...to make its second to last post.

Let me explain. I think this blog has run its course now that I am no longer in law school and the Illinois bar is successfully behind me. I’m just not sure there is much I can add to a conversation about being pre-law or law student at this point (and I’d rather not share my upcoming job search experiences on the internet for obvious reasons).

So I’ll make one final post summing up this blog soon. And I’ll leave this blog up for whoever happens to find it in the future until CALI decides to take it down.

Thanks to those who were paying attention.

The pre-law blog will be going on hiatus until at least after the 2008 February Bar Exam.

The last piece of advice I have is to those thinking about working and studying for the bar (below):

This winter's Pre-Law Magazine is now available for free online in digital format. Here is a sampling of the content:

• Most Political Liberal or Conservative
• All Night Law School: What part-time law students are finding
• Advocacy & Dispute Resolutions
• Law School Applications Decline
• Innovative Bar Exam Prep
• AutoAdmit.com Lawsuit Revisited

The National Jurist (it's sister magazine aimed at law students) is worth a look too:

• How Much Will You Earn: Large law firms are now paying $160,000.00 to new associates. See how your school compares.
  
• Experience Studying Abroad: Check out our annual guide to programs and hear as law students recount their experiences.
• Off The Bench: A law student's final revenge.
• For The Record: Find out who's been arrested, who's caught up in controversy and who's been recognized.
• Trends & Profiles: Most political law schools.

Don't be alarmed by the changed look of the Pre-Law Blog. The pre-law blog grew tired of the previous ugly old color scheme and gave the blog a makeover.

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Do any of the new students have a question about law school in general? How about those of you planning on law school next year?

Fill out the form above and submit you question. We will do the best we can to answer here at the Pre-Law Blog. See some of our previous questions here.

With CALI Instapoll, professors ask a question in class and CALI Instapoll (www.cali.org/instapoll) lets them create a poll online in a matter of one click, giving the professor a screen like this:

Students then access cali.org/instapoll on their laptop, put in the poll number, and click on the letter corresponding with their vote: Two clicks.

The professor sees the student's responses in real time on his/her screen as soon as the students vote:

One advantage I can see is this: When my Constitutional Law Professor took a poll of the class's opinion on an issue by hand-raising, it normally came out overwhelmingly in favor of one side (usually the side considered more liberal).

But I knew there were plenty of people who may not have agreed with the majority of my classmates just from talking with some before or after class about the same issue.

Many people are uncomfortable with disclosing their true thoughts to everyone in a class when it comes to topics in classes like ConLaw.

So a professor can use this stripped-down, easy-to-use polling tool to help eliminate that reluctance.

And yes, it's absolutely free. No account or login required.

I hope you voted yesterday. And I hope you didn't stay up so late last night watching election results that you forgot to set your alarm and overslept this morning. Not that I am speaking from experience....

Anyway, you may not hear quite as much about these issues on the news, but there some changes as a result of the voting last night that could affect you from the standpoint of a person looking to continue his/her education.

Insidehighered.com has an analysis of how the apparent congressional shift in power might affect higher education.

• Democrats . . . have vowed to aggressively push an agenda that includes helping students and families better afford college, an effort that higher education officials (and of course student groups) very much support.

They do note the unpredictability of the power shift's future effects, but it seems at least an increase in spending on student financial aid is on the minds of a Democrat-controlled Congress.

And in an apparent backlash of the US Supreme Court's decision allowing the University of Michigan Law School to consider race/ethnicity in its admissions, Michigan voters approved a state constitutional amendment to ban instances of affirmative action in state schools and elsewhere.

If this is confusing, the US Supreme Court decision simply says that a school admissions are allowed to use certain factors such as race and ethnicity in the name of diversity should they choose. That Supreme Court decision, however, does not stop a state or a school from choosing to not use or forbidding the use of racial/ethnic factors in the admission process.
This is the third state amendment of its kind. Are other states likely to follow? How will this affect the state law schools in Michigan?

Update from Volokh Conspiracy: University of Michigan seems none to happy about the decision of Michigan voters and is exploring legal action.

I'm trying out Feedblitz, a service that allows you to receive emails of new posts at a blog.

If you'd like to get the Pre-Law blog delivered straight to your inbox, please give it a try!

Do you have questions about law school? Fill out, anonymously if you like, and submit the form below.

I'll answer honestly and the best I can from a current law student's point of view. If I can't answer it, I'll try to find someone who can...hey, we have connections here at CALI. Click here to see previous reader submitted posts.

Thanks!

Remember this post about how I felt like I overextended myself and it likely cost me on a certain exam? I do because I remember how I felt while writing it...deflated about my future grade in that class and exhausted in the aftermath of two summer classes while working. As referenced by this quote:

• "I came out of the test feeling awful, probably worse than I have felt about any other law school exam."

That was no joke. I was pretty resigned to my fate that I would break my string of no less than average grades in law school.

I just found out that I got an A-. That's unbelievable to me. I'm almost offended and feel like I got away with something.

Why I'm Bringing This Up
You hear a lot of this stuff from students in law school after tests. Students think they were unprepared, claim to have bombed an exam, and it turns out they did fine. It can be obnoxious sometimes so I try to avoid claiming to have done poorly on an exam before I know, but I hadn't felt this bad about an exam before.

The test was clearly just a very hard test and likely designed so that students miss a lot of issues. There are a lot of tests like this in law school.

The law school curve again comes into play. I must have done OK compared to the rest of the class (although this wasn't a strict curve so maybe he gave everyone pretty good grades). Your relative performance is all that matters in law school.

Moral of the story: don't assume anything about your grade until you know for sure...namely, don't beat yourself up if you think you did poorly.

