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.