HLS in Focus

Woo-hoo!  I got approved to spend winter term doing an independent writing credit!  I’m going to be studying 1L legal education and how it has been evolving, particularly at Harvard.  HLS is introducing a brand new mandatory class for 1Ls this year, which is good to know if you decide to come here and even if you don’t, since a lot of law schools follow Harvard’s lead on this type of thing.   If you for some reason are not intimately familiar with the history of legal education in the United States, I’ll give you a little primer.  It is a hugely popular cocktail party conversation, after all.   

For better or for worse, Harvard is a big dog in the development of legal education.  It was our guy Christopher Columbus Langdell who changed law school more than a hundred years ago to go from “Hello, students, here’s what the law is.  Listen up.” to “Miss Smith, what was the holding in Terry v. Ohio?”  Langdell changed law education at Harvard to switch to studying cases, and now just about every law school in the country uses the case study method.  Go, Langdell!  No wonder we named the HLS library after you. 

Then nothing happened for like a hundred and twenty years.  Law students everywhere continued to take the same required classes: criminal law (call it “crim” unless you want to sound like a newbie), contracts, property, torts, and civil procedure (“civ pro”).  Legal education really stayed pretty much the same from around 1890 to 2007, when I started as a 1L.  Ooh, then things got exciting.  HLS added two classes for 1Ls, one on international law and another on legislation and regulation.  The buzz was generally positive, since most people recognize how international our world has become, and how much of our law today is promulgated by statutes.  It did take a few weeks that year for the student body to agree on the nickname for legislation and regulation, whose title was clearly too long to be bothered with, but the universally accepted term is “leg reg.”  Ah, the important decisions made at Harvard Law School. . .

Well, bring on the excitement again, because this year’s batch of 1Ls will be the very first to all take the same class for winter term.  It’s called the Problem Solving Workshop, and it’s designed to teach students practical lawyering skills, including client interaction.  I’m a 3L so I won’t take the class, but a professor invited me to TA for his class, which will be great research fodder for my paper.  Maybe I’ll get to help pick the nickname.  I’m torn between “prob” and “PSW.”  Right now everyone is just calling it the new 1L class.  “The new 1L class”—obviously the creative spirit of Langdell is alive and well.

- Erin

One of the greatest perks of being at Harvard is getting to know the people. I am always amazed when I talk to my classmates about their interests and hobbies. As a 2L it has been especially interesting to talk to other students about what they did with their 1L summer. I recently sat down with a friend and asked him to tell me all about his summer in New York City. During last year’s spring on-campus interview season, he met with recruiters from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. A week after his short interview he got a phone call with an offer. He immediately accepted. As a native of New York, he was excited to be home for the summer and because the internship was unpaid, he was eligible for a Summer Public Interest Fund stipend.

The summer turned out to be a great success. His placement in the civil division involved a lot of legal research and writing. Throughout the course of the summer, he was able to research several different topics including inmates’ rights to counsel and federal tort claims under the Medical Care Recovery Act. His first big lesson of the summer was that, “1L Civil Procedure does matter.” He realized this when his very first research assignment was all about international service of process and personal jurisdiction under New York’s long arm statute. I know all of this is gibberish unless you have taken civil procedure but after a semester in law school, you will understand how frightening those words can be and how great it is to see that you didn’t spend a week studying them for nothing. In addition to writing informal internal memos, he had the opportunity to write first drafts of motions for his supervising attorneys including a motion for summary judgment on employment discrimination under Title Seven.

The summer wasn’t restricted to just research and writing, the internship also came with trips to the courthouse to observe trials in the district court and oral arguments in the 2nd circuit. The office also offered a trial advocacy workshop for its small group of fifteen summer interns. The interns were able to participate in a mock trial at the end of the program and prepare segments of the oral arguments. Last summer there was even the opportunity to have a picture taken with U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder.

