What a law student thinks...

I feel like I need to dispel the fiction that law school makes law students smarter right now before it gets out of hand. We are not "smarter." We maybe know a little more Latin and try to apply legal rules to factual situations in our lives but I wouldn't call this smarter. Let's face it, waking up in the middle night to my neighbor's talk radio and trying to figure out if I can sue him based on a nuisance theory and recover for my lost sleep isn't smart... it's actually kind of stupid because it means I'm not putting my ear plugs in and going back to sleep.

There are all kinds of more prominent examples though daily at the law school. I'd like to share these with you now so in three years when you call me for free legal advice, I can point to this blog and say, "Hey, I put you on notice that I'm still an idiot a long time ago." Here's your notice...

When my Property professor talks about a state government's "police power"... I automatically think of the video of police beating Rodney King even though that has nothing to do with it.

When my Constitutional Law professor who was born in France says "whereas-es" in his French accent 75% of the class giggles and thinks..."haha, he said ass!"

My law school buddy and I decided it would be funny to name my fictional-future children "Plaintiff, Defendant, and Your Honor." You can only imagine the tom-foolery that proceeded from there. Commentary such as "Your Honor, stop hitting Plaintiff!" has been going on for two days now and makes us behave in class like kids in church.

When I'm staring intently at the professor, looking astute, it's probably only because I got bumped off the internet so the CNN article I wanted to read won't load.

I may know more Latin but I still have no idea what Eddie Vedder is singing.

I generally have three pages up on Firefox during every class: my e-mail, CNN, and Dictionary.com just so I can see if my professor is making up words, The legal field has confused the English language more than Ebonics.

Law students are not any better at conflict resolution than the rest of the world. Some even find it acceptable to bang their heads on their desk repeatedly when a fellow-student won't shut up their own ridiculousness. Hilarious? Yes. Appropriate? Probably not.

We still gossip and make up code names for people we either really like or really don't like so they don't know we are talking about them.

So you see, we are just like the rest of you... only more like the way you were in junior high. Lesson from this? Find out what your potential attorney's nickname was in law school before you hire them.