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

Quick note – I’m out of the country most of this week.  As such we’ll have a short hiatus on the blog.  We’ll be back up and running first thing Monday – enjoy the HLS Admissions Blog version of a long weekend!

One thing I was just sure would be unpleasant about law school was the Socratic method—the tradition of professors teaching class by firing questions at students who haven’t volunteered. By the time I arrived at Harvard, I had received both a lot of teasing from family and friends about The Paper Chase and a lot of assurances from people at Harvard that it was going to be nothing like that. I believed the school and ignored my friends—in fact, I deliberately boycotted The Paper Chase to avoid scaring myself unnecessarily—but I still thought being personally answerable for everything I read each day couldn’t possibly be any fun.  

Three semesters later, though, I can honestly say that Socratic “cold-calling” defined my 1L experience much less than I expected. For one thing, not many of my professors applied it strictly. Some used systems to make it more predictable who they will call: two set up “panels,” meaning segments of the class eligible to be called on certain days of the week, and one worked backward through the alphabet so each student could see his or her time coming. Three others claimed to cold-call, but took so many volunteers that the real thing became a rarity.  

Only my Torts professor was Socratic in all the ways you’d expect: rarely lecturing, cold-calling regularly and sometimes on the same one or two people for entire class periods, using students’ last names, the whole bit. This was intimidating for a while, but only until I realized that correct recitations of facts were hardly the goal. Once the first few people answered wrongly and nothing bad happened at all, I realized the professor’s aim was not to embarrass us, or even really to check our reading comprehension, but to force us to explore issues together—sometimes by sheer process of elimination, making wrong answers as useful to the group as right ones.  

Yes, this system had me reading Ploof v. Putnam and Vosburg v. Putney with a lot more care, but it was out of a positive desire to impress far more than a negative fear of humiliation. Of course, it helped that the professor was funny and entertaining, genuinely enthusiastic, and clearly a reigning expert in the field. So—although I never would have believed it at one time—the most Socratic class I had also turned out to be the most fun. And when my section convened at the end of the first semester to watch The Paper Chase with our Contracts professor, some of the loudest laughter at the classroom scenes came from me.

- Lea

One of the reasons to make friends during your first year in law school with 2Ls and 3Ls is the benefit of an early heads up.   Well, here’s an early heads up to all of you who are thinking about coming to law school (any law school) next year: there’s an ethics test at the end.  It’s called the MPRE, and it’s coming up on Saturday.  Who’s excited?  I’ll tell you who—all the 3Ls, only not so much for the exam as much as the terrific excuse for a social get-together afterward.  Oh, poor us, we have to take the MPRE.  We’ll deserve a break after it’s all over.  In fact, I predict we’ll deserve several breaks. 

The test is a two-hour multiple choice.  It’s not hard, but conventional wisdom says you do have to be prepared.  The parts I like the best are the ones about who you can and can’t give legal advice to.  You will discover this next year, but starting approximately one week into law school, anyone you know who’s not a lawyer or a law student themselves—relatives, college roommates, high school friends, whatever—will present you with legal quandaries from their lives and ask for your opinion.  The bad news is you will have no idea what the answers to any of their questions are.  The good news is it’s illegal to practice law without a license!  So, you can just tell them that giving your opinion might constitute a false expectation of competent legal representation and/or a false expectation of an invocation of the attorney-client privilege, so for their protection, you’d prefer not to comment.  They will instantly understand you and will not think this is strange at all. 

So we’ve all been studying the rules for giving legal advice and all the other components of professional responsibility for the last few days.  As it turns out, planning the celebration for after the test is more fun than studying for test itself (who would have guessed?).  As a result, we already have an elaborately orchestrated scheme that commences directly after the test is over, starting with a matinee showing of the new Chris Rock movie, a stop by the official law school post-MPRE celebration for free drinks at a bar, and then on to some show in Boston one of my friends found that’s apparently a disco-themed Shakespeare play combined with a dance club.  I’m not clear about whether the play is in the middle of a dance club, or whether the theater turns into a dance club after the play is over, but either way, I’m sure it’s obvious how a disco-themed Shakespearian dance club is the proper celebration for the completion of an ethics test. 

Failing the MPRE is kind of embarrassing, both because it’s not considered particularly difficult and because it’s an ethics test, and it’s never good to flunk an ethics test.  So my main challenge this week is to keep my eyes on the prize instead of investigating an after-hours coffee place I heard about near the disco Shakespeare theater.  Having said that, you never know when a fourth break idea will come in handy.  MPRE advice applies to the celebrations, too—it’s best to be prepared.   