In the end, the internship was exactly what he expected. One of the greatest benefits of working in government is that they are often short on resources and really need help from interns. This means that you get real work that the attorneys often incorporate into their final briefs and presentations. There are so many different legal opportunities to take advantage of your 1L summer and I never get tired of hearing about them.

- Elizabeth

I met my “big sis,” a 2L from the Boston area, for lunch during the first week of school and a few more times each semester when events like exams, class registration, and summer job applications were approaching. From the very beginning, she was a wonderful source of frank advice about professors, classmates, and the ultimate 1L concern of how much a person should study.

She was also very geared toward public interest and happened to work with several activities that interested me, so it was terrific to have her perspective as I decided what to join. Her involvement on two journals allowed for comparisons that helped me choose mine, and her advice about different student practice groups was part of what led me to the Tenant Advocacy Project, a really defining part of my HLS experience. As time went on with that, she shared experiences from her work with the Legal Aid Bureau, helping me feel more confident and prepared as a student advocate.

It was great having so much in common with my “big sis,” but I think anyone who had made it through 1L year would have been a great resource as I found my niche here at Harvard. In a big school where connections beyond your assigned section can take effort, it was great to be paired with someone already eager to help out. That’s why I decided to pay the favor forward and take on a “little sis” of my own this year. It’s been easy to keep in touch so far through e- mails, a frozen yogurt date, a WLA wine and cupcakes party, and some chance encounters on campus. And it feels good to answer her questions about outlines, exams, and jobs, just trying to be the same helpful resource I had last year.

Meanwhile, WLA is not the only group with big siblings. I know the progressive American Constitution Society has mentors, for instance, and two friends of mine are big and little siblings with APALSA, the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association. So there are many opportunities for the same positive experience as mine.

- Lea

By all objective measures, this past Saturday should have been miserable. I spent the afternoon, trudging through random neighborhoods on four hours of sleep, in the middle of a downpour. Given all of these factors, it would probably be a little strange to know that I was actually really enjoying myself.

This past weekend was Fall Fest, a Harvard-wide day of service. Basically, the school organized a bunch of service projects and encouraged students to participate in them. I’m not going to pretend that my initial inkling towards getting involved was completely altruistic. The night of the deadline to sign-up, I got an excited email from a friend of mine saying that our section was four people away from being the section with the most people to participate. The prize for the most well-represented section was a free tab at the bar of their choosing. I figured that if I got to help the community, hang out with my friends, and get a shot at free drinks all at the same event, it probably made sense to give it a try.

I threw my name down on the last activity that still had spots available, Project No One Leaves. I woke up the next morning, bright and early, and headed over to campus to figure out what I would be doing that day. As it turns out, No One Leaves is a group that educates foreclosed homeowners and renters about their options and provides them with free legal advice. I was going to spend the day with a small group of law students, going door to door to homes that had recently been foreclosed on and talking with the residents about their rights. After a training session, we were broken up into small groups and assigned a member of No One Leaves to canvass with.

On the drive over to the neighborhood that we would be canvassing, I started to ask our group leader more about the rights of foreclosed people. She told me a number of things that I had not known about the foreclosure crisis. For one, the banks usually try to undergo “no fault” evictions. They will try to kick renters off the foreclosed property despite the fact that the renters have paid, and would like to continue to pay, their rent. If this doesn’t work they will offer people small, one-time cash sums to get people out of their homes. What is most incredible is that in most instances the tenant has the right to stay in their home, if the eviction is of no fault of their own. The whole situation was something I had read about in the paper and seen on the news, but not something I had been given a chance to interact with firsthand.

As we began canvassing I was surprised by a number of things. At first, I was shocked at how welcoming people were to us. I am not sure why, but I had just assumed that people would be highly suspicious of the random ivy league twenty-somethings that had showed up on their doorstep on a Saturday morning, with fliers in hand ready to lecture them about the law. In actuality, people were just excited to have some reasonable person speak with them about their situations.

