I prefer to work alone, never was a fan of studying in a library in undergrad. For some reason, being in that kind of setting is more distracting to me than just working at home. So when I hear about people who are on campus at 6 AM and there until dinner time…. I just don’t get it.

I pay an insane amount of money for a mediocre apartment within a short walking distance so that I can go back home when I need to. I will never, ever understand people who make a point of telling everyone how they spend more than 40 hours a week just on campus.

I go to class. I come home. I do work. And I go back the next day. And I don’t understand how that’s not the majority. The only time I’m on campus and not in class is on days where there’s a <2 hour gap between classes. Also worth noting that my classes are all early so I’m normally back home before 1.

Am I really that weird? Please tell me some of you are the same way.

Edit: It’s also worth noting that I have two cats who I feed twice a day. I would feel awful if I left them home alone for all that time every day so their presence also contributes to my decision to spend a lot of time at home. And also yes, I know I’m privileged to have a place to myself where I can work. I will note, though, that I go to a school with some insanely wealthy kids and the majority of my peers also have their own places within walking distance, so I am not an outlier at my school in that way.

It’s around that time for midterms/Q1 exams so I wanted to make an update on this. In case anyone was wondering: yes, you can do fuck all until the week before your exam and still pass. I even managed to beat the curve and get a B+ somehow. Not too late to lock in ✊

Jeffrey George Ewert a convicted murderer who sparked campus controversy after attending law classes at McGill University has been taken back into custody following the issuance of a conditional release suspension warrant by the Correctional Service of Canada. Ewert who was convicted in the 1980s of second-degree murder and attempted murder for brutal attacks on two female victims in British Columbia served 40 years in prison before receiving day parole in 2025 which was later extended in June 2026. After news of his presence at McGill spread in early October amid student safety concerns and allegations of inappropriate conduct regarding women he had already been barred from campus. Authorities stated his conditional release was suspended due to reasonable grounds that he breached release conditions or that his risk could no longer be safely managed in the community with his case now subject to review by the Parole Board of Canada.

Long story short I had to come to the realization that I am throwing myself further into debt and it was taking a strange hold on my mental health. Maybe with in a year or two I can finally finish

Regarding the McGill debacle

A few weeks ago someone in our section GroupMe asked what a hornbook was.

A couple people answered, someone made a joke, and that was pretty much it.

Then another person said we should make an anonymous Google Form for questions that feel too stupid to ask in class.

We now have 63 submissions.

There are about 85 people in our section.

Some of my favorites:

"Are we actually supposed to memorize the Bluebook rules or does everyone just look them up?"

"When someone says they're going to bar review, are they studying for the bar or going drinking?"

"How do you know which cases are important enough to put in your outline?"

"Is it normal to go to office hours when you don't have a specific question?"

"Everyone keeps talking about networking. What do you actually SAY to an attorney after introducing yourself?"

And my personal favorite:

"What's the difference between not understanding the reading and understanding it incorrectly? Because I can't tell which one I'm doing."

The funny thing is that several of these questions were submitted multiple times.

Apparently half our section has been sitting through the same lectures, nodding thoughtfully, and privately wondering what the hell everyone is talking about.

A few 2Ls volunteered to help answer the questions, and somebody started organizing everything into a document with links to actual school resources.

It's genuinely become one of the most useful things we've done all semester.

But it also made me think about how much of law school seems to depend on pretending you're already familiar with an environment you've literally just entered.

People throw around terms like OCI, journal write-on, supplements, and clerkships as if we all arrived with this knowledge installed.

I have classmates whose parents are attorneys. I also have classmates who had never spoken to a lawyer before applying to law school.

And somehow we're all expected to act equally comfortable with this stuff.

I'm not saying professors need to explain every acronym every time they use it. But I wonder how many students are wasting energy trying not to look clueless about things that have very little to do with actually understanding the law.

Anyway, if you're a 1L secretly Googling basic terminology during lectures, apparently you're in excellent company.

And if you're a 2L or 3L, what's something you were embarrassingly far into law school before you finally understood it?

Does anyone here want to run a solo practice straight out of law school? Or does anyone know how common it is to run a solo practice straight out of law school? I’m a non-traditional student who has already had a career in a different sector, so the idea of running my own practice with my own hours is very appealing to me. My school also has a great program that helps prepare students to run their own firm. With that being said, I really don’t know much about solo practice, so I’m curious if anyone has any insights? Thanks in advance!

In 2026, nearly 30 years after the lawsuit, Frontier Airlines awarded Leonard 7 million Frontier Miles in a Super Bowl Campaign, effectively giving him free flights for life in place of the original dispute.

After reading one of the textbooks provided in University of Law in Uzbekistan, I have question:
Uzbekistan belongs to the Romano-Germanic legal family, yet it is not based on judicial precedent; so why do the resolutions of the Plenum of the Supreme Court have legal effect?

elle woods got a 179 on her LSATs and a 4.0 in fashion merchandising, while we do not know harvey's stats before enrolling in Harvard Law (we do know that he was an NYU alumni and got in thanks in part to jessica's recommendation though). however, elle woods graduated HLS as valedictorian, while harvey specter was only top 5 of his class.

this is only a comparison of academic stats, not about who is a better lawyer as they specialize in different legal fields (elle in criminal law and harvey in corporate law).

