Assault and Battery and a Big F*** You to all the Gunners

Poor gunners get no love.  An attorney friend of mine has been commenting on my preparing for 1L and sent me this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQsPC2n4T6Q

I wonder what she was trying to say to me? 

Everybody in law school is smart (okay, there are degrees of smart, but seriously, if you've made it past first semester, you're smart.)  Even so, seems like a lot of folks really resent the guys and girls going the extra mile to be at the top of the class.

I know I'll try, but I can't say I will succeed.  I haven't the foggiest notion of what law school is like.  However, I'm still a little surprised there's so much resentment towards gunners.  Gunners aren't your typical suck-asses.  We see ass kissers in school and work and frankly, we really do sorta hope that something heavy falls on them sometime.  The fact that they're brown nosing all the time only highlights that they lack talent.

Gunners are a little different.  People think of them as annoying suck-ups, but they actually do rock the class.  It's not enough to just want to be a gunner.  That may make you an annoying suck-up, but it doesn't make you a gunner.  To actually be a gunner, you have to get the grades, which, begrudgingly or not, all law students will tell you requires more than a little bit of chops. 

Like I said, I don't know if I'll be in the top of my class or not.  Right now, I'm at that phase where I'm no different than all the other 0Ls.  We all think we're smart because our mom thinks so, and all our friends think we are, and we even had a college prof or two who said, "dang, you're sorta smart".  Every 0L thinks they're top 10% material.  90% of us are wrong.

If I did become a gunner, though, it could be problematic, because that would be a combination of perhaps the two most wholly annoying types of people in all of law school:  the old guy and the gunner.  I mean, yeah, you wish you could strangle the gunners but you know you better not because someday you might want them to help you get a job. 

The old guys?  You want to hate them because... well... because they're too damned old to be doing this.  They don't accept that the minute they became a 1L, then everything that makes them interesting and unique, in their minds, is completely inconsequential.  They're a 1L just like everybody else, regardless of how many paper clips they sorted at ABC, Inc., during their zillion years of corporate experience, where they almost got promoted to middle management. 

See, "interesting and unique", to an old guy's way of thinking is more closely aligned with pathetic and mind-numbingly boring to a 20-something law student's way of thinking.  Old guys think, "Well, the fact that I did all this stuff makes me more well-rounded than these kids".  Kids think, "you must have been really shitty at what you did before because you obviously did soooo well that now you're starting an academic program intended for 24 year-olds.  If your life was a video game, the aliens were eating your spleen and you just hit the reset button.  In the quarter of a century since you graduated high school, you got exactly as far in life as I did in the 4 years since I graduated High School."

I will probably be incomprehensibly annoying to all my fellow 1Ls.  I won't, realistically, be able to talk with the male 1Ls about which female 1Ls we are going to try and go out with.  I won't, realistically, be able to talk any of the female 1Ls into going out with me. 

When everybody goes out to have a few drinks, very few will be thinking, "You know what would make Thursday night even better?  If we could find a fat, balding, boring-ass senior citizen to come with us and prattle on and on about a bunch of boring crap that isn't going to be interesting until we're our parents' age."

I will be nearly genetically incapable of not speaking up in class.  The fact that I know no more law than anybody else means that I won't be giving any better answers than anybody else.  So, instead of fellow students thinking, "wow, tough one... glad it wasn't me, dude", they'll probably be thinking something more in line with, "jesus, will you please shut up?"

So, if I don't end up having the grades to be a gunner, that may be a good thing.  Being both gunner and old guy is sorta like combining the streams in Ghostbusters.  It's probably never happened before, there's incredible danger involved and it may spell the end of the world as we know it.

I finished the second chapter of the E&E on Torts.  This chapter dealt with Battery to go with Assault from yesterday.  At the end of each chapter, there are a few hypothetical examples with questions.

Defendant deliberately swings a hammer at the head of plaintiff whose back is turned so that he cannot see the blow coming.  The blow strikes plaintiff in the head.  The direct result of this action is no discernable physical harm, but plaintiff slaps himself vigorously in the face and barks like a dog.  Is this an example of Assault?

Yesterday, out of about 13 questions on assault, I only got about 9 of them right.  The other 4, I missed because I wasn't thinking literally enough.  The key here is to understand the literal definition of the law and apply only the literal definition to the circumstances.

I think I'm getting the hang of it.  Today, out of about 12 questions, I got all 11 right and figured out the 12th after about 3 words in the explanation. 

I'm as annoyed as anybody when I hear things like, "law school teaches you to think like a lawyer", but frankly, based on the E&E, I see how that's a somewhat clumsy, but accurate description of what's going on.  It's not that it's teaching you to think better or worse, or on a different plane.  It's that it's teaching you to limit your answers to what is presented and the literal definition under the law.

So far, my biggest leap forward is when I eliminated any concept of wrong or right.  It's not what's fair or right or just that's being asked.  It's what does the law say and how does it apply?

So far, these E&E chapters are pretty entertaining.  I actually like reading them.  I don't know what my textbooks will look like.  I suspect the E&Es are supposed to be more like summary-level material.  You can answer the questions if you can apply the definitions.  You're not citing cases or anything.

As for my "what the hell am I going to do?" plan, I'm thinking I'll still probably put down the seat deposit.  If I don't get a scholarship for 1L, I can try to get good enough grades that maybe I can earn a partial for the 2nd semester.  They have some scholarships available for the top 10 or 15 students.  So, even if I don't get a scholarship by next week, I could get one next year. 

I am going to retake the LSAT, though.  I wanna see how I can do on it.  Might apply to some other schools that are a bit of a haul, like Wayne State, UDM and Ohio Northern.  Who knows, might be able to get a good scholarship to one of them.  Cooley is about an hour away.  15 minutes longer drive isn't totally out of the question if I can pull down a full-ride somewhere.  I also don't have to go to law school in the fall.  I threw this stuff together on the fly.  I can always wait until Fall 2012, though I'd obviously rather not.

Figuring this out as I go.  I'll have it all figured out probably at the precise moment when it's too late to do me any good at all.