The other thing that surprised me, was how I was able to apply what I had been learning in class to what I was seeing that day. In civil procedure, we had learned that before taking away someone’s property you must give them “service of process” or fair notice. But if this were true, why were so many of the people we were speaking with learning of their foreclosure for the first time? In contracts, we learned that in order for a contract to be formed there must be a “meeting of the minds”. But how could the tenants and the banks be on the same page when the tenants were so woefully misinformed about their rights?

I know that the rudimentary grasp of these complex issues I have as a first semester law student probably didn’t allow me to fully understand what I was seeing. However, it wouldn’t take a legal expert to realize that on some level the situations we were confronting were fundamentally unjust. When we were driving back home after our day spent canvassing, I was pretty glad that my friends had managed to convince me to come out. I had spent the day learning about a truly meaningful application of my coursework, placed in a setting that, up until that point, I had only really known from newspaper headlines and talking head segments. I’m not sure if this is a fair barometer of how successful the day was, but I had actually forgotten about the free bar tab that had driven me to help out in the first place, until I wrote about it for this post.

- Anit

This Friday I spent part of a very peaceful afternoon de-cluttering my e-mail inbox, which is always a funny process of reliving whole stretches of my life in just minutes. As I scrolled past birthdays and various technical edits for my journal, I realized it was around this time last year that the American Studies department where I majored in undergrad decided to feature me in their annual newsletter.

They asked for 600 words about my experiences since graduation, which I remember finding difficult because so much seemed to have changed for me in such a short time. But I managed to keep it brief, and it was interesting to re-read what I chose to say and remember how I felt just a few months into law school, so I thought I’d share. It went like this:

It’s amazing the places my American Studies education has taken me over the past year.

Just last March—which sometimes feels like yesterday, sometimes a lifetime ago—I found myself in New Orleans researching a senior thesis on that city’s public housing. Placing great trust in my professors’ advice and the power of scholarship money, I had chosen to focus my vague ideas about housing projects on a single city I’d never even visited—and suddenly, I was there. I spent my spring break not only elbow-deep in archives at Tulane University, but falling in love with New Orleans: its food, its architecture, its bittersweet mixture of community spirit and lingering racial and economic strife. By sheer benefit of majoring in American Studies, I was no stranger to these issues. It felt like having instant access to a secret history seldom revealed to outsiders like me.

It’s a long way to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’m now a student at Harvard Law. But American Studies has had its influence, in one form or another, at every point along the way. Throughout a difficult law school application process, few people were more supportive than my thesis advisor, Steven Hoelscher. And that classic skill of seeing documents in their historical context, stressed so heavily in American Studies, has been useful since my first day here. Not to mention the AMS course that convinced me to study law in the first place: Sarah Weddington’s “Gender Discrimination,” which I would recommend to anyone interested in testing the waters of a legal education.

Of course, nothing could fully prepare me for the reality of Harvard Law School. Life here moves at a breakneck pace, so I was very lucky to arrive in Cambridge after a relaxing summer, a full month before school began. Unlike some of my classmates, I had time to plant my roots and explore the Boston area before things got too hectic. Its marriage of big-city bustle and college-town eccentricity reminds me of Austin in many ways, and I feel more like a local every day.

However, Harvard itself has quickly become the real center of my world. It’s just as challenging and stimulating as you’d predict, full of brilliant professors and demanding coursework. But our 18 classroom hours each week also compete with an impossible number of student groups, volunteer opportunities, and prestigious speakers seeming to arrive daily. Unable to resist, I’ve wound up joining a small reading group that meets in one of my professors’ homes, working on a law journal, and serving as an exit pollster on Election Day. Most rewarding of all, I’ve also joined a student practice organization called the Tenant Advocacy Project, which provides legal help to public housing tenants. TAP is the most enriching part of my Harvard experience so far, and I might never have joined were it not for UT American Studies and the thesis I wrote there.

