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.