Environmental Law Class

I don't usually talk about my law school experiences because it's akin to discussing boot camp. You really just want to forget the trauma of it. Well, I just found out one of my favorite law professors has part of one of his environmental law classes on-line, and when I watched the video clip, I wasn't traumatized and realized, there were some parts of law school that I actually enjoyed - Firestone's Contracts class, his Environmental Law class, and Reed Loder's Estates class. As for Firestone - I LOVED this guy. He was short, sweet, too the point, get in, get out, learn the essentials, done. His classes were fast paced, you can tell by how quickly he speaks, but he never rattled on about things that didn't matter. He would strip cases down to their elements and it was so much easier learning this way for me.

Just listen to the first minute when he starts talking about the negligence case and the difference between "cause in fact" and "proximate cause." He says, "your tort teachers would kill me because they spend weeks on this, right, but we're gonna do it in one word. What's proximate cause?" Foreseeability. "End of story." This is Professor Firestone in a nutshell. He teaches the essentials and drills them home. It's like teaching proper grammar before you can write a great novel. You need to know the essentials before you can make sense of the complexities. That was SOOOOO helpful in law school.

Here's a sample of one other thing we all went through in law school, appellate advocacy. Apellate Advocacy was when we were assigned appellate cases to research, write arguments on, then argue them in a mock court setting. I was such a nervous wreck going into the oral arguments and kept practicing with other students. Then when that component of class was over, I and some other classmates entered the moot court competitions. That we had fun with, because even though it was supposed to be competitive for a student position on a board, there was no grade being assigned and we just had fun with it and argued our hearts out. We argued over two consecutive nights before panels of 3 judges each time. Our team did well, and afterward one of the judges came up to me and told me I should be a litigator. No Thanks! Too much stress, but it was a great experience and something I needed to do before getting out in the "real world" and actually arguing for clients in court. Okay, enough reminiscing, back to work.