Congratulations, antonio107. I hope you enjoy law school, and eventually the practice of law, as much as many of us have.
There’s very good advice from The Second Stone re only being able to do first class brain work for so many hours per day, from Hello Again re new students being slow to understand what’s important and slow to read cases, and from Spoons re knowing your materials thoroughly.
The trick is to learn what you need to learn in the clear-thinking time you have available. To do this, you’ll have to first figure out how to speed up your understanding and reading, which means learning what to focus on, and what to skip past, so that you don’t get lost in the forest due to all the trees. Consider picking up simple, well written texts that provide easily understood overviews – for example, the various Ontario Bar Admission reference materials (hopefully your law library or the Great Library at Osgoode will have some), or texts from Irwin’s “Essentials of Canadian Law” series (those little purple things at Chapters). If you read through these sorts of overview texts in the summer at your leisure, it will help orient you, and thereby accelerate your learning to sift through rather large piles of case law to quickly find the kernels that you need to know. Once you are oriented, the studying is a lot easier and a lot less time consuming. I expect that you will hear of law students saying that their first year was by far the hardest, and that it became easier each subsequent year. It’s not that the volume of material decreased each year, it is that most students learned how to deal with the volume more efficiently.
Getting back to The Second Stone’s point, I suggest that you consider what will make you as focused and clear thinking as possible for the few hours each day that you will be at your peak. I don’t know about you, but for myself, the ol’ noggin wanders off to points unknown after too many hours of intense focus.
Don’t fall into the trap of trying to mimic the youngsters who have yet to find themselves, and spend their time fretting over exams, or boasting over how many sleepless hours they have spent studying, or generally getting obsessed over everything and worked up over nothing. Find your own path that works for you.
Will studying late into the night once your brain is dragging help improve your performance for the next day’s classes and studies, or will it just grind you down for diminishing returns or even negative returns? How about spending your evenings with your family, friends, music and other activities? My guess is that would leave your mind in better condition for the next day’s academic work.
Think of law school as a job. You are in law for the long haul, so you must keep your life in balance. Your career is only part of your life. Put your relationship on hold and give up your music? Nuts to that. All that will accomplish is to burn yourself out and destroy your relationships.
In Ontario, law school and bar admissions are both designed to help you succeed as a student and later as a lawyer. I found the teachers at law school and the lawyers and judges during bar admissions to be bright, dedicated, and genuinely caring. I don’t have any figures at hand, but I recall that when it comes to legal education in Ontario, it is extremely difficult to get into law school, but once you make it in, then you will get through both law school and the bar course unless a huge anvil falls out of the sky and lands on you. The only people I know who did not make it through are those who did not have their lives in balance and cracked up. Keep you life in balance, including your relationships with family and friends, your various activities, including your music, and your studies, and you will thrive at law school.
