The Harvard Law Record: 2016-2017, Issue 1

class of 2019 1l guide

The Harvard Law Record hlrecord.org

Independent at Harvard Law School since 1946

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Welcome to Harvard Law School!

Dear 1Ls, Welcome to Harvard Law School!

You are about to begin an exciting year and your legal career.

1L year can be many things: inspiring, demanding, happy, sad, lonely, busy, and much more. You'll engage with challenging texts, meet wonderful professors, and make lifelong

friends. Of course, 1L year can also be difficult in many ways, whether socially, academically, or spiritually.

This issue of The Record contains pieces from students, faculty, and staff to help you navigate those difficulties and make the most of your 1L year. It contains a variety of viewpoints from a variety of people. Some of the advice

here may be even be contradictory.

Nevertheless, we hope and think that this issue will inform and comfort you, if for no other reason than to reassure you that others have gone through what you are about to go through and lived to tell the tale.

Again, welcome to HLS and welcome to Cambridge. We are so excited

to see each of you join our readership and the HLS community.

Sincerely, Jim An and Brianna Rennix, editorsin-chief P.S. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter @hlrecord to keep up with our latest stories and HLS news.

Now That You’re Here, Relax, But Stay Engaged

With a little hard work and an open mind, you will go far at HLS.

By John Goldberg

Welcome to HLS! I’ve been invited to offer a few words of advice, so….

First, relax.

Easier said than done, no doubt.

But remember, you are here for good reason. You belong here. It may seem that some of your classmates know more about law or law school than you do. Probably you’re just being hard on yourself. In any event, it’s what you’re all going to be learning that matters.

Second, focus.

Your 1L year is and should be about your classes and your classmates. Don’t get too caught up in other activities. You’re all hyper-accomplished, massively motivated multi-taskers. Soon enough, you’ll be spread plenty thin. For now just read, think, write, and talk

about the stuff that is going in your classes.

Third, do.

The best way to learn is to do.

For 1Ls, this means thinking, writing, and arguing in the mode of lawyers. How do you do that? When it comes to reading, you must read actively, “interrogating” the text.

You come across a mysterious Latin phrase. Look it up.

You can’t quite get your head around the facts of the case. Why not? Is that because you’ve missed something? Or because the opinion you’re reading doesn’t tell you something that you need to know?

What is that something? Why isn’t it mentioned?

Meanwhile, for classes, being active means thinking, formulating questions, even volunteering to try your hand at some answers. It does not mean mindlessly copying down what you hear.

Finally, be critical and charitable. By “critical,” I mean careful, thoughtful, and discerning. I do not mean vicious, judgmental, or nasty. Indeed, a crucial part of

You must be critical of what others say.

(Yes, that goes for what your professors say.) being critical is being charitable.

Law is, above all else, an analytic discipline. It provides elaborate frameworks for addressing some of life’s most complex and difficult problems. If you are going to be a lawyer, you must read, think, and write critically. You must be critical of what others say. (Yes, that goes for what your professors say.) And you must be self-critical. (Are you so sure you have things right? Are you confident you presented your argument clearly?)

And if you want to understand a text, you must approach it charitably. You must treat it as if it aspires towards coherence and

persuasiveness. You might conclude that it does not meet these aspirations. Regardless, the critical conclusion can come only after the charitable engagement.

What goes for texts goes double for classmates. Approach them with charity: they are your colleagues and your friends. Sometimes they will say things that surprise, confuse, or upset you.

If you want to respond, great.

Just start with a charitable disposition. Assume the best of your classmates, not the worst. I can’t guarantee that this assumption will always, at all times, be vindicated. But it almost always will be.

And it’s the right place to start.

Let me conclude where I began.

Welcome! HLS is extraordinary.

So are you. May your time here be happy, healthy, and endlessly interesting.

John Goldberg is a professor of law at Harvard Law School. This fall, he will be teaching torts to Section 4.

He is the author of Open Book: The Inside Track to Law School Success.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Have fun, stay sane, and uphold Harvard’s mission to promote justice, says ACS president.

By Kassi Yukevich ’17 Welcome to Harvard Law School!

My name is Kassi Yukevich and I am the President of the Harvard Law School chapter of the American Constitution Society, more commonly known as ACS. I’m sure that you have been overwhelmed with advice already, but I have three more pieces of advice that I hope will help you during your time at Harvard. First, take the time to find your people. Second, make sure that you have a life outside of Harvard Law School. Third, remember that with great power comes great responsibility.

