Lawyering “Tips of the Day”

I’m a TA for Lawyer­ing again this year, and my pro­fes­sor wants me to give a “tip of the day” when I’m in class (which is once a week).  And because I have not writ­ten any­thing on here for a while, I thought I would share my wis­dom with the gen­er­al pub­lic… or no one, as the case may be.

Week 1:

  • Main­tain bal­ance in your life — get to the gym, do things out­side the law school, be involved in the com­mu­ni­ty, etc. — bal­anced peo­ple are hap­pi­er and I think they are bet­ter stu­dents because they learn to be effi­cient with their time.
  • Form rela­tion­ships with each oth­er — these will be your col­leagues, so take care of each oth­er.  Send peo­ple notes when they miss class, form study groups, get to know each oth­er.

Week 2:

  • Believe it or not, pro­fes­sors do actu­al­ly know a lot, prob­a­bly more than your friends, so do not be afraid to ask ques­tions dur­ing class or out­side of class.
  • If you’re going to bat­tle a library book, make sure you can win with­out dam­ag­ing your wrist.  (This was a par­tic­u­lar­ly dumb sto­ry that result­ed in a lot of pain for my poor wrist.)

Week 3 (this week):

  • Try and cat­e­go­rize things in oth­er ways when you read cas­es or com­pare cas­es.  For instance, even though you will not take Crim­i­nal Pro­ce­dure until next semes­ter, my favorite cat­e­go­riza­tion is the ani­mal-rule cat­e­go­ry.  This includes the rac­coon rule (deter­min­ing cur­tilage and trash cans), the eagle rule (deter­min­ing obser­va­tions dur­ing fly­overs), the ado­les­cent hip­popo­to­mus rule and the para­keet in a lock­et rule (deter­min­ing rea­son­able­ness for a search gained by war­rant).
  • An eagle may soar, but a weasel does­n’t get sucked into a jet engine.  (A friend sug­gest­ed that one.)

I haven’t real­ly been lim­it­ing myself to one tip each week, but I just have so much wis­dom to pass on.  Ha.