HLS in Focus

Ah, the annual Halloween party at Harvard.  Halloween was already my favorite holiday because I love the creativity of costumes and I have an unbelievable sweet tooth.  I also love the HLS/costume connection in Legally Blonde where Elle Woods dresses up like a Playboy bunny to go to a costume party that turns out to be a non-costume party.  Classic.  Then I got to real HLS and discovered case law-inspired Halloween costumes, which crack me up even more than that scene because they are so dorkily awesome.  F or example. . .

Our 1L year, a group of my friends dressed up like the characters from the famous tort case Ploof v. Putnam, a case that asks whether you are allowed to tether your boat to a stranger’s dock in the middle of a storm even though it will damage the dock.  Most people’s intuition about this is yes, even without permission you should be able to dock your boat in an emergency.  Then you learn that the people on the boat are pirates.  This makes for a much more interesting legal discussion, and a much more fun Halloween costume—what calls for festivities more than an eye patch, a swashbuckler’s hat, and a question of legal trespass for private necessity?

I’ve also seen three guys dressed up like the fox and the two hunters from Pierson v. Post, which is the first property case almost every law student in the country learns. The legal question there is who owns the fox if you chase it around forever on a hunt and then another guy comes out of nowhere and shoots it, but for the purposes of Halloween parties it just means that whenever partygoers realize why the guy is dressed up like a fox, they chase him around for a minute. 

Last year at the HLS Halloween party I saw a guy who went as an eggshell plaintiff.  A funny costume, but as you might imagine, everyone kept kicking him in the shins.  Well, maybe you wouldn’t imagine that unless you know that the concept of an eggshell plaintiff is exemplified by Vosburg v. Putney, where one kid kicked another kid in the shin and the guy ended up losing his leg because the kick aggravated a previous injury.  Again, funny costume, but you’re kind of asking for it if you dress up as a guy who’s supposed to get kicked in the shin.  In normal world, it’s the bullies who go around kicking people.  In law school world, it’s the people who understand what you are if you come to a costume party dressed as an eggshell.

So if you do come to HLS and you get invited to a costume party, don’t worry, you are not getting Legally Blonded, there really is a big Halloween party every year and people really do dress up in costumes for it.  I say embrace your inner geek and look to your 1L casebooks for inspiration.  But if you’re thinking about going as Jonathan Vosburg, consider shin guards.          

- Erin

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

One of the main reasons that I chose to come to Harvard for law school was how easy it is to get around. As an undergraduate I often felt like I was trapped within the same ten-block radius. There wasn’t really good public transportation and the best I could do with the bus was go to the mall a few towns over. I decided that I couldn’t live that way for another three years. I wanted to be able to go to the grocery store without having to call a taxi, go shopping without a hassle and feel like I wasn’t tied down. I knew that Harvard was the answer to my problems when I visited for the first time.

I rode the Amtrak up from Connecticut for my admitted student tour. Getting to campus from South Station with the “T” (Cambridge’s subway) couldn’t have been easier. After my tour and lunch with an admissions fellow, I found myself starved for something to do because my train didn’t leave for hours. Sadly, my first instinct was to take the T back to south station and wait. Instead, I decided to ask the people in admissions for some suggestions. The woman in the office pulled out tons of materials on all the things I could do with my free evening. She gave me simple directions and I left happy and determined to make the most of the couple hours I had left. I ended up taking the red line to the Park Street station. When I exited the station I got really excited. To my right was a huge park called the Boston Common and to my left was a very large movie theater. I walked up the street slowly and stopped occasionally to check out all the monuments that surround the park. I was so happy that such interesting things were easily accessible from the law school. I was also very impressed with the movie theater and I still don’t think I have ever seen a nicer one. They have classic movie posters and famous movie quotes all over the walls. They even offer funnel cake! Getting back home on the train was just as easy as the trip in. The ease with which I got around that day was a huge relief for me. I left very satisfied with my one-day Harvard experience.

As a current student, I am very happy with the choice that I made. I don’t have a car or a bike so if I need to get somewhere I’m probably going to walk. It is really nice not to have to worry about how I am going to carve out enough travel time to run errands when I am busy with schoolwork and activities. Fortunately, I don’t have to. There are two grocery stores within a ten-minute walk of my Harvard-Affiliated apartment. I can walk to Target in twenty minutes. And of course if I want to go out to eat instead of cooking, there are at least 5 restaurants within two minutes of my apartment. I can get to Harvard Square for many of the HLS social events in no time. If it is too late to walk home alone, I can hop into one of the many cabs that make Harvard Square their base.