Find Your People

When I moved to Cambridge,

I brought a lot of things with me. I brought goofy family photos, letters from my old students, the warmest coat I could find, and, like so many other students, I brought a serious case of impostor syndrome. I distinctly remember bringing my admission letter with me to orientation, just in case my name tag wasn’t there. I thought it would be helpful to have physical proof that I belonged at Harvard Law School, just in case anyone asked.

When I say find your people, I mean find the people that you are comfortable telling your most ridiculous fears to. Find the people who also refuse to hide their love for country music. Find the people that, after a few glasses of wine, will tell

you it’s a great idea for you to spend every dollar in your savings account on Hamilton tickets, but will not let you actually go through with that purchase.

My third week at Harvard, I was lucky to receive one of the few remaining positions left on the ACS Board. I was immediately inspired by the passion that ACS members have for progressive causes. Through ACS, I found my people. I found friends who were ready to debate the legal nuances of the Obama Administration’s immigration policy and then binge watch an entire season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

As soon as I found my people, my impostor syndrome disappeared.

The best thing about Harvard Law School is how wonderful the student body is. I’ve met so many lifelong friends here.

Get to know everyone in your

Some Useful Things to Know Harvard Law School isn't what it was, but it's not what the law school bills it as either.

By Brianna Rennix ’18 1. There is a hallway on the second floor of Wasserstein that leads straight into the Hark cafeteria.

It’s on the far right as you face the big window. Not the side with the Milstein rooms, where you got to sit through all those Orientation speeches — the other side.

I am an idiot, and I never speak to anyone, ever, and so I didn’t know this hallway was there for my first nine months at HLS. During those nine months, whenever I was in a second-floor classroom, I had to decide whether I was going to use my two-minute bathroom break to take a piss or dash to the Hark and buy a heap of cookies. Needless to say, I always chose the latter, and my bladder suffered for it.

But though law school sometimes involves hard choices, this doesn’t have to be one of them. The second-floor hallway will cut your cookie-purchasing time in half. There’s even a bathroom on your way back.

This thing is basically the Northwest Passage.

2. Harvard Law School is not anything like The Paper Chase.

And 99% of your Orientation experience is devoted to convincing you of this exact fact. However, just because your 1L year is not The Paper Chase does not mean you are going to enjoy it.

Some of you will not enjoy your 1L year. I myself was rather miserable for a lot of 1L, in part because I believed that I was supposed to be enjoying myself. Once I resigned

I was rather miserable for a lot of 1L because I believed that I was supposed to be enjoying myself. myself to the fact that I hated everything I was doing, I felt much more relaxed and more like myself. I’m not sure if this trick will work for everyone, but it’s certainly worth a try.

Finding your people and your voice are certainly important parts of making your law school experience more enjoyable and rewarding, and there’s a lot of excellent advice in this issue about how to go about doing this. But here I want to take a moment to address some of you fellows at the edge of the room: the odd ducks, the prematurely elderly, the painfully shy. Sometimes it’s hard to find anyone who understands exactly what you mean; and sometimes you yourself will have no idea what on earth you’re trying to say. This isn’t anything to be ashamed of, either.

3. There is something subtly unsettling about Harvard Law School.

I think it arises from the coincidence in time between the transition to adulthood, which happens to everyone, and the transition into a world of power and influence, which only happens to a very few people, and which many of us never expected

would happen to us.

Before we came to HLS, we were struggling to discover how to live morally within a certain circumscribed degree of agency. Now the possibility of larger agency and greater power is looming before us.

The decisions we make in our future careers may affect many lives. When you’re plucked out of the general populace, however unfairly, to be a societal “elite,” how do you fulfill this role conscientiously? Is it even possible to live morally as a person of power?

We are unnaturally and undeservedly perched atop the heap of humanity.

This question is the brooding existential elephant in the room at places like Harvard. It makes us nervous in some deep stratum of our subconscious. We spend a lot of time reassuring each other that we belong: that we’re all right: that we’re just normal people after all.

But the fact is, simply by having been admitted here, we are all unnaturally and undeservedly perched atop the heap of humanity.

Our world is filled with suffering, and some of that suffering might someday be eased or amplified by Rennix continued on page 2

The best thing about Harvard Law School is how won derful the student body is. section and meet as many people as you can outside of your section.

Join every organization that sounds interesting to you. Go to every social event and mixer that you hear about.

Join a student practice organization.

Never pay for lunch — always go to a lunch event.

It can take some time to find your people, but you will. And once you do, I promise that Harvard will feel like home.

Yukevich continued on page 3

Contents John Goldberg, Professor

1

Tyra Walker, Record contributor

1

Kassi Yukevich, ACS president

1

Brianna Rennix, Record editor-in-chief

1

Meg Kribble, HLS librarian

1

Jim An, Record editor-in-chief

2

Fenno, Perennial HLS student

2

Natalie Vernon, Paavani Garg, and Amanda Lee, WLA leaders

3

Jeremy Salinger and Jacqueline Wolpoe, JLSA co-presidents

3

Kristin Turner, BLSA president

3

Stephanie Jimenez, La Alianza president

3

Pete Davis, Record online editor

4

Deborah Beth Medows, N.Y.S. Dept. of Health

4

Jennifer Marr, RAP industry relations chair

4

Lauren Godles, Victoria Hartmann, Alicia Daniels, and Benjamin Hecht, HMP board members

4

If I Did It All Over Again Hard-learned lessons from 1L, O.J. Simpson documentaries, and more.

By Tyra J. Walker ’18 Since one of the most exhilarating experiences of my summer was rotating between couches to watch Ezra Edelman’s five-part ESPN documentary OJ: Made in America, I felt inclined to share my own tell-all account of how I would do 1L, if I did it all over again.

Step 1. Start preparing for exams early.

What I have found to be, perhaps, the most difficult adjustment to the Bizarro World that is law school is the fact that no matter what you learn during the semester, the only factor that typically has a material Walker continued on page 2

Make the Most of Your Library

By Meg Kribble

Welcome, new HLS students! We at your new library are excited that you're here.

We know you’re probably experiencing information overload right now, so we’ll keep this short and, we hope, whet your appetites to learn more about how the HLS Library can make life as a law student easier for you. Here are some things we think every new HLS student should know about their library.

1. You can ask us anything.

There’s no such thing as a stupid question at this library. In fact, so-called “stupid questions” often turn out to be the trickiest to answer, while questions you might think are hard turn out to be easy.

2. Follow the 10-minute rule.

Don’t spend more than ten minutes struggling with any task related to research or information. Come visit the reference desk, email us, call us, or chat with us at http://bit.ly/askhlsl. You’re here to read, analyze, study, think, and write — not to fight with database interfaces or struggle with search results.

We’re here because we love helping you find information. Make everyone’s lives happier by coming to us before wasting two hours looking for a Congressional report we can find in two minutes.

3. You can check out more than just books at the library.

We’ve got board games, sports equipment, laptop power cords, popular movies on DVD, and toolkits.

This summer we used the results of our student survey to add to this list with noise-canceling headphones, USB monitors, laptop stands, and additional options for device chargers.

4. We’re your source for help with your Canvas course sites.

Our Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum Solutions (TLC) staff is available to help you with all aspects of trouble-shooting Monday-Friday 8:30-5:30 at ask@edtech.libanswers.com or (617) 500-1038.

Don't get frustrated with Canvas — just ask us for help! You can read the Canvas FAQ and view tutorials anytime at http://bit.ly/canvashelp16.

5. Take a tour!

Our tours go beyond finding your way around and quoting library policies. We focus on important issues, like where to take a comfy nap, where to get your late night and weekend coffee fix, cool things to show family and friends when they visit, and, for our true library nerds, where to enter the building when you want to take advantage of the 24/7 access for HLS students. Sign up for a tour at http:// bit.ly/hlslcal.

6. Ask us.

Yes, it’s so important we’re saying it twice. Physically and virtually, the library is full of resources for you.

Don’t wait until you’re a 3L or about to finish your LLM thesis to find out everything we can do for you!

Meg Kribble is a research librarian and the outreach coordinator at the Harvard Law School Library.

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The Harvard Law Record

August 31, 2016

The Harvard Law Record

Independent at Harvard Law School since 1946 · August 31, 2016 · Volume 143, Issue 1 Winner of the 2016 American Bar Association Law School Newspaper Award Editors-in-Chief Jim An ’18 Brianna Rennix ’18 Online Editor Pete Davis ’18

Business Manager Teddy Grodek ’18

Opinion Editor Nic Mayne ’18

Deputy Opinion Editor Namita Dhawan ’18

Contributors Jimmy Chalk ’18 Tyra Walker ’18

The Record is looking for 1L writers, editors, and designers.

Contact us at editor@hlrecord.org

If you have a response to any piece in The Record, email us at editor@hlrecord.org.

Six Easy Steps for Fun and Profit in Law School and Life Follow these recommendations for a good time at Harvard Law School and a successful career beyond. ​By Jim An ’18 Hello 1Ls! You all have just entered a strange and wonderful world, and I hope each one of you has an amazing time. That said, I'd like to give y'all just a few tips to help you make the most of your time in law school.

1. Go to class

It's true that a lot of things can be learned directly from your casebooks. But sometimes professors say things during class not covered in the casebooks or talk about what they like to emphasize on exams.

Sometimes somebody in your class says something smart, and you'll want to know who the smart people are so you can ask them for their outlines. And sometimes a professor does a one-person reenactment of The Hangover and everyone has a nice laugh. I'm not saying that the last thing has ever happened to me, but if it did, you wouldn't want to miss it.

2. Find time for yourself

Let's say one of your hobbies is

Walker

Continued from page 1 effect on your eventual transcript is your performance on a three- or eight-hour exam at the end of the semester. If I did 1L all over again, I would let this single reality be my guide.

It is all too easy to be whisked away by the decorated language of Cardozo opinions, but unless Cardozo can teach you how to issue spot, your flowery friend might just leave you out of luck. I do not mean to diminish the importance of learning the substance of the law, but only to emphasize that for the first time in many of our educational lives, substance will only get you so far.

Exams and their execution are what count, and the more time you take to understand the anatomy of these exams and how to execute them, the better.

Step 2. Reserve time for the things you love to do.

Although admittedly unoriginal, this may be my most important advice, since the pastimes that keep you grounded usually become the first casualties at the very moment pressure begins to mount. I say this from experience.

I regarded myself as a master juggler last September. I was able to make time for all of my class reading, regular jogs, Sex and the City study breaks, and even a fleeting tune on my cello here and there. The hardest but most necessary balancing act you must accomplish, however, arises when the behavior of your peers suggests that you no longer have time to do what you love.

When the WCC study rooms start smelling ripe and lived-in and the

making candy necklaces or prospecting for oil. You should continue to make time for alternately threading Smarties and caramel corn or fracking for some sweet Texas tea. Everyone needs a hobby so they're not boring people who can only talk about the latest Supreme Court docket.

Having a hobby also gives future middle-aged you a good excuse to disappear for a few days so you can frolic in peace with your much-tooyoung paramour in an attempt to relive the youth that you squandered at law school and a BigLaw job.

3. Take good notes

Notes are like baby aspirin. You don't need to take them, but they may reduce your risk of a second heart attack if taken in conjunction with a healthy diet and regular exercise. Talk to your doctor before starting any medical regimen.

4. Meet new people

You'll meet tons of great people, at least some of whom are not secret gunners or future corrupt politicians. Many lawyers are depressed or alcoholics, and making more

Are you inviting the opportunity to have challenging conversations? libraries are packed end to end with students, these are the times when you must recall this advice most.

Step 3. Find “your place” off campus.

Your place might be at the end of a ten-minute stroll down the road to Porter Square. It might be a quick zip over to Fresh Pond. It might even entail an afternoon spent at Boston’s The Lawn on D. If I did it over again, I would be a 1L who committed to “unplugging,” not just mentally, but spatially as well. This physical separation, even if brief, can be the key to effective recharging. Effective recharging can be the key to your endurance through 1L year.

Step 4. Use your HLS email address to unlock doors.

This is not advice exclusive to your 1L year, but it is nonetheless important advice because of the negligible time we have on this campus. We J.D. students have just three years to be a student at Harvard Law School — and LLMs, only one. To spend any portion of this time squandering potential opportunities is, arguably, to misspend a substantial amount of time.

If I did 1L all over again, I would use my HLS email address to meet with educators, local politicians, and community leaders from both Cambridge and the greater Boston area in

friends will increase the number of people who might stage an intervention for you.

When your spouse finds out about your not-so-secret paramour and leaves you for their personal trainer, it will also come in handy to have a friend on whose couch you can crash while you look for an apartment.

5. Write for The Record

This is definitely an important and good thing to do that will improve your law school experience and future job prospects. My job as editor-in-chief definitely does not involve dealing with dumb emails from random strangers complaining about Iran, socialism, and broken links.

6. Have fun

Believe it or not, some people find law school to be a stressful experience. I don't really understand those people, but do try to have fun.

You're at a place with terrifically smart people who sometimes turn out to be not quite as neurotic as you might imagine.

Believe it or not, some people find law school to be a stressful experience.

