04 May 2006

Shout Out To DU Law Students!

The legislative session is coming to an end, and so is the semester at the University of Denver Law School. Scooter Joe's is flooded with hard suffering law school exam crammers this afternoon. Up and coming Democratic party operative, political aid and third year law student Andrew Luxen (who works for Anne McGihon with whom I practice law) is starting to get study lines under his eyes. I suspect DU law student and Speaker of the State House Andrew Romanoff is taking the semester off to focus on passing laws. But, I'm sure that he is suffering sympathy anxiety.

For those of you who don't know, final exams in law school are a big deal. The traditional format of the law school class is the attend ungraded lectures, where the professor asks you unannounced questions instead of the other way around, all semester, leaving you little sense of your progress in the class (or what the law in that area is about), followed by a single sitting essay exam for several hours which is graded anonymously and is your sole grade for the course. This tends to encourage early semester slacking and last minute, intense cramming, often aided by commercial outlines that tell you everything that you didn't learn from your professor during the semester. It probably isn't the most pedagogically sound way to teach the subject and can begin a lifetime a bad work habits, but somehow, participants survive and go on to do their best to solve their clients problems (if they can manage to pass the quite similar bar exam, a matter that former state house minority leader Joe Stengle reminds us can happen to the best of us if you don't devote enough time to cramming). I don't know how much law school has changed, but judging from the frantic examination of federal jurisdiction textbooks I see going on around me, I suspect it hasn't changed that much.

So, here's to you guys! Have fun. And, enjoy tequilla shots afterwards. It does wonders.

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