Well, I survived. One semester of law school is done. I finished my last exam on the 19th. It was an incredibly tough journey, but I've learned a ton and I'm hoping I'll be much better prepared when I begin again on January 5.

I had 4 exams -- Torts, Contracts, Property, and "Economics for Lawyers"... The torts and contracts classes are a full year long, so I still have them next semester, but Property was crammed all into one semester, so it was twice the amount of material as the others. We made it through about 500 pages of the case book for both torts and contracts, and over 1000 pages for property.

I have not been blogging much because I just couldn't figure out how to fit it in. I was far too worried about exams first semester, and ended up doing a lot of unnecessary work because I didn't know what the exams would be like and was so unfamiliar with the material and law in general... This time, I think I'll be able to focus on the most important things more easily, and avoid wasted effort. I also have to make an attempt to be more balanced about my life. I need to try to go out and do things with Yuki... I went out probably less than 5 or 6 times in the last 4 months. Crazy.

As for my grades, torts was the toughest since we have a philosopher for a professor, who cares much less about the law than about what is moral and ideologically consistent... Very tough to write essays about. The exam was only two essay questions for 3 hours. Some of the others had short answer questions, and a bit of multiple choice... (Econ was all multiple choice.)

The main thing I learned from these exams is that there is only so much you can write in 3 hours, and if you know the main concepts and have some notes (which you are hopefully allowed to bring) on the important details, you should be able to get down enough to show that you learned a lot in the class... It's utterly different from computer science exams though, so I had no idea how I would do or what to expect until I did them.

All of my study methods have changed dramatically since the beginning as well. I discovered that hilighting just distracted and confused me, whereas underlining and drawing rectangles around words with pencil helped me a great deal. I also continued to write notes in the margin of my books, but these evolved to become more focused and succinct as I went along. Briefing cases is a difficult issue. Briefing basically consists in taking a judge's confusing mess of a decision and organizing and sorting it out, finding the salient points. This is necessary for class preparation, and sometimes for later preparation before exams, but it's very easy to take too many notes and not think about things enough.

I've had many revelations throughout the semester, one of which is that you don't always need a ton of information to think about something and come to an intelligent and rational solution, even in subjects as squishy as the law. In fact, often too much information prevents you from thinking properly about a problem. I believe that the excess of un-edited information on the net and across our media in general today has caused people to focus too much on the data and far too little on the analysis, if at all.

I'm beginning to think that everyone may need a break from the net and from such powerful tools as computers periodically, in order to regain the capacity to think deeply and meaningfully about a smaller number of things.