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LSAT Instructor: One Month Into Law School

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Yuko Sin is an instructor and blogger for Blueprint LSAT Prep. He just started as a 1L at Columbia Law School, and is writing a series of law school-related posts about his experiences.

Alright, so I know I said in my last Columbia related post that law school isn’t all that bad, but I think I’m starting to crack.

We were debating in small groups whether extreme starvation can justify murder, if it’s for the purpose of cannibalizing the victim’s body. Things got a little heated. I may have threatened to eat someone.

This was highly out of character for me. I’m eating about 6 meals a day. Good stuff.

Okay, maybe I’m not eating the best stuff all the time. I get a few sandwiches, and about once a week I have the delicious NYC street food known as chicken over rice. Five bucks gets you a delicious plate of buttery self-loathing.

Classes are going at about the same pace as before – you can get most of your reading done by about 6PM – so I do have plenty of time to cook healthy meals for myself. However, I should probably cook less and focus more on surviving my impending cold call in Contracts…

The professor likes to call on a single student for about 40 minutes at a time. During this ordeal, an extreme version of the Socratic Method, no one is allowed to help you out. And if you say that you don’t know the answer to a question, the professor’s standard reply – in true Socratic fashion – is, “Yes you do.” There’s no getting off the hook.

One early cold call went something like this:

Prof: “And how do we explain that Mr. FirstDayOfLawSchool?”

Mr. F: “The… um… doctrine of promissory estoppel?”

Note: this was the first time most of us heard this term, and none of us knew what the hell it meant.

Prof: “Whoa! You can’t just pop off random legal jargon and hope that something sticks. Let’s spin that head roulette around one more time and see what else comes out!”

Mr FirstDayOfLawSchool was rushed off to the E.R. to receive a skin graft for his burn.

Apart from the brutalizing cold calls, law school still isn’t all that bad. Just the other night I had to leave a party early because I got too tipsy earlier – at a law school sponsored kegger.

Life is good.

For more of Yuko’s law school journey see: