Of Outlines and Bricks

Law school finals ended Friday, and I am officially half way through law school.  It's time for some much-needed reflections on this whirlwind semester.

After going through three cycles of finals, which comprise all or most of my grade in each class, I'm fairly certain that law school finals basically only measure how skilled one is at filling one's mind to brimming, dumping it on a page (in the most orderly and concise way possible, of course), wiping the mind clean, and starting all over again for the next final. 

With each final, my textbook and my carefully-organized notes for that class become my complete life and being for a space of two or three days.  My process is:
1) take notes by hand throughout the semester,
2) type up my notes,
3) spend hours and hours formatting, refining, bolding, adding to, and whittling down those notes,
4) print out the notes, highlight through them, and index them with brightly-colored tabs. 

By the time I am finished, my notes have become the all-important Outline, and I'm privately convinced it is a genius work of art.  The process with statute books is similar: strategic tabs and highlighting are an absolute necessity.  There is nothing more beautiful than a nicely tabbed statute book.  Like this one (I took this picture just before my 9am Secured Transactions final):

I walk into a final feeling like my textbook and Outline are my very best friends and absolute lifeline.  Then, three hours later, I carry those same objects out of Green Hall and dump them, to be forgotten, in the back seat of my car. 

It makes me sad, to see them lying there abandoned...  But they are abandoned out of necessity: law school just doesn't leave you much time to ponder or appreciate newly-gained insights. 

One of my time-consuming tasks this semester was editing other people's (sometime poorly-written) footnotes in articles submitted for publication in the Kansas Law Review.  During one of my frantic editing sessions (they never struck at a convenient time, but then again, there's never a convenient time to edit footnotes for four hours), I came across a quote in a book that provided a lovely metaphor for my semester, and maybe for law school generally: 

The author analogized bits of information to bricks, falling all around you.  At a certain rate, you can use those bricks build a wall, placing each brick as it falls into its place on the wall.  But if they begin to fall at too fast a rate, and if there are too many bricks all around you, you will never be able to find space to build a wall, and the bricks are useless.

I felt all semester that I was being buried alive by my metaphorical bricks of information.  The classes I took this semester were really quite interesting, exactly the kind of thing that I was happy to spend time reading and thinking about.  But I had to cram each new fact or idea into an unfilled sliver of my brain to make space for the next onslaught. 

About half way through the semester, I gave up attempting to mentally organize and process the material that I read through each night.   There was just too much.  It was frustrating knowing that I could be getting a lot more out of my classes, if I could just find some space to build a coherent structure out of my thoughts. 

But maybe that is for after law school.  Maybe law school is just to show you the bricks, impress you with how many there are, and hit you over the head with them a few times so you at least remember where they are in case you need to come back for them later.  If you're lucky, maybe you'll walk out of each class with a brick in each hand? Hm (I like analogies).

Well, now that I'm not trying to process so much new info every day, I'm starting to feel unoccupied space opening up again, both in my schedule and in my mind.  My goal for next semester is to use at least one idea a month as inspiration for a blog post here, in the attempt to feel that I've at least partially processed and refined a few thoughts from my classes. 

Meanwhile, I'm spending some time during my break working on projects that use other parts of my brain, and it feels great--I hope to do a post on those projects in the next week or so.   But if you don't hear from me before next week, I'm wishing everyone the mental space and peace of mind to enjoy family, enjoy break, and enjoy Christmas.