Most Strongly Supported LSAT Blogs

It’s not a secret that we are not the biggest fans of the US News Rankings here at MSS. Trent has had multiple postings on the subject of the rankings and there’s no real reason to delve back into it except to say that the rankings themselves may or may not be an insidious plot by a evil mastermind living in a volcano.

I am a big sports fan. I commonly watch three or four episodes of Sportscenter in the same evening. (For those of you who are not sports aficionados, Sportscenter plays the same highlights of the same games over and over each night.)

As a sports junkie, this is my favorite time of year. The Super Bowl has become little more than a commercial for Bud Light and Doritos. The NBA playoffs will begin soon and a champion will be crowned some time in mid-November. In college football, the bowl season is plagued by the whole “debate” over the BCS versus a playoff system (one plus: at least Tim Tebow is gone). The World Series is, well, baseball. But then there is college basketball and… March Madness!

There is a good chance that if you are reading this and waiting on those final admission decisions, you still don’t know exactly what you are getting yourself into. You have vague dreams of a corner office and using the phrase “your honor”, but are not quite sure what the years between now and then are going to look like. I feel your pain. Last summer, when MSS decided that I should start as their 1L blogger well before I actually started law school, I wrote about fifteen blogs about how I had no idea what to expect. Things got messy. There were metaphors. It was a dark time.

Luckily, I have made it my quest to give potential students all the information they could possibly want as they decide the wheres, whens and ifs about attending law school. To that end, this week and next I bring you a two part series (because two parts = twice the money for the same amount of work) about what classes you will take as a 1L. Much like middle schoolers, first year law school students are not allowed to actually pick their own classes. Instead, the classes are assigned, and the subjects are pretty uniform from school to school. There are some exceptions (my favorite fake law school comes to mind), but these are the six classes that are pretty likely to make an appearance in your life over the next twelve months. So sit back and enjoy.

I haven’t had television broadcast into my home for about five years. Don’t worry, I’m not one of those self-righteous “Kill Your TV” jerks. I have an LCD and waste as much of my life in front of it as any other obese American; it’s just that I switched to watching everything on DVD a long time ago. If you couple that with Netflix Watch Instantly, you really won’t miss cable at all. The things you do technically miss out on (news and sports and being able to watch TV shows when they come out) should really be viewed differently (sports should be watched drunken in a bar or not at all, if you still watch televised news you’re probably not reading this because you’re elderly and afraid of computers, and watching TV shows back-to-back is a million times better than having to wait weeks or months between episodes – it took me days, not years, to realize that Lost was going to turn out to be really, really stupid).

In an era where Humanities faculty are dropping like flies, law school faculty members have flourished. A study from the National Jurist indicates that the average law school increased its faculty by 40% over the past ten years.

This is a good thing, as it allows students to be in smaller classes with more access to the instructor and provides law professors with more time for scholarship. On the other hand, the increase in staffing accounts for 48% of the tuition increase from 1998 to 2008. Hmmm.

If asked, would a student desire a lower student to faculty ratio for lower tuition? Based on a highly technical and carefully conducted office survey that included two receptionists, a marketing assistant, and the IT guy, the answer was a resounding yes.

Law school is a scary place. There are gigantic books filled with absurd Latin words and many people who, all things being equal, would prefer that you failed. So from my perch atop the widening gyre of 1L, I’ve decided to lend some advice on how to traverse the pitfalls of law school.

10. Skip an occasional class: I had classmates during fall semester that prided themselves on attending every single class session. This is not elementary school and you will not be given a certificate for the Perfect Attendance Award. You will get burned out and that will start to happen towards the end of the semester when you approach finals. The adage is true: law school is a marathon and not a sprint. If you take some time off throughout the semester, you will go into finals feeling saner, healthier, and happier than many of your classmates. And since it’s graded on a curve…you win!

Not to be alarmist, because we are not in the business of inducing panic, but I would like to direct your attention to the situation currently arising with LSAT test centers in New York:

Mother****ers are filling up. Fast.

In fact, if one were to use a word to describe them, if one really wanted to hit the nail on its head, as it were, one might use the word “full”.

This obviously presents a bevy of problems for the average test-taker in Manhattan (i.e. you) but you do have a couple of options.

Rumors about the legal profession’s demise have become so common lately that one can almost be faulted for not knowing its dismal state. The WSJ legal blog and Above the Law were among the earliest and most vocal critics of the profession’s future, but recently even the mainstream media have started banging the drum. Both the Los Angeles and New York Times have run a variety of stories about the dearth of jobs for law school graduates, their mountains of non-dischargeable debt, and the responsibility law schools have to reduce their admissions.

I’m not sure if it’s that I like a good challenge or that I can’t stand to be on the winning side of an issue, or simply that I don’t want to have friends, but I’d like to take on the whole world in this debate. I think they’re a bit myopic and unduly alarmist about the relative state of the legal profession.

If you want to apply to law schools this coming fall (2010) to enroll next fall (2011), then you probably haven’t taken the LSAT yet. If you’re a junior who wants to go to law school right after graduation, then you’re in this boat. If you’re reading this, and planning this far in advance, then you’re already a step ahead of most people. But when to take the test? June, October, or December?

Technically you have four options, because you could take the February 2011 test and still apply for enrollment for Fall 11. But this really isn’t your best bet. A lot of schools won’t even allow you to apply, and those that do will generally say that it certainly lessens your chances of getting in and getting financial aid. You can make the February test work for you, but it is a last resort of sorts, so I’m going to take that off the table for this discussion (I should note, though, that if you’re not applying in the same year that you’re taking the test, then there is nothing wrong with the February test).

I love Project Runway. There, I said it. Heidi Klum is gorgeous and nice (two characteristics that rarely go together) and Tim Gunn is even, if possible, nicer. Plus, he’s got great fashion sense. (Watch enough episodes and it’s always the idiots who don’t listen to his thoughtful “hmmm…I don’t know about the hot pink ruffles” who get auf wiedersehen’ed that night).