Luckily, exhausting as all this can be, it still isn’t the Harvard Law of The Paper Chase, One L, or even Legally Blonde. At today’s Harvard the professors are kinder, the classmates more social, the administration more approachable, and the free coffee more bountiful than the reputation suggests. As our fabulous Dean put it during orientation, “The competition is over. And you won.”

If that’s true, it is largely due to my experience in American Studies at UT. There I discovered the issues I’m passionate about, and here I’m learning how to make a career out of them. It’s been a match made in heaven so far, and I can hardly wait to see where it takes me next.

It’s pretty cheesy in retrospect, and of course it credits my undergraduate program with an awful lot. But looking back, I think it also really captures my enthusiasm as the first semester of law school drew to a close. Now that I’ve gotten comfortable and take Harvard for granted a bit more, it’s good to be reminded of what makes this experience so special.

- Lea

Last week, one of my friends received a pretty random email from me. It had the subject “this place is insane” and consisted of the text “jedi mind tricks lawyer just gave a crash course on copyright law”. My friend probably didn’t realize it, but I was raving about the law school’s Recording Artist Project (RAP).

RAP is an organization that matches up musicians looking for legal advice with law students interested in entertainment law. The group also works with independent record labels and music websites. The work itself covers a broad range of legal issues including trademarks, copyrights, contracts, and transactions.

I had heard about RAP at a panel on student practice organizations that the law school held a couple weeks ago. I have always been fascinated by the way that the law regulates art and how that in turn affects both artists and content distributors. When I heard that not only did Harvard have an organization that catered to this interest but also that this organization took first year students, I jumped at the opportunity to join. 

Last weekend, RAP held their semesterly training session for new recruits. The group brought in a prominent entertainment lawyer (who has, among others, the hip-hop group Jedi Mind Tricks as a client). He talked with us about the copyright and trademark issues in music and then walked us through the basics of marking up a record contract. It was pretty exciting to have someone with practical knowledge in a field I am interested in talk candidly about what their job entailed.

Yesterday, I received my first assignment. I will be working with a team of three other law students to help a local electronica band review the record deal they were recently offered. It is my first semester of law school and I am already getting hands-on experience in a field of law that has always fascinated me. This is just another testament to the sheer number of opportunities that HLS provides its students.

- Anit

I realize, sadly, that this will surprise some people out there, but Harvard Law students like reality TV.  I don’t want to generalize, because at school the size of HLS there’s gotta be a few people who don’t, so I’ll just speak for myself—well, myself and the group of HLSers I have been watching reality TV with every Wednesday for the past two years. 

I don’t want to give the impression that we’re really crazy about this or that we have perfect attendance or that anyone is devoted enough to be Tweeting or blogging about our weekly get-togethers (yes, I realize this is a blog, but this one doesn’t count.  It’s a blog explaining that we don’t blog.).  We just have made it a point to hang out and watch trashy TV together at our friend John’s house ever since we started law school.  It began with a group of people from our 1L section, but we have attracted people from other sections and other class years, mostly based on the criteria Do-You-Like-America’s-Next-Top-Model, and Do-Your-Top-Chef-Watching-Habits-Allow-You-To-Be-Quiet-During-The-Show-But-Make-Funny-Snarky-Comments-About-The-Contestants-During-The-Commercials.

We always have tons of food, and we always have a great time dissecting what we see.  We do not talk about how these shows might relate to law or theory or legal practice; we talk about how stupid the word “smizing” is (the Tyra Banks term for smiling with your eyes), and whether it is tautological that no human can win a Top Chef challenge with gnocchi.  Occasionally, someone won’t be able to help themselves when a contestant who was hit in the back of the head threatens to sue for assault, and will mutter, “Under tort law that’s not assault, it’s battery—he never saw it coming,” but those relate-it-to-law-school type comments are loudly booed down by the group.

Full disclosure: our group also used to watch Project Runway, but this year they moved it to Thursday nights, causing a spin-off group to form to reconvene the next night for Runway and that tag-on show about its models that comes on afterward.  So yes, I didn’t think I was going to admit this, but I am actually a member of two HLS-based reality watching TV groups.  I’m not sure if that’s sad or awesome, or maybe a little bit of both. 

And as for the HLSers who don’t watch reality TV, I’d love to hear from you.  What do you do?  Study the law?  Somebody should make a reality show about that.

 - Erin

I was walking into the library to do some studying last Saturday when I noticed something was awry. On Saturdays Langdell is usually pretty well populated with students getting a jump on their weekend homework, but today it was unusually packed. What’s more, the people were all organized into groups of about 5-10 sprawled out at any given table. Each table had a couple bags of snacks strewn about and a book cart at the end that students were frantically going back and forth from. I was scratching my head trying to figure out what the heck was happening when it dawned on me: with journal recruitment in full swing, I was witnessing the first batch of massive fall sub-citing.

For those that don’t know what sub-citing is (I didn’t until a week ago) it’s the sometimes tedious process of double-checking every footnote in a given journal article to verify it’s accuracy. It is also a rite of passage for any first year student hoping to crack their way into the journal market. The journals usually hold mass sub-cites early in the fall and spring semesters to expose 1Ls to their work.

I was a little concerned watching all of this take place because I knew that the sub-cite for a journal I was joining, the Journal on Legislation, was taking place the next day. Thus far I had had what I guess is the typical 1L journal picking experience. I had gone to the journal fair, signed up for a bunch that I thought sounded interesting, attended a slew of info sessions, free lunches, and happy hours, then eventually narrowed it to the one that interested me most. I had felt pretty good about my choice, but watching my fellow first year students pore over their texts made me a little nervous about what I had gotten myself in to.

The next day I went to my sub-cite expecting mind-numbing work. I was shocked when the first thing that we did was actually go over the substance of our article and talk about ways that we thought it could be changed. The editors were interested in any feedback that they could relay to the article’s authors. Next came the sub-citing itself. Granted, the activity wasn’t horribly entertaining (you can only flip through so many political science books verifying that facts are correct before you start to go just a little bit crazy). However, it was good to be hanging out with a group of people interested in similar legal issues as me, and to work on a piece of scholarship in its very early stages. Also, I got some decent tips about law school and the legal profession in general from the 2Ls and 3Ls in the group. 

I think one of the benefits of going to a school the size of HLS is the sheer volume of extra-curricular opportunities available. With the massive number of journals, all jockeying for new recruits, I had the flexibility to shop around and find the one that made the most sense for me. This helped turn what could have been a pretty boring endeavor, into a rewarding extracurricular activity.

- Anit

2L Ayalon Eliach recently e-mailed me about his experience this summer at the Hague:

Prior to arriving at HLS, I spent two years living, working, and traveling abroad.  Whether it was trying to understand how tax treaties between the United States and South Korea affected my earnings in Seoul, taking advantage of the easy access to travel and work visas that I enjoyed as an American, or seeing pictures of President Bush on newspaper covers in almost every country I visited, my experiences overseas piqued my interest in international law and heightened my curiosity about the ways in which the United States’ interests are affected by and pursued through international legal institutions.

When I got to HLS, I began thinking about my 1L summer very early on.  I knew the different elements of what I was looking for but wasn’t sure how to combine them.  I wanted to learn more about international law, better understand America’s role in the international legal order, and contribute what I could to my country.  After speaking to some 1L friends and upper-classmen, it became pretty clear that working for the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser presented the perfect opportunity to combine those interests. 

I quickly learned that the Office of the Legal Adviser’s summer internship is only open to law students who have completed their 2L year.  Luckily, OPIA’s Job Search Database contains profiles of internship opportunities impossible to find anywhere else on the Internet.  A quick search for “U.S. Embassy” led me to an evaluation of an internship with the State Department’s Office of the Legal Counselor in The Hague.  The evaluation was extremely enthusiastic and contained contact information for a State Department attorney who worked in the office.  I emailed her and although she had returned to Washington, she was able to put me in contact with the current Legal Counselor who explained the application process to me.

