Aggregated first-year advice

Over the last several weeks, there have been some excellent posts around the web offering advice to new Sec3 students in specific, and new law students in general.

Scoplaw (Sec3 '07) hits all the high points.

Lyco (Sec3 '07) discusses briefing and outlining.

And Ambivalent Imbroglio (GWU '06) is a regular dynamo when it comes to dishing out words of wisdom.

Please add other particularly apt posts or resources in the comments.

I don't have a lot to say that isn't going to sound hokey, but I welcome the new class of Section Three, and I'd love to hear your impressions, either in comments on this blog, in the SectionThree.org discussion boards, or in my inbox at dls42 [at] law [dot] georgetown [dot] edu.

Burden or Benefit #2: Daniel Swanwick

My summer job was 95% Section Three. I worked for Professor Chused, reformulating Legal Process and Society from a year-long CivPro course into a showcase of legal history, social science, and philosophy. My largest single assignment was to determine what Justice Brandeis was thinking when he wrote Erie v. Tompkins. So clearly I'm a bit of an outlier when I say that Section Three was essential to my work this summer. I simply couldn't have done large parts of my job if I hadn't been exposed to the jurisprudential arc of the twentieth century.

However, I also did a fair amount of research into the history of landlord-tenant law. While this work was also fairly academic, it didn't contain a strong substantive Section Three component. Clearly, being able to navigate the law review literature and the library's primary and secondary sources was vital for the L-T stuff, but I picked up a lot of these skills on the job.

Bottom line: Section Three is essential in the unlikely case that you're doing research for a Section Three professor.

Burden or Benefit #1: Julia Pinover

Julia's take:

Best Thing We Learned: Class Actions and Legal Writing.
Most Irrelevant Things We Learned: All level 3 stuff.

I'm a summer associate for a non-profit civil rights firm that does impact litigation and Class Action suits on behalf of people with disabilities.

I know this sucks to say it, but my lawyers are not really interested in policy arguments, and what I'm really asked to do is find the law, balance it out and tell my superiors about it. Policy doesn't really enter into it at all because no matter what brilliant policy arguments I can come up with, or how I could debunk the opinions that exist, what my lawyers want is a prospective review of what they can expect from the judges or the other side based on the precedent.

Now all that said, I do not regret Section 3 for even one minute. It did give me a great perspective from which to read cases, and toy with them in my own brain, and will most certainly become really useful once I am the head of my own non-profit or otherwise higher up in the business/law worlds... But for now the black letter would have been more useful. But, I don't think we learned too little black letter at all -- I've been more than able to keep up with all of it even though I maybe don't know all the terms (like what the hell is the catalyst theory? had to teach myself that one...)

So this is probably not the emphatic "section 3 is always better" review that you wanted. But even though it has its drawbacks, I think on balance it's more good than bad. AND not to be overlooked is the social dynamic we had -- to hear my co-workers and new Georgetown friends from Section Other talk about their first year experience, it just sounds TERRIBLE! I constantly thank my lucky stars that we were in a relatively supportive and kind environment.

Sec3: Burden or Benefit?

Earlier this summer I solicited feedback from recent Sec3 alums about how their summer work was helped or hindered by their participation in Georgetown's alternative curriculum. I got a number of responses, and I plan to publish highlights in the coming days.

Announcing the Section Three Blog

Considering how stagnant the Section Three homepage is, largely due to the difficulty of updating it, I wondered if I shouldn't attempt a Section Three blog. If you're interested in contributing, leave a comment or email me at dls [at] swanno [dot] org.