Plus, you'll want to maximize your fun memories now because it will be a lot harder to make new fun memories once you are hospitalized with liver failure, your paramour leaves you, and even your kids won't visit you out of resentment from all those years when they were younger and you never saw them because of your constant late nights at the office. When the light starts to fade while you're sitting at the bottom of the transplant list, you'll want some good times to look back upon.

Anyway, welcome to Harvard!

It'll be a great three years!

Jim An is a 2L. He is an editor-inchief of The Record.

order to supplement my classroom experience. I would ask more questions to help determine who I want to be when I, one day, bear my Harvard Law degree.

Step 5. Remember that your charge as a member of the legal profession is bigger than your own ambitions.

We have chosen a school that seeks “[t]o educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well-being of society.” This charge set by HLS’s mission is bigger than you, your career, and your ambitions. This charge is a responsibility. Always think about the ways that this charge affects your education, both inside and outside of the classroom. Are you seeking other perspectives as much as you could be? Are you putting yourself in the shoes of other individuals? Are you inviting the opportunity to have challenging conversations?

All of these inquiries are crucial to the mission with which we have been charged, and if I did 1L all over again, I would keep the words of HLS’s mission in a place where I could read it daily, and recall its importance even in my times of greatest doubt.

Step 6. Watch the ESPN OJ: Made in America documentary.

If I did 1L all over again, I would enlist a team with the technical capacity to build a time machine so that I could send this documentary back in time and watch it during my 1L year. Released this summer, Ezra Edelman’s ESPN documentary holds up a mirror to this country through the narrative of a fallen ex-hero. The masterful weaving of this narrative has oriented me on race, law, and justice better than any other piece of media I have consumed in quite

ESPN Films

some time.

Gather friends and have a weekly screening of this documentary, part by part. Form discussion groups over wine and/or waffles. Consider how this documentary contextualizes the contemporary challenges that we face in America. Consider how this documentary frames the law versus the legal realities that you will be studying over the next nine months.

I enter my 2L year believing that this documentary can do a great deal to foster productive discussions between great minds in this country.

Behold, and let me know whether you agree.

I hope that this advice will empower you to take 1L year by the horns as you embark on the audacious journey of becoming a Crimson lawyer. Warmest welcome to Harvard Law, and to all a good fall!

Tyra Walker is a 2L.

Fenno: Ignore These Lessons at Your Own Risk

By Fenno As the longest-serving member of the Harvard Law School student body, I am happy to offer a few words of advice to incoming 1Ls. As you embark on this exciting new phase of your life, here are a few things to keep in mind.

1. The law is a terrible profession.

Judicial opinions are nothing but a mix of bad philosophy, amateur sociology, and half-remembered historical anecdotes. They are appallingly written as a genre, and reading too many of them will inevitably make your own writing much worse. Unfortunately, only those who fully steep themselves in this cesspool of verbiage will ever manage to become judges, and thus the hideous cycle of unreadability perpetuates itself forever.

“The law is a noble profession,” your professors will say. But as everyone knows, “BigLaw” lawyers are miserable alcoholics who consistently miss their children’s birthdays/

baseball games/funerals/etc., while public interest lawyers spend the majority of their time weeping in rat-infested offices because they have 300,000 clients and no pens.

It’s important to remember that all your professors went into academia precisely because they didn’t want to be real lawyers.

Your best option is to learn as little law as possible while you’re here, and then try to get a job in something else.

2. You are not special.

You are at HLS because you performed well on a standardized test whose hardest questions involved devising seating charts for hypothetical dinner-guests. Intellectually speaking, we are all glorified wedding planners, and it’s time we accepted this.

3. Enemies are all around you.

Be careful whom you trust. Some of your classmates could be part of America’s next generation of villains. One day, a sectionmate of yours may well end up poisoning

a river, defrauding widows and orphans, or hosting their own talk show on a cable news channel.

NOW IS YOUR CHANCE TO FIND THESE PEOPLE AND THWART THEM WHILE THEY ARE STILL WEAK. Sabotage them by any means necessary. Videotape them at a brothel! Trick them into eating a beloved childhood pet that you have cunningly disguised as a pot roast!

Encourage them to write ill-advised, career-ruining editorials in The Record!