- Erin

Students often ask what we’re looking for in an applicant, beyond a history of strong academic performance.  While there are many other factors, one that often gets overlooked or minimized in the minds of applicants is a demonstrated history of leadership and impact.  Intellectual ability is obviously a key factor in admissions here, but we’re very fortunate to receive applications from more talented students than we can possibly fit in an entering class.  One thing that really sets applicants apart is what they’ve done with their time outside the classroom or how they’ve built upon their academic work.

Now this isn’t something that you can start to think about around the time you’re starting to fill out your law school applications.  It’s more about how you’ve spent the last few years.  Have you dedicated yourself to an extracurricular or cause?  Have you taken on a leadership role in a group or job that has allowed you to create significant change or have a meaningful impact?  There’s no one right answer here – the key is to use your application to let us know about situations where you’ve come in and changed things for the better. 

A big part of being at HLS is immersing yourself in a community of people who are dedicated to change and impact across a variety of fields.  A great way to convince us that you’ll be a positive addition to this community is to explain how you’re already doing this – I can’t wait to read about it. 

- Josh

I have noticed from talking to my law school minded friends and from reading this blog that the next law school admissions cycle is in full swing. With this comes the one-two punch of meticulous application preparation followed by the seemingly endless wait to hear back from the various schools people have applied to.

I know that it can be easy to feel that you are somehow behind in the process, or that your results aren’t matching up with those of others. I figured that being a newly minted 1L, I am not that far removed from the process, and it might be helpful to talk about my experiences with the dreaded law school admissions cycle.

My trip to Harvard Law was pretty non-traditional. By May, I was still on the wait-list at HLS and had subsequently made arrangements to go to a different law school. I was quick to set up my housing and financial aid with that school because I knew that I was going to be be out of the country all summer doing volunteer work in South Africa. I left for my summer abroad in early June, assuming that there was little to no chance I was going to make it off the waitlist so late in the admissions game.

I arrived back in the US in late July and almost immediately received an email asking if I was still interested in a spot in the entering class at HLS. To put this in context, I had been in the country for less than a day and I was planning on leaving my home in less than a week to go to a different law school. Even if I were able to prepare for the phone interview, I would still need to divert all of my energies to going to a new law school, essentially accomplishing in a couple days the preparations that every other 1L had all summer to arrange. However, HLS was my dream school, and if I didn’t at least try to get in I would always wonder if I could have. I replied to the email and arranged to take my phone interview the following Monday.

I’m going to let you guys in on a secret about the HLS phone interviews. After your interview, you will feel that your performance was anywhere from “meh” to “terrible”. Personally, mine probably leaned towards terrible. I had planned on spending most of the time talking about my experiences that summer in South Africa. My rationale was that my application talked in detail about the things I had done while an undergraduate and my summer was something new that would add color to my application. However, when I got on the phone I think interview jitters seized me and I only spent about a minute talking about my summer before delving into the activities I had done in college. Every one of my answers seemed like an unhelpful rehash of things from my application. At the end, I was pretty certain that in an attempt to sound interested in the school (which I was) I asked too many questions and I came off as poorly researched about the school (which I wasn’t). When my mother called me that afternoon to ask how the interview went, I assured her that she didn’t need to worry about adding crimson to her wardrobe any time soon.

Assuming that whoever is reading this is aware of what website they are on, you probably also know how this story ends. The next morning I got a phone call offering me a spot in the entering class at HLS. In my excitement, I pumped my fists in the air so hard that I broke a ceiling tile in my basement.

I thought my story might be helpful for any potential applicants out there to hear. I know that it’s hard sometimes, but it is important not to stress about the process too much. I remember agonizing over what I was going to say in my phone interview, only to do something completely different in the actual interview. If you are relaxed and talk about yourself and your accomplishments honestly and openly, you will be fine. It is also important not to get freaked out if your application results aren’t matching up with the results you are hearing about from other people. I had heard all the message board chatter about how not getting off the waitlist by Date X was the death knell for my application. I also had a lot of friends and friends of friends that were getting into their dream schools (including HLS) while my application results were just trickling in. It’s easy to get discouraged with all of the activity going on around these applications. It is important to stay positive about your chances, because in the end you will almost certainly end up in a school that is a good fit for you.

- Anit

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

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

Got a great question at an info session the other day: why does it take us as long as it does to review your application? 

First off, we don’t have any shortcuts or thresholds.  We’ve found that there’s no substitute for a complete reading of your application including your transcript, recommendations, personal statement, resume, and application questions.  We only evaluate candidates once we’ve reviewed their entire file – this takes longer but we think it helps us build a better class. 

Further, no one individual’s opinion holds sway – both our admissions officers and our faculty admissions committee are highly involved in reading applications.  Each application has multiple readers – again, this takes a bit longer, but we think its worth it. 

So while we want to get you a decision as quickly as possible, we also want to make sure we’re giving your application the consideration it deserves.   Hang in there and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. 

Have a great weekend!

Josh