I'm still wandering around other law student blogs. It's interesting, when I poke around the archives of the better ones, the recurrent topics and themes common to so many. For example, pretty much every 1L writes about the same thing in the same month (eg, moot court, interviews, etc.) Same thing with the 2Ls, etc. It's like if I pick the November month of their first year, I will find posts strikingly similar to my own of that same time. Even if we weren't 1Ls in the same calendar year. There's variation, sure, for school differences, personality differences, political differences... but we're all wrestling with roughly the same things. Not just in terms of pedagogy but also the meta issues that give this experience context.
It is interesting to note, although it's only an impression gleaned from cursory poking-around, that there are more posts that are more curious about the law in people's first years. There's a certain sense of wonder in the experience, of finally getting to look under the veil and see what's going on, and then getting really excited to see how these legal principles apply to other things. By the second year we seem to be over it, although maybe it's just that we have no time for such decadence. We have to play up our own confident bravado, that we're law students and we know lots of stuff. More stuff than most people, and enough stuff that you should hire us.
It's kind of a shame, though, because I think a lot of the innate curiosity has been drummed out of us. I think some of the bloggers, maybe by virtue of the blogging exercise, still cling to some of it, still being somewhat inclined to peel back the layers of issues so we can have something to write about. But it's difficult. It's not encouraged. What is encouraged is to churn our massive amounts of work (at least in our second years) and not so much indulge in the luxury of just learning for its own sake.
Posted 11/25.