I no longer feel like I’m confined to the area around my classes and home. It’s great to have so many affordable ways to get around quickly and easily. I’m glad I gave so much thought to how I would get around in my every day life when choosing a law school. I may even go to the Boston Common this weekend…

- Elizabeth

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

I learned a new term last year: leaf peeping.  Like most people, I’ve been leaf peeping my whole life, I just didn’t realize that there was an official term for it—or, for that matter, that the official term would sound like a game to be played with babies.  It turns out that leaf peeping is the bona fide term for standing around looking at fall leaves.  Who knew?  I also didn’t realize how big of a big deal it is in New England.  I’ve lived in plenty of places with deciduous trees before, but none of my former stomping grounds include businesses in the region that hang banners that say things like “Welcome, peepers!” and “Get your peeping snacks here!”

To be fair, the hype is not baseless.  The leaves do seem to be brighter-prettier-longer here.  I don’t know why, and my extensive research on the subject (read: two minutes on Wikipedia and another two on Google) has not revealed any answers.  I once talked to a random guy at a retirement party for my former boss who claimed it has something to do with an enzyme found only in New England soil that causes all the leaves here to change at the same time.  Again, thirty seconds on Google didn’t provide any info one way or the other on this possibly fictitious enzyme, which clearly indicates that the answer cannot be known by humankind. 

I’ve had three autumns here now, and to celebrate peeping season we have gone apple picking, driving through western Mass, hiking in New Hampshire, and free food sample chasing in Vermont.  As I write this, I’m realizing that this whole leaf peeping thing might sound lame, but it’s really quite charming.  I guess you just have to see it to get why people like it so much.  Okay, I can’t resist—you just have to peep it.  Okay, I’m done.  I’m not going to say another thing.  Not another. . .peep. 

I can’t help it.  Peep.    

- Erin

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

La Alianza is the Latino law student group on campus. As Co-Chair for this organization I get to participate in a lot of different activities and take an active role in planning and organizing our events and initiatives. As Co-Chair, I also get the opportunity to interact with other student group leaders at Harvard and in the Boston area. Because many other schools have organizations with similar missions La Alianza often gets emails from student groups at other schools asking for collaboration on different projects or inviting us to attend their conferences and social events. These events are great networking opportunities and also a nice way to get out of the law school bubble and explore the area a bit. Our events are always open to the entire student body and we often have a large number of non-members at our social events.

In addition to hosting social events, we also sponsor more substantive activities. Next week we will be hosting a talk with a Federal Judge from Texas who will talk about Latinos in the law, public interest careers and clerkships. This will give students the opportunity to talk with a Latino professional about any questions or concerns they might have entering a field where Latinos have been historically underrepresented. 

One of our major events is a conference that we co-sponsor with the Latino group at the Kennedy School. The theme of the conference always focuses on issues involving Latinos in law and public policy. Last year’s conference was a great success. The keynote speaker was José Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the Organization of American States. The conference drew attendees from Harvard as a whole as well as alumni and people from the community. The plans for this year’s conference are still being settled but our membership is really enthusiastic about it and the conference is coming together nicely.

Last year La Alianza’s membership was down and we didn’t get to host as many events as in years past. This was a major part of the reason that I decided to run for Co-Chair. I wanted to see more actitivies and a greater sense of community among the Latinos on campus. We now have a new board full of enthusiastic people and we have started the year off very well. Helping to increase the group’s presence on campus and welcome the new 1Ls has been very fulfilling for me. Being a student group leader has been great experience so far and I would definitely recommend that other students try to take a leadership role in at least one organization.

- Elizabeth

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

The weather is changing fast here in Cambridge, which reminds me of my first adjustments to the New England climate last year. Coming from Texas, I was completely unsure what to expect: part of me was panicked that I would hate the cold, the snow, and the need to pull on boots and gloves every time I wanted to step outside. But part of me, defiant in the face of relatives’ constant teasing about frostbite in September, was determined to like it.