4. You won’t remember anything that you learn in your 1L classes.

Don’t worry about it, though: nothing you learn your first year is remotely useful anyway. The Dean will go on about the importance of scholarship and analysis in these uncertain times, but the fact is, when the Day Of Calamity comes— and it will likely come during your lifetime—your nuanced understanding of the Erie doctrine will not matter a damn. The Imperator,

as he conducts his judicial purges, will not be particularly interested in whether you are a strict textualist or more of a purposivist, and his Secret Police, once they have beaten down the door of your panic-room, are unlikely to order you to cold-recite the facts of Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Company in exchange for your life. Nor will the Resistance arrange to meet you at dawn in the swaying shadow of a dilapidated bridge, and there implore you to explain the dark secret of Chevron deference, for upon Chevron depends the fate of the revolution.

So relax!

5. Boston is a great town.

I strongly recommend that you spend no more than one hour a day in Cambridge. You are young! You are strong! Go join a drum circle in Boston Common. Challenge someone to bare-knuckle boxing at a Dropkick Murphys concert. Hijack a Duck Tour Boat and pursue terrified rent-a-kayakers up and down the Charles. Visit Modern Pastry in

Rennix

Continued from page 1 our decisions, or the decisions of people who are very like us, who may be our current classmates and future colleagues.

There will be moments when we seem to feel the full gravitational weight of this responsibility. There are other moments when we feel so lost and confused that we don’t believe ourselves to be powerful people at all.

But regardless of how we feel, we are all, proportionally speaking, powerful people on this planet, with all the spiritual precariousness this entails. It’s a very troubling position to be in.

Once I resigned myself to the fact that I hated everything I was doing, I felt much more relaxed.

4. Don’t be gaslit by your own legal education.

Once in a while, your brain will really resist bending in some particular direction, or refuse to accept some distinction as valid or relevant.

This could mean that you’ve misunderstood something important in your readings or in lecture. But sometimes it just means that you are finding yourself profoundly skeptical of the law’s ability, in some particular instance, to achieve anything that a normal, non-lawyerly human person would instinctively understand as justice.

Sometimes, the “issue” you’re being urged to spot has damn-all to do what a layperson would think was the most pressing matter in the case.

When you first start studying the law, this will seem weird. Then, you begin to expect it, and it may start to seem less weird. Don’t let that happen! It is weird! You weren’t wrong!

If you ever have that creepy feeling of dissonance, don’t sublimate it.

Honestly, it’s probably more important to figure out how to articulate and explain and justify that instinctive mental resistance than it is to dive down all the theoretical and procedural rabbit-holes of a particular legal problem. When the operation of the law affronts your sense of justice, it’s probably not because your sense of justice needs fine-tuning; but rather because the law isn’t working as it should.

5. The Harvard Law Record, like the Phantom of the Opera, has a shadowy basement lair, and plots ceaselessly about how to stir up trouble.

We are not as prestigious as the Harvard Law Review, but our fridge is full of beer, and sometimes Ralph Nader calls us on the telephone. Come write for us!

Brianna Rennix is a 2L. She is an editor-in-chief of The Record.

Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you work at WilmerHale, and the day after that you die. the North End, eat as many cannoli as you can, vomit on the plinth of Paul Revere’s statue, and then check out Mike’s Pastry across the street. Hide out in the Boston MFA at closing time, wait till everyone leaves, and then move all the mummies just a little bit out of their sarcophagi.

Don’t let The Reasonable Man get you down. Don’t let The Dead Hand write your story. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you work at WilmerHale, and the day after that you die.

Fenno has been a student at Harvard Law School since at least 1961. He has no current plans to graduate.

August 31, 2016

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The Harvard Law Record

Talk to Classmates, Professors, Mentors

By Natalie Vernon ’17, Paavani Garg ’18, and Amanda Lee ’18 Dear Class of 2019, Welcome to Harvard Law School!

As you embark on this new academic adventure, we wanted to share a few tidbits of advice. Take a deep breath and get excited for a challenging and rewarding year.

1. Remember that you know yourself best.

Keep your own study habits and figure out what works best for you.

Like study groups? Join one. Prefer to work in your house by yourself? Do it. Don’t let other people’s approach to the first year of law school affect you. There is no right or wrong way to read cases and digest material. What you’ve done to get here will likely serve you best.

2. Maintain your mental and physical health.

Find time to exercise and make

sure you get the chance to do the things you love outside of class. Set aside an afternoon or day each week to stay in touch with friends and family, catch up on Netflix, read for fun, or just take a walk. Law school can be as much of an exercise in mental and physical stamina as it is an intellectual challenge. Above all, take care of yourself!

3. Talk to the people around you.

Your classmates are fascinating, gifted people with diverse backgrounds. They’re also your short-term colleagues, your lifelong friends and your professional network for the years to come. Helping to create an atmosphere of openness and trust within your section and getting involved on campus can also go a long way to getting to know other people in the first year.