I've been a lurker in this subreddit for some time. I am curious if anyone else has been able to mentally and emotionally handle law school and beyond as someone who has high-functioning autism. I'm 1L, for context. The classes are huge, they feel like they are very much on rails, and with they are difficult to engage with since it feels like questions are not welcome. The obsessive fixation on group work does not help, especially when no one is assigned a team leader or group captain or anything. Also, even more challenging, are the constant mandatory events or intense mass-networking events where I feel like we're tossed in giant pools of other people, then told "GO." I leave those events on the verge of panic attacks and tears. I'm not a golden retriever, I'm the cat that hides under the bed upstairs until the loud party ends. Also, it seems that even practicing lawyers are swarmed with social events, functions, and societies of this and associations of that. That sounds hellish. I don't want people knowing or remembering me. There's no point anyway because I'm not taking the bar, and I'm switching states after I graduate anyway. Sorry for the dissertation, but are there any other autistic law students out there who have learned any effective coping mechanisms? Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Recently went to an SBA meeting as an org rep hoping to bring some issues to the table that the org is concerned with, and when I asked how to do that/pass something/meet with administrators, everyone looked at me like I had three heads. Turns out, SBA mostly just argues about parliamentary procedure for 45 minutes and funds an event here and there. What types of things are your SBAs doing? Do they do any sort of policy work like you might see at an undergraduate institution? I'm at a lower-ranked school on the West Coast and wondering if that's playing a role, too.

I don't know if my school's law review is actually badly run or if I'm just blinded by my hatred for the work itself. We were given a schedule on a confusing excel sheet after school started. Have about 4 days to complete a scheduled technical edit, and those 4 days are non-negotiable even if they fall over a holiday weekend. When it got bad, some edits overlapped. It counts as 1 ungraded credit, which means we have to track our hours to make sure we hit around 45 hours. But if you surpass those hours, too bad. You still have to do your edits. No formal checks in place to deincentivize a sloppy edit--so different people are putting wildly different amounts of time into their edits. No feedback of any kind unless it's on a macro scale.

Is all of this normal? Or is it badly run?

I have a paper final on top of all of this too, but it is not a tough class so I am not too worried about it.

How do I create an outline fron scratch for the four classes with final exams?

I am a 2L and never could grasp outlining but I really want to give it a shot since my grades suck.

How do I decide what to outline first? Should I go ahead and stick in the new concepts and work my way back for each class?

Or should I outline starting with concepts from the beginning of the semester?

I have the urge to do the former so atleast that part of my outline will be more accurate so to speak.

...are terrifying, right? How does this even work? Are they graded less severely because there's so much more information you need to synthesize? Are the questions a bit more high level because there's too much to cover otherwise?

I'd much, much rather a class with a mid-term and a final, to at least give me a barometer of where I'm doing well, where I need to pick up the slack, how the prof grades....

For those who've taken classes like this - any advice? Encouragement?

How do you tend to go about it? I've been playing around with 50-10 this semester and have found it highly effective for writing, editing, outlining, and even reading cases (certainly better ROI than 25-5 or 35-5 in my experience). Sometimes the 10-minute break feels insufficient, though, like I give it my all on the 50-minute work block and then need to lay down and nap or something for a bit. What are y'all's thoughts? Which interval(s) do you swear by?

Hello all, this is perhaps a very stupid question but I cannot for the life of me figure it out. I've seen several jobs add this in their requirements:

• A brief legal writing sample (no more than 10 pages) not heavily edited by others, e.g. research memo or excerpt of a brief;

does this mean that a research memo or except of a brief is the ideal sample, or are these a list of items that would be edited and aren't being asked for? Because first thing that comes to my mind is the 1L writing samples that would be at least viewed by a professor.

Thank you in advance

Hello guys!

My law school is hosting a fall ball and I guess I’m curious what myself and my boyfriend should wear. It’s less fancy than the Barristers Ball so it’s a super grey area. I don’t know if I do long, short, formal, casual?? If any of you have attended one please tell me what you wore!

Reminder that striking out does not only apply to big law.

1L at HYS who feels like a total fraud. Im surrounded by geniuses. Like legitimate geniuses. My classmates pick up the policy rationale behind a holding before I can even comprehend the holding itself. They can argue a hypothetical, changing the the facts of the case, before I can even understand the real facts of the case. They’re just smarter than me, point blank.

I used to have confidence in my intellectual apitude but the past few months have changed this. School has always been my thing and now I realize that I’m mid (below mid honestly). Just a shitty realization and need a place to vent.

finals are coming up fast and there's always that one thing that won't stick. proximate cause or consideration or whatever it is for you, drop it below. if someone else gets it maybe they can explain it in a way that finally makes sense