The reality wound up being somewhere between the two. First off, my family was dead wrong about September. Although it’s cooling off a bit faster this year, I was still wearing skirts and light jackets outside last Halloween. Also, most things just weren’t the hassle I imagined. The snow held off until December, was shoveled expertly off most sidewalks every day, and was so gorgeous fresh that I never stopped being excited to see it fall. Winter wear gradually became part of my routine, and I found I was rarely cold indoors since New England, unlike Texas, really knows how to keep its buildings toasty.

The only annoyances were a handful of things I never could have predicted. Feeling unfeminine as I marched around in boots and bulky sweaters was a big one; so was slipping on ice all the time. Mostly, I found it depressing that the sun started to go down so early I would walk home from class at 4:30 in darkness. If I wasn’t careful, this made me sleep and eat constantly like a hibernating bear, which in turn wasn’t great for the femininity problem.

However, almost all of this proved possible to counteract somehow. A classmate from Canada told me that having multiple coats might keep my wardrobe feeling less monotonous in winter, so I didn’t fight the temptation to buy distinctive ones I saw. I wound up with three in different colors, and it really did help. I also started building extra time into my mornings so I could take it slow over the ice on my way to school.

Most importantly, I wound up seeing someone at University Health Services about a light box to make up for lost sunshine. I got one free with student insurance, and I didn’t have to undergo therapy or anything else intrusive or time-consuming first. It was actually spring before I thought to do this, and I wish every day that I had sooner, because the difference it made in my energy level was amazing.

If I could go back to my panicked pre-law school self, I would say Harvard makes it so easy to take care of yourself that there’s really nothing to fear about the cold—even coming from Texas. Sure, winter in New England is no walk in the park. Sometimes I think to myself, “The Puritans landed here first and they stayed?!?” But we Southerners can’t actually predict what we’ll like and dislike about Northern weather until we try it, and the school and our more experienced peers are always willing to help smooth the transition.

- Lea

Note: It’s beautiful and sunny out today, with a high in the 60’s. 

I really enjoy living just outside Boston, with easy subway access to all the culture, food, and entertainment of a city that size. Long weekends and the odd school holiday when I don’t head home to Texas make great opportunities to shop, eat out, attend festivals on Boston Common, or spend time on the beaches of the North Shore. In a city with so much history, there’s no shortage of things to do.  

Realistically, though, a rigorous schedule of HLS classes and extracurricular activities can make it hard for students to find time to visit Boston as often as we’d like. So we’re lucky that Cambridge offers plenty of things to do without so much time spent in transit.  

First off, there’s always the option to eat out. The variety of places here is great—I live next to a great Indian place and an acclaimed tapas bar, and just steps from the Law School are a tasty sandwich shop, a Starbucks and a Berryline, and a restaurant and bar called Cambridge Common that’s especially popular with students. In nearby Harvard Square are dozens of restaurants ranging from an Au Bon Pain and the local pizza chain Upper Crust to pub fare at Grendel’s Den and Grafton Street and upscale Asian at Om.  

Plus, there are three ice cream places in the Square alone (I think it really says something that my favorite, JP Licks, gives my hometown’s famed Amy’s Ice Creams a run for its money!) And in every direction there are small sandwich and coffee shops more appealing to the student schedule and budget than a big dinner out. Two of my personal favorites are The Biscuit and Darwin’s Ltd.  

As a big moviegoer coming from the city the best theater in America, I especially appreciate having multiple ways to catch a movie without heading into Boston. Harvard Square has a Loews theater showing five or six mainstream movies at a time, just blocks from school. There’s also the quirky Brattle Theatre, which charges a little less, serves local beer, and offers balcony seating at its screenings of older movies and art films. And just a short bus ride away, near MIT, is the art house Kendall Square Cinema where I saw most of last year’s Oscar nominees.  

The nightlife here is also decent, with a good number of bars and clubs within walking or bus distance of the Law School. Our social organizations have a lot of events at Redline and the Irish pub Tommy Doyle’s, but I prefer the chill atmosphere and cheap (Harvard-subsidized!) prices at the Cambridge Queen’s Head on campus.  

This is such a partial list of my own favorites that I really suggest checking out http://www.harvardsquare.com/ for even more things an HLS student can do with just a few free hours at a time. There’s shopping, theatre, live music, public events, and a lot more to eat and drink. Better yet, that site covers just one small part of this “City of Squares.” Porter, Inman, Central, and many others each have their own unique character and make quick, easy outings to blow off some of that law school steam.

- Lea