How I Did It:
I'm going to sound like a real company guy again, but I am dead serious about this. The course was a UCC Article Nine course on secured transactions. CALI's lesson on UCC Article Nine by Professor William Boyd is freaking amazing. It is so in depth...basically a complete casebook on secured transactions (but without cases and answerless problems to confuse you). It is in a different format than most CALI lessons but I loved it. I relied on it HEAVILY for my outline and througout the semester.

If you take a UCC Article Nine/secured transactions class in law school, remember this lesson (don't forget, you'll have free access to CALI lessons by that time if your school is a CALI member school).

Professor Boyd and John (who has put a lot of time into updating the lesson), if you see this, thank you. It's worth the effort.

I just finished up my last final for the summer. It was the first summer in law school where I had true classes (I took a clinic and worked last summer). It was pretty tough to keep up with classes and work full time...

One class, in particular, was a very involved class on a specific UCC article. I realized how involved it was when I came out of the test feeling awful, probably worse than I have felt about any other law school exam.

This in-depth of class is just not conducive to the "everything crammed into 6 weeks" summer schedule. Add to that another class, a law journal, no break between spring finals and summer semester, a full-time job, and a week-long work trip over this period and I simply should not have been taking this sort of schedule.

Why is this important?
I'm not complaining or making excuses for being unprepared, but this is relevant to an incoming law student because I look at this blog as a way for people to learn from both things do right and things do wrong. Most of the time I can speak with more authority on, and you can learn more from my mistakes. I would suggest to someone taking summer classes to choose a schedule more carefully than I did.

Know your school's pass/fail policy
Our school has an option to take classes pass/fail, meaning a student can elect to take a course so that he/she either passes or fails it and that class is not counted toward GPA. That would have saved me not only because I'm worried about my grade on the exam, but because there would have been much less pressure on me throughout the semester. I'm not sure if all other schools have pass/fail policies, but know your school's pass/fail policy so you can use it to your advantage when you need to.

Know your limits
When it comes time to pick your own classes, take into account all other activities. Remember summer classes are really are semester long courses crammed into a few weeks. Save less involved classes or pass/fail classes for times when you know you will be busy.

If I could not take the class pass/fail or if I couldn't find another less involved class to take its place, I should have settled for taking less credits and worried about catching up later. I think I overextended myself these past few weeks and it may have cost me in that class. Keep that in mind if you're tempted to try and load up on the credits over the summer.

Either way, I'm glad the summer semester is over and I can finally relax a little bit. Even though I still have to work, it will feel like vacation!

Do not be alarmed, this is the same old blog. I just got a little bored with the old look of the blog so I changed the template...

Also: Technorati Profile

In the coming months, CALI will be putting considerable time and effort into a project called eLangdell. The link below will explain it better, but very basically, eLangdell will be an online collection of cases, articles, and more which will give law professors the ability to systematically build digital course materials. This project has great potential benefits for law students, one being the reduction in the extremely high price of law school casebooks and other course materials.

Check out John's presentation on eLangdell as given at the 2006 Conference for Law School Computing.

Some talk on Law.com Blog Network of how student loan debt relates to students' decision to either work in the public sector or private sector. You probably know the general characterization of the differences between the two: public sector leaves more time and energy for things outside of work for less pay, private sector means longer work hours for more pay (edit: I originally typed the opposite of what I meant...corrected).

It is especially important to contemplate these career alternatives before deciding where to attend law school. If you are like me when I was deciding to go to law school, you will hear and read a lot of advice that suggests attending the highest ranked law school to which you are accepted regardless of scholarship offers and tuition costs. Of course, this advice is not always right. But it is especially wrong in the case of a person who wants to go into the public sector.

Because of the likely lower salary, the lower ranked and/or less expensive school must garner even more consideration if you decide you want to work in the public sector. I can imagine it is a bad situation where a person has his/her heart set on public work coming into law school and then, because of the "psychic cost" discussed in the link above, that person feels forced into the private sector based on the tremendous amount of debt acquired law school.

This brings up another topic I have been meaning to touch on...scholarships in law school.

Now that CALI's learnthelaw.org is up and running smoothly thanks to the brilliant tech guys at CALI, I would like to start focusing on this blog a little more.

I now hope to change the direction of this blog from simply education-related posts. As a second-year law student at Chicago-Kent School of Law, I plan to add some discussion about information and advice for pre-laws from the perspective of a current law student.

This doesn't make me an expert on all things (or anything) law school. But with all of the information about law school out there for pre-laws, most is written by current professors or former law students. What is missing is serious and honest discussion/information/advice for pre-laws from the perspective of someone who is living through the experience of law school.

Also note, I am a new employee of CALI. Some of these upcoming posts will not necessarily reflect the views or advice of CALI. Stay tuned for the next post...

Austin
agroothuis@cali.org

CALI is in the midst of the Legal Education Podcasting Project. For this project, a number of law professors from around the country have agreed to start podcasting and making these podcasts available to enhance the educational experience of students in the professors' individual classes.

A number of the professors podcasting summaries of their classes have given CALI permission to make their podcasts available to people outside of the individual professors' classes. So CALI will be posting some of the relevant podcasts affiliated with the project here on the Pre-Law Blog.

We believe that these podcasts will be a great way for incoming students to learn about some basic concepts from 1L classes as told by an actual law professor to his or her students.

A special thanks goes out to all of the professors who have agreed to help us out with this!

CALI's pre-law blog is being developed in coordination with www.learnthelaw.org: The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction's (CALI's) online resource for pre-laws. Some of the best CALI podcasts and other material relevant to incoming first-year law students will be posted here as a service to those incoming law students who are preparing for law school early.

Comments and questions can be sent to:
Austin Groothuis
Marketing/Communications Coordinator, CALI
agroothuis@cali.org