Most Strongly Supported LSAT Blogs

The new school year is just about upon us. Students across the United States will be back in classes in seven days, including yours truly. This week, as I wind down the very final days of summer and try to get back into the school mind-set, I have been spending some time considering my classmates. You see, law school attracts some interesting people (in all senses of the word) and I’ve missed some of those buggers over the past few months. So to celebrate their general awesomeness/entertainment value I bring you this non-exhaustive list of all the people you will ever meet in law school! (It’s non-exhaustive primarily so I can recycle the idea next time I am too lazy to come up with a real topic. Also, full disclaimer, I got my inspiration from this piece, which is both more original and funnier.)

Enjoy, and be sure to let me know who I’ve missed and where you fit.
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You probably didn’t notice, but just about a week ago LSAC rolled out a fantastic new service seemingly designed solely to increase your general levels of stress and discomfort. Now, in addition to getting letters of recommendations, you can also request… Evaluations! The world of pre-law let out an excited cry of “damn it, really? What the hell is this?” What the hell is this, indeed.

What They Are

An Evaluation, as it’s so creatively called, is something that’s being offered by LSAC, which schools can choose to accept or ignore. With evaluations, you have people judging you in a much more measured manner than they do with letters of recommendation. In multiple different categories, your evaluator ranks you on a scale ranging from “Below Average” (bottom 50%) all the way to “Truly Exceptional” (top 1-2%). There are thirty different areas in which you’re measured, including intellectual curiosity, trustworthiness, and motivation. There is a place for additional comments, so it’s not wholly quantitative, though that is seemingly the thrust of it. This is all done online by your evaluator. For the details, check out the LSAC site: http://www.lsac.org/JD/Apply/evaluations.asp.
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Hello my friends, it has been a while. I’m finally done with my first summer of pretending to be a lawyer, which means exactly two things: 1) I have time to blog again and 2) I can now definitively say that being in law school is not very similar to actually being a part of the legal world. Also I drank a lot of coffee. But that wasn’t really anything new.

This weeks post is, therefore, born of a combination of the first two things. Because I’m now convinced, more than ever, that there is one essential task that every single LSAT student should undertake before they fill out their applications:

Figure out what a lawyer does.
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Ann Levine of US News dropped anvils of knowledge on unsuspecting potential law students this week.

In her piece on the US News blog on Monday, Levine asked the question, “Can You Really Go to Law School?” and answered it with a resounding “Sort of, as long as you enjoy Puerto Rico.”

“Just wanting to go isn’t enough,” Levine writes. “Be honest with yourself. Do you really have a chance to get into the law schools you want, or even to get in anywhere?”
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Guess what? The rankings still sort of suck.

If the US News & World Report rankings didn’t already seem problematic enough, a few weeks ago Bill Henderson of Indiana University came to some conclusions that are a bit annoying, although not that surprising. Henderson is known for studying the rankings, and making models of the rankings to play with. Using these models, he was able to yet again show how these rankings are sometimes based on some crappy measures. Getting back to that in a second.
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Way back in February, the ABA (American Bar Association) decided it was going to investigate the US News rankings of law schools with the hope, it seems, of finding out if they are at all helpful for prospective law students and law schools in general.

The result, as reported earlier today by Law.com, appears to be a resounding “Eh.”
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Here we are, halfway through July, and for some of you it is less than a month away from THE START OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. Yep, for students starting 1L in mid to late August, we are officially in the seventh inning stretch. On the other hand, for those of us soon to be starting 2L, we are halfway through recovering from the miseries of last year, while eagerly anticipating the good parts we’ll get to relive next.

For those of you studying for the LSAT… enough wasting time, get back to it.

Today, as a tribute to these waning days of the world as we know it, I’ve once again reached out to my favorite pre-L, (who will soon enough know just as much about law school as I do) James Swift. This time he shared with me ten of his biggest fears (which, to his credit, all look pretty familiar), and I agreed to either debunk them, or at least provide the best advice I could.
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Another week has come and gone and I’ve learned a couple new things: one, there is no good way out of San Francisco by car during the evening rush hour, and two, I actually enjoy solving logic games.

I haven’t seen any flying pigs lately and Hell certainly isn’t going to be a stop on this winter’s ski circuit, but that which seemed impossible has happened. I’m not saying that I’m some logic game solving wunderkind, and to date we’ve only done one-to-one ordering games and overbooked/underbooked games. I just find them enjoyable. The methods that I’ve learned in class really give me a feeling of control over the situation. The rules are right in front of me, concrete statements that I can reduce to mere letters and lines (sometimes). If I can build my scenarios accurately, I should be able to arrive at the right answer without too much drama. Even the new “playing the numbers” trick we learned on Tuesday, which I truly expected to drive me up the wall, made sense and proved invaluable.
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I think we can safely say that anyone who has taken the LSAT has at least entertained the idea of going to law school. In fact, when you’re taking that lovely test, you have to write a passage on your test form in painful, painful cursive saying you are taking the test to go to law school.

But I’d also wager that, given the choice, most of you would avoid law school entirely if it meant you could become a lawyer sooner. Anything to start stacking that cheddar a little earlier, eh?

Well, if this guy’s lawsuit goes well, maybe that option isn’t too far off.

Clarence K. Carter, a former Indiana prisoner, is suing the state of Indiana, claiming that he should be allowed to take the Bar exam without going to law school. Carter’s argument hinges on the idea that the law requiring law school is unconstitutional.
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Today I am writing about a reoccurring fear I have. That’s right, at least for the week, I’m shunning unauthorized advice, seriatim descriptions and even pie charts for the sake of addressing a subject seriously and somberly. With YouTube clips. Well one YouTube clip. But a serious YouTube clip. Ok not really.

But I am talking about a reoccurring fear. You see, the legal world is often regarded as a rather conservative universe, and it seems that conformity is the norm. Lawyers are expected to look the same, behave similarly and follow parallel paths toward comparable goals. I sometimes wonder if law school is really just the real life version of the Play Doh spaghetti maker. We spent the last twenty odd years making ourselves into these different and colorful masterpieces, which we proudly showed to our big sister, law school. And she went Oh how nice and picked out all the best pieces, and for a moment we were so gratified… but then the stupid bitch decided she wanted some fake linguini, threw us all into the same tank, cranked the handle, and out came a big brown blob of sameness.
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