I've had a little more than two weeks of classes now, and overall it's been pretty fun. The material is more interesting than I thought it'd be. I thought I'd only care about criminal procedure, constitutional law, and IP, none of which I'm taking this semester, but torts, contracts, property, and civil procedure actually keep me engaged. I think this is because we've been looking so closely at particular cases that I haven't had time to step back and evaluate the philosophical underpinnings and find them dull.
Apparently "Coach" Heise, my torts professor, was John Elway's backup quarterback at Stanford. That explains his mannerisms. I usually leave his class feeling like I haven't learned much, though, either about the law or about how to "think like a lawyer." Almost everything I've learned in his class was gleamed from the casebook and not from lecture or in-class questioning of students.
Prof. Summers really hammers the lawyering methodology. Most of his questions in class are directed at criticizing the cases we've read (and the student's briefs of those cases) and encouraging us to read carefully, talk with our classmates outside class, and think creatively. It's fun hearing him tear apart the opinions in our casebook-- casebook that he cowrote with another professor here.
I'd estimate my workload at 3-3.5 H cores equivalent. Homework is 3 hours on average every night, maximum 5.5 on bad days (Tuesday nights). Not too bad. Less work than college. I'm glad I went straight from college to here, because many of the students who took time off seem to have trouble getting back into the academic world. It'll kick up though. 1L is supposed to be the hardest year.
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