That’s a really interesting perspective. Was that material you sought for personal reasons or a required part of your education? Any specialization involved, if the latter? (I’m pretty ignorant about y’all’s schooling)
Good question. I’ve wondered how people could go to the same schools as I, sit through the same classes, and have wildly different political views. But it’s that they come into it with a different lens.
Example, There’s a Supreme Court case about a woman who was charged with obscenity for possession of porn. It didn’t belong to her. It was her boyfriends, maybe husband. Police came in with a warrant for his arrest, but he wasn’t there, and they wanted to squeeze her for information on his whereabouts, so they charged her with possession of porn he had squirreled away in the basement.
You’re could read that and be like “good, the police had a warrant and she should have cooperated, she had her turn in court and was convicted of possessing it, and we might disagree now but that was just the law of the day.”
Other students who were less ignorant, more fun to be around, and usually much better students and people read that and be like “could you believe these obvious racists jammed up this innocent woman over a porn mag just to serve a warrant?”
Speaking for myself, I could see that they were out there right now pulling the same type of shit and I thought now they’re going to have to go through me, once I get my card, let’s fight about it.
Then you start practicing and the lines start to blur a bit, things become grey, and you start to drink your own Kool Aid, whatever that may be. If you go defend corporations, you’re going to start thinking maybe they should have more rights, maybe they aren’t getting a fair shake by all these whiny plaintiffs and their surviving family members. You go prosecute criminals, you’ll think there is danger everywhere, suspicious of everyone.
I found a happy mix of picking and choosing cases of all kinds, now, but spent my formative years representing employees who got hurt at work. My Kool Aid was like “employees are being fucking by corporations, watch them or they’ll fuck you too, and insurance companies are evil, life sucking leaches.” So, my Kool Aid has no artificial flavor, right?
I did do a lot of extra reading as I was eic of the law review and a top student, able to remember obscure footnotes in great detail; reading stories and then drawing on them to remember rules and policy reasoning is very natural for my memory. Worked out well.
Hey thanks. Glad to be out here. I personally find listening less effective than reading, especially for new material, mainly because with books you get a table of contents and headings, chapter titles, all right there to show you the shape and direction of the material, then you start reading and you have a rough idea of where you are and where you’re going. Plus, with a book you can stop, start, flip back, make notes in the margins, highlight. Even if you never look back at the highlights, the act of highlighting means you’re reading twice, same for margin notes, or even little pictures.
For studying and review, listening to recorded lectures while writing an outline, including my own reflections and examples, was most effective. Like for the rule that an assault can be a touching of an object intimate to a person, rather than the actual person, the classic case involves slapping a dinner plate out of the plaintiff’s hand at a dinner buffet, and the lecturer would usually toss in an example or two, or the reading might have a couple extra in the footnotes, and I would throw those in and add my own like, you could assault someone by slapping the hat off their head, pausing the lecture to create and reflect.
There was a journalist who went to write an article about those memory champions who memorize the order of a deck of playing cards, things such as that, and he asked them how they did it, and then the journalist ended up becoming the champion, because he realized there was nothing special about it: memory is a product of focus and attention. This is the basis of an ancient memorization technique called the memory palace, this and the fact that spatial relationships are naturally easy to remember, even if you just imagine two totally unrelated things having an arbitrary location to one another, just imagining it once will help you remember the two things. Even recall is a product of focus and attention. Like before an exam it’s way more effective to clear your head and separate from the subject entirely for fifteen minutes than it is to try and cram a few more items from your notes. Like, you already know the shit, you made the notes, it’s in there.
I have this eerie feeling that any large amount of legal documents is going to contain mostly stories of those with means fucking the rest of us.
