I'm done with the first week of classes, and I seem to have survived them in good shape.
So far I feel pretty good about this law school thing, no significant trepidation remaining although I do have some some concerns. Some of the concerns are on the macro level, having to do with the Great Change and being able to accept the law as it is as I learn about its inner workings, and some of the concerns are about the logistics of law school.
Of the latter category is the fact that it's nearly impossible to remember my schedule. When I was an undergrad classes across the campus tended to keep a uniform schedule (MWF hourly classes, or TTh classes of an hour and a half, usually all starting and stopping at the same time). But here classes are of irregular lengths with varying start times. I think this may mostly be due to the unusual architecture of the law school: it's a tower. While this may make it a fine example of urban planning with its relatively small footprint, it's a school heavily dependent on its elevators and two somewhat skimpy stairwells to connect its 17 stories plus a variety of basement and lobby levels. If everyone got out of class at the same time there would be utter gridlock. So my guess is that classes are staggered in order to free up the hallways.
Of course, that doesn't quite explain why some classes meet Monday, Tuesday, Thursday; and others meet Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and still others Monday, Wedesday, Thursday... And rarely at the same time on each occasion. The one interesting quirk about my schedule is that all my classes are in the same room. So I just need to know what time to get there for my first class of the day and then just wait to see which professor shows up.
My earlier observation about the professors caring about the students seems to hold. Mine seem to be more interested in educating us than torturing us, which I'm sure will make the experience much less excruciating. So far I seem to prefer my classes on Contracts and Civil Procedure. The subjects seem to be very mechanical, and while I suppose some might find them to be dry and boring, the geeky side of my personality tends to find them enthralling for the same reason. Criminal Law and Torts are leaving me feeling a little unsettled though. The lectures seem to be approaching the subjects somewhat circuitously and I find myself halfway through wondering exactly what I'm supposed to walk away knowing.
Torts also bothers me for some of those macro reasons. The sense I've gotten so far is that one should never leave the house. Nearly everything you might do could be a tort and someone could sue you. To a layman I think there's some sense that the tort liability system may be out of control. As part of this Great Change I'm learning that it's not actually out of control - it actually seems fairly normalized and regimented - but it's nonetheless fairly insane and potentially socially destructive. As a society, do we want liabilities to be so easily applied? Yes we don't want people to be able to do bad things, but innocuously bad things seem to generate as great a liability as maliciously bad things*. The effect of this would appear to be that we have a society which has no incentive to forgive culprits for their accidents.
(* Actually, I'm not entirely sure whether the element of malice may not somehow change things in the eyes of the law. But so far it looks like it isn't required in order to generate liability. At least not for assault and battery, which is as far as we've gotten. You'd be amazed at what qualifies for assault and battery. See Vosburg v. Putney [50 N.W. 403 (Wis 1891)] or Garratt v. Dailey [279 P.2d 1091 (Wash. 1955)] if you don't believe me.)
Contracts is similar to torts in the sense that malice doesn't seem to be a big determiner of whether the transgressed party has the right to claim damages, but within contracts this principle doesn't seem to have the same detrimental effect on society. People freely enter into contracts and voluntarily take on their liabilities. Whereas with torts you seem to take on these liabilities just by having been born.