I made it to Friday! Today was quite the abnormal Friday. We had a slightly shortened property class this morning (apparently Professor Dodge also wanted to go to the educational workshop that Professor Goldman, my civpro professor, was attending…) and then I was done. At 10:15am. I didn’t know what to do with myself! I ended up going to Panera to get some lunch and work on my ALTA assignment, had a doctor’s appointment, took my dog on a special...

It’s almost the weekend! Today was a pretty uneventful day. It started off with my contracts class from 9-10:30a. I would usually go to ALTA after that, but it was cancelled today due to conferences. When our wonderful civil procedure TA, Karen, found out that our ALTA classes were cancelled, she offered an additional review session (in addition to the one from 1:30-2:30p) for those of us who wanted to get home early. I took advantage of the ear...

Wasn’t Peter just talking yesterday about the joys of a cancelled class? Our property class was cancelled this morning, and with that being our first class of the day, everyone from my section was treated to a couple extra hours of sleep (or homework…) this morning.   I still got to campus early to meet up with friends from another section for lunch, as we do every Wednesday. The nice part of being downtown is that there is so much within w...

The week is already 40% over! Today, I had Contracts 9-10:30am and then ALTA (Applied Legal Theory and Analysis) 11:30a-1p. After class, I also had a conference with my ALTA professor (the fabulous Professor Lysaght) about my final writing assignment for the semester. Later, I babysat for a couple hours before heading home for the day. If you have looked into UDM Law at all, you likely have heard mentions of our ALTA class. Most days I really e...

What a crazy Monday! Today has been quite a challenging day in terms of time management. It started off at 10am with about an hour of working in the library, followed by a Property supplemental review session from 11-1 and then Civil Procedure and Torts from 2-6 (with a half hour break in between).  I am just now sitting down to blog and eat some dinner before heading to a Coast Guard Auxiliary meeting at 7:30. Yikes. Fortunately, my homewo...

Hello World! Welcome to the UDM Law blogs…hopefully you will find our delightful banter helpful in choosing a law school and figuring out what you can expect once you start. I am not really sure how to start…I know these blogs are supposed to give you insight into the student experience, so maybe I’ll start with why I’m here. I was a UDM undergrad, so I already knew all that UDM had to offer. UDM ultimately won me over with the small school fee...

Sometimes one of the hardest lessons to learn is that our clients are not our friends and, rather, we are their lawyers and not their therapists or social workers.  Clients with lawyers who treat them with kid gloves lose.  This point was brought home to students in the Immigration Law Clinic this term. Our client is a political activist who was jailed and tortured in his home country.  We had one day of testimony in Immigration C...

The summer term (as it always does) flew by this year.  The students in the Immigration Law Clinic were hard at work on a number of interesting cases and the new term promises to be a great experience for our students – and hopefully for our clients.  The past term had a couple highlights in my mind, not strictly in terms of wins on behalf of our clients but how students learned to grow as lawyers and people.  Each term, I experim...

Winning is not everything and sometimes we learn more from losing than winning.  That's all fine and good but winning still beats losing and some wins are sweeter than others.  A client of the Immigration Law Clinic recently experienced a particularly sweet victory:  not only does the decision mean that our client will not have to return to a country where she was tortured but it also gives her access to a life full of opportunitie...

Sometimes we get more from our clients than they get from us.  One of things my students and I get from working with many of our clients is a greater sense of humility and compassion and a desire to not be so self-focused.  Law students, lawyers and even law professors (shocking, I know!) have larger than normal egos and law school, in particular, can be an exercise in alternating self-aggrandizement and self-debasement.  Students ...