4. Get involved on campus.

All the opportunities available at the law school can seem overwhelming, but they are also great

More Than Classrooms HLS has great classes, but don’t forget about the opportunities outside of the formal curriculum.

By Kristin Turner ’17 Dearest 1Ls, There is something very startling about being asked to reflect on an experience that you haven’t fully realized is coming to a close.

Nonetheless, here are a few words of advice as you begin this unique journey and what you’ll soon know is the very full experience HLS can be.

1. Make the HLS experience yours.

Law school, and 1L especially, is such a peculiar experience that, at times, you’ll forget how to relate to people who exist outside of the bubble. As scholars who will grapple with nuances and haggle over semantics, you’ll somehow still struggle to describe the uniqueness that is the HLS experience—and that’s okay! This shared experience will form the basis for many friendships and connections. However, the current can also pull you under and lead you to go through law school the way other people think you should do law school.

As much as HLS is a collective of brilliant minds, scholars and people, don’t forget the individual that applied to HLS. You are your first client in a long list of clients that will come throughout your budding careers.

At times, this becomes easy to forget in the commotion of trying to stay on top of it all.

Take control over your schedule, take risks, and don’t be scared to be autonomous. Seek out the

things that interest you regardless of how different, or motley, those interests may be. That’s the beauty of having all of these resources and experiences at your disposal! Find the groups and the people that help you feel whole, well-rounded, and engaged. It will be well worth it!

2. You’ll learn some of your most valuable lessons outside of the classroom.

In an environment like HLS, everyday you will find yourself in a room where what is seemingly obvious to you, is a point of debate for someone else. Everybody has a viewpoint, an opinion, and an experience that informs why they feel the way they do. Take advantage of the conversations in the halls, and around campus. Attend the lunch talks and the Q&As with guest speakers. It doesn’t take much to have a profound moment of intellectual growth.

Contracts, torts, criminal law, and civil procedure are going to be very similar no matter where you go to law school. The people around you are what make this experience in Cambridge special.

3. Take care of yourself: eat, sleep (!), exercise, laugh.

This one is actually harder than it sounds because, as you’ll soon see, 1L requires So. Much. Reading. That said, the only thing worse than the amount of reading during 1L is returning home and physically looking as though school owned you and not the other way around.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Go to the gym, don’t let too much coffee

Speak Up You can find a home and a voice at HLS, even if you’re from somewhere else or talk differently.

By Stephanie Jimenez ’17 Being cold-called for the first time in class is the biggest fear for most 1Ls. Looking back now, I thought I would remember what questions the professor asked, I thought I would remember my horribly incorrect answer and the embarrassment I would feel. But no, what I remember the most is how my Miami-Cuban accent reverberated through the classroom.

My accent, my voice, did not sound like the voices of my classmates. It was definitely different and it made me realize that I was different. The funny thing is my “accent” is actually non-existent in Miami. I know many people who have much stronger accents back home, and I actually sound “American” in comparison.

But here, in Cambridge, I definitely had an accent.

And it might not have been a

Yukevich

Continued from page 1 Have A Life Outside of Law School

It can be easy to spend most of your time within three blocks of campus, but do your best to get out of Cambridge as much as you can.

For a city with so many smart people, there is an astonishing lack of comfortable coffee shops in Cambridge. Somerville and Boston have some great ones. Almost every Saturday you can find me working at Render Coffee or The Thinking Cup

problem, except that to me, my accent sounded “unintelligent.” Suddenly, I didn’t sound eloquent, my vocabulary wasn’t expansive, and my voice more resembled the voices of the girls in the parody “Sh*t Miami Girls Say” than those of my peers. I never felt this way about anyone else’s accent, but suddenly, I internalized that my own voice was not on par with HLS standards, and thus, everyone would think I had nothing valuable to offer.

Compounded with the fact that I already suffered from “impostor syndrome,” this new realization — that I was different, a minority (who was used to being a majority) — really lowered my self-esteem. So I did the most natural thing for me: I stopped talking. I lost my voice. In class, I only spoke when called on. It’s not that I had nothing to say; it’s just I didn’t think that what I had to say was relevant or important.

It took me the rest of 1L (and some

in Boston.

Also, make sure you are finding time to do things that you love. I go to Flywheel and SoulCycle like it’s my job. I’ve also made it halfway through my Boston Bar and Restaurant Bucket List thanks in large part to outings with friends that I made through my involvement in ACS. I’ve made it to almost every decent oyster bar in Boston, which, in my humble opinion, is quite the accomplishment.

