One month in

By Sancho McCann ·
“I know kung fu.”

One month into law school, and I feel a lit­tle like Neo af­ter be­ing jacked into the in­for­ma­tion pipe. But, as you might re­mem­ber from the next scene, he was far from ready for the Matrix. That’s the lev­el that we’re learn­ing things at right now—a ba­sic lit­er­a­cy of broad ar­eas of law, so we will know how to un­der­stand new cas­es, what ques­tions to ask, and what ar­gu­ments are valid. I also feel quite un­pre­pared to ap­ply any­thing just yet. Maybe it will al­ways feel like this!

The most com­mon ques­tion I’m asked is: “How has your first month been?” I keep say­ing that it’s been man­age­able. It’s also been stress­ful. It’s also been real­ly good.

I think the stress has more to do with the stress in­her­ent in any change rather than due to some­thing specific to law school. This new thing I’m do­ing is dis­plac­ing some old things: no more Overwatch, no more Hearthstone, less read­ing for pure leisure, no binge-watch­ing The Office. It’s also su­per en­gag­ing and stim­u­lat­ing. So, when I wake up in the mid­dle of the night, in­stead of falling right back to sleep, my mind jumps to a top­ic we’ve been talk­ing about in class or to a read­ing I just com­plet­ed. I also moved to a new apart­ment at the be­gin­ning of October—an­oth­er change and more work that I had to fit every­thing else around.

The sec­ond-most com­mon ques­tion I’m asked is (from peo­ple around me in class): “What are you us­ing to take your notes?”

I’ve been us­ing org-mode to take class notes and I like how that’s been work­ing. In case you haven’t heard of org-mode be­fore, it’s built in to a plain-text ed­i­tor called emacs and it looks like this:

Some notes on one of the cas­es we read in tort law.

Things I like about tak­ing notes in org-mode:

And, I’ve set up my org-mode sys­tem to au­to­mat­i­cal­ly ex­port the notes to an html file that’s saved to Google Drive. That lets me re­view all of my notes on my phone on a nice-to-read web page.

What the notes end up look­ing like when I browse them on my phone. The ex­port also in­cludes a ta­ble-of-con­tents. Forgive the colour clash. It’s just a screen­shot from my phone and I made the back­ground of my notes pink­ish so I would feel bet­ter while read­ing them.

The third-most fre­quent thing I’m asked is: “Why did you come to law school? How are you go­ing to use your com­put­er sci­ence back­ground?”

At the out­set, I’m in­ter­est­ed in civ­il lib­er­ties, pub­lic-in­ter­est law gen­er­al­ly, de­fen­dant rights, and copy­right. I’m not sure whether I’ll use my com­put­er sci­ence back­ground (oth­er than tan­gen­tial­ly, like my note-tak­ing sys­tem, or fac­tum-au­thor­ing tool), but there are some top­ics where my in­ter­ests seem to in­ter­sect. I’ve thought about some of these more than oth­ers, but here are a few ex­am­ples: copy­right in AI-gen­er­at­ed art, pro­tec­tions against search and seizure of dig­i­tal and net­work ev­i­dence, anonymi­ty and pri­va­cy rights in gen­er­al, al­go­rith­mic de­ci­sion-mak­ing in law, and copy­right/fair use of code, APIs, and pro­gram out­puts. These are not things that I’ll get to think a lot about in first year, but I’m en­joy­ing the foun­da­tion­al top­ics that we’re fo­cus­ing on in the mean­time. They’re cer­tain­ly com­plex and in­ter­est­ing enough.

Favourite things from each class

Some of my favourite readings brought to me by school so far

What I’m looking forward to

Miscellany