Halfway through 1L

It's December 16th, and exams have come and gone. Some of you may have read books or seen movies that feature law exams, which tend to give the impression that they are terribly painful and challenging tests that you should run far, far, away from at first opportunity. Long story short, they're pretty much right! While I think I managed to hold my own and even do quite well on some of the six exams I wrote over the past 8 days, they were definitely the most challenging (albeit sometimes fun!) academic experience I've ever had. The typical setup is that the professor gives you a "fact pattern" that ranges from 1-4 pages that tells a story about a situation full of potential legal actions, and then you play the role of a lawyer who has to advise one side or the other, or alternatively, try to determine how the case would be resolved if you were presiding as the judge.

The biggest challenge was honestly the time factor- these "practice" exams were only an hour, so by the time you took 5-10 minutes to read the facts and get a sense of the potential points you wanted to address, you were pretty much done to 45-50 minutes to get everything typed out (at least we type these things, which is a huge blessing given how terrible my writing is). Some of the patterns were quite a lot of fun - in Constitutional, they gave us the proposed national securities regulator, and asked us to comment on whether or not the scheme violated provincial jurisdiction enough to be unconstitutional (a question that's before the Supreme Court as of this writing). For criminal law, we had a case of a gentleman who went to get his first tattoo, and the artist told him that the procedure "wouldn't hurt a bit" and didn't have any risks - except that he developed an infection afterwards and found it to be extremely painful. There, we had to evaluate whether or not the artist's lie meant that the gentleman didn't actually give consent to the procedure (which would make the artist guilty of assault). While some were much more elaborate- we had an amazingly complex one for legal process involving a transnational museum exhibit shipment gone horribly wrong, this gives you a general flavour for what they're all about.

Despite the challenge, I did learn a lot from the process - studying for exams really forces you to crystallize the different concepts and conflicting cases, and I also found that even though in the past I tended to study mostly on my own, working in groups really helps prepare for these tests because everyone reads cases slightly differently and it's amazing how much you can learn from just bouncing ideas back and forth. And unlike in "One L," exam time actually brought the first year class much closer together. We were all sharing our summaries, consoling each other after a particularly tough test, or just swapping various procrastination tips & tricks (for my part, a flurry of baking was definitely happening to keep the sugar-rush intact while getting my mind away from the law at least for awhile).

To celebrate, I also had a great lunch yesterday with my "mentor" that I've been paired up with by the school - she's a partner at a boutique intellectual property litigation firm here in Toronto, and she's handled a lot of high-profile cases (anyone remember the Lego v. Megabloks case from a few years back?) It gave me a good taste of what some of the issues are in the field, as well as what some of the benefits/tradeoffs are in terms of working in smaller v. larger firms, the differing cultures of the lawyers/courts who practice in various areas of the law, etc. It's really good to have someone who I can go to with questions and we're going to meet again in the new year, so I'll keep you posted on that front too.

Well, I should keep this entry short because I need to finish packing - this afternoon I'm heading back to NS for a couple weeks to get some R&R (and get a head start on next term's readings!) and then I'll be passing through Ottawa for new years before making my way back to Toronto. Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays everyone, and stay in touch!