” while the rest of the top thirty percent can “write on” in a writing competition at the beginning of the summer. The other journals have different cut-offs, like twenty percent/fifty percent, or thirty percent/everybody, and they all collaborate to put on just one write-on competition, thank goodness.
Write-on is pretty grueling, or so I hear. There’s an editing test, and then you have to churn out a 30-40 (IIRC) page case note analyzing a given recent case. On the one hand it’d be a worthwhile experience, but on the other…yikes. I’ll have a full-time job at that point, and I wouldn’t mind a little relaxation time on evenings and weekends.
But like I said, it’ll be my own fault if I don’t finish in the top ten percent and have to do the write-on. I made it last semester, but just barely, and it’s the whole 1L year that counts. With only one exam left to go, I don’t feel spectacular about any of the work I’ve done so far. I’m writing a lot less on my exams this time around—just nine pages on ConLaw, for example, compared to the sixteen and thirteen I wrote for Contracts and Torts—because I’m not as fluent in the material. Even my brief was a little more lackluster than the memo I wrote last semester.
In my section alone (about ninety people, one third of the class) I can name seven or eight people off the top of my head who are definitely kicking my ass, and if they’re not, they deserve to be. I’m sure there are more. Write-on, here I come!
Tags: exams, law review, law school, writing