The internship was everything that I had hoped for and more.  I had the opportunity to directly work for and learn from two brilliant attorneys from the Office of the Legal Adviser stationed in The Hague.  I attended meetings with other states’ legal representatives, trials of alleged war criminals, and readings of legal decisions that impacted countries’ sovereignties and borders.  Being in the world’s capital of international law gave me unparalleled exposure to the issues I was interested in, and researching and writing about those issues deepened my understanding of them.  By the end of the summer, I had done substantive work related to the International Court of Justice, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Iran-US Claims Tribunal, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Hague Conference on Private International Law, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and other legal institutions. 

The internship brought my 1L Public International Law class to life and enabled me to get out of my 1L summer everything that I had hoped for and more.

Last year, I began with the intention of finding a private sector job; however, like many 1Ls, I encountered some difficulty, given the economic climate.  By winter, I decided to make an appointment to meet with an OPIA advisor. I was hesitant to meet with them because I wasn’t all that interested in public service, but I needed to get a job. I met with Lisa Williams for about half an hour. When she asked me what areas I was interested in, I explained to her that I didn’t really have any preference and that I just needed an experience that would help me get a job in the private sector later. Lisa showed me the websites of several reputable organizations in Chicago that were interested in taking first year interns to work on legal issues and offices that would offer the kind of work that would be most comparable to what an intern would get in the private sector. She also told me that I should tap into some Harvard connections. I’ve never been comfortable asking people I don’t know for any kind of favors so she also said she would email some of them herself and see what kinds of positions were available. I left her office with a page full of handwritten notes on organizations to contact and tips on how to approach people with my resume and cover letter. Lisa even reviewed my cover letter the very next day.

I sent out application and went home for spring break worried that I wouldn’t get a job. One day in the middle of break Lisa Williams called me to say that she had spoken to a Wasserstein Fellow in Chicago about my resume and interests. He told her that he would hold on to my resume and try to help me out. He then coincidentally ran into some high-ranking people in the Illinois Attorney General’s Office and handed them my resume, which he happened to have printed out and in his briefcase. Lisa was calling to let me know that the AG’s people were very interested in me and that they might be calling me soon so I should get ready for a phone interview at the very least. Instead what I got was an offer to work in the office’s Special Litigation Bureau.

The job turned out to be fantastic. I had the opportunity to work with almost every lawyer in my department on a variety of cases. My work included areas like consumer fraud, the Americans with Disabilities Act, arbitration guidelines, and the state’s whistleblower statute. The Bureau Chief took me under his wing after my second week there and asked me to work on some of his most important cases, including the Chicago Parking meter investigation and a couple major settlements as well. Over the course of the summer I got a pretty good feel for what it will be like to work as a lawyer. I researched issues of first impression and wrote memos for the attorneys that asked for my help.

In addition to getting to do substantive work and refine my research and writing skills I was also able to attend all of the workshops and information sessions that the office organized for interns. There was everything from hearing about the various career paths that lead to working as a department head in the Attorney General’s Office to how to prepare a resume that will get you hired. The unofficial outings were the most beneficial to me. On several occasions I was able to sit in on status hearings in the Daley Center and submit orders to the court clerks. I know all of this sounds like it shouldn’t have been exciting but I had never been in a courtroom before this experience so I was enjoying every minute of it. One of the highlights of my summer was when I went to the federal building with a couple other interns and sat in on oral arguments in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. We were all star struck when we realized that the chief judge on the panel was the Honorable Richard Posner. After reading so many of his cases in our 1L classes, it was amazing to see him in action. The summer turned out to be amazing and I have to say I’m somewhat tempted to “switch sides” and work in public interest. We’ll see. 

 - Elizabeth