I promise that you have enough time to do fun things. You just have

ways to explore areas of law, gain leadership experiences, and meet different people outside your section, including 2Ls and 3Ls. Again, you know yourself best. Take advantage of opportunities that interest you, but know that you should never feel pressure to sign up for a club simply for the sake of signing up.

Don’t let other people’s approach to the first year of law school affect you.

5. Know that grades are important but not everything.

As a Harvard student, your professional career opportunities will be vast and varied. You can clerk, land a fellowship, work for a nonprofit, work for a law firm, and more. Don’t feel the need to tailor your experience only to grades, as they’re only one indicator of performance. Keep in mind that grades are often based on just one curb your appetite, don’t feel guilty for needing sleep, and most importantly, keep a sense of humor. Make time to still be a person. Trust me, it’s a good investment.

4. Keep things in perspective.

During my final class of 1L, Professor Jody Freeman closed class with a profound and personal reminder to us about the road ahead.

She said, “You are at the best school at the best university in the wealthiest country in the world.

Your ‘problems’ aren’t like other problems. You have opportunity. It is all going to be alright.”

It doesn’t take much to have a profound moment of intellectual growth.

Her words embodied what we all knew to be true: it is so easy to lose sight of where we are, what we’re doing and what really matters. And, instead of hearing this at the close of your 1L, it is important for you to keep that in your mind from the start.

Take the time you need to keep things in perspective. Maintaining that perspective is the most valuable thing you can do for yourselves over the next three years because, before you know it, you’ll be offering your own advice to 1Ls. See you on the other side!

Sincerely, Kristin Turner Kristin Turner is a 3L. She is the president of the Black Law Students Association.

Make yourself heard.

Your experiences and backgrounds are important. of 2L) to find my voice. I rediscovered my voice through La Alianza, the Latinx law student association at HLS. Even though our group hails from many different countries, from Colombia to Puerto Rico to Peru, I felt that I was at home with La Alianza members.

The Latinx experience is not monolithic. Latinx people originate from many countries with diverse cultures, foods, and customs, come from different socioeconomic levels, and have different immigration experiences. Still, there are many commonalities — above all, many of us have an accent or speak a second language. Immersing myself in La Alianza made me realize that people who are like me also belong at HLS. And what’s more, HLS did not just pick us, we also picked HLS and we worked extremely hard to be here.

to let yourself take the time.

Make sure that you continue to nurture your relationships with people outside of law school. You have a family who loves you. You have friends who think that a tort is a dessert and that the rule against perpetuities is something they learned in calculus class. Call those people.

Spend time with those people. When you need a break from law school — and you will need a break — they will be there for you.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

final exam at the end of the semester. Many employers care about different experiences, such as practical and clinical work, journal exposure, and leadership roles on campus.

6. Go to office hours.

Professors are happy to talk to you and interested in your thoughts and experiences. One way to start up a conversation with a professor is to ask a question or clarification about something in the reading or something that happened in class. Nervous to go alone? Sign up with a friend.

7. Find mentors on campus.

BSAs, teaching assistants, professors, and advisers are wonderful resources. You can also sign up for a mentor through the Women’s Law Association’s Big

Sister Little Sister program at http://tiny.cc/wlamentor2016. Don’t be afraid to reach out to upperclassmen; they’ve been through 1L and are often willing to share their wisdom.

8. Remind yourself that you deserve to be here.

Last but not least, you are at Harvard Law for a reason. If you ever feel out of place confused, or experience “impostor syndrome,” remember that you are not alone. The first year of law school is tough, but so are you.

We are so excited to get to know you on campus this year. Please reach out to the Women’s Law Association on campus if you ever have questions!

Sincerely, Natalie Vernon Paavani Garg Amanda Lee Natalie Vernon is a 3L. She is the president of the Women's Law Association. Paavani Garg and Amanda Lee are 2Ls. They are the co-vice presidents of the Women's Law Association.

Don’t Forget to Smell the Roses

By Jeremy Salinger ’17 and Jacqueline Wolpoe ’17 Dear New Students, Let us be the 613th people to welcome you to HLS. You are in the first steps of what will be an amazing journey. Drink for the word journey. #TheBachelorette #I’mWithLuke #TheBacheLuke.

As you begin your decorated legal careers, people will be asking you all sorts of challenging questions.

Your professors will ask you for the facts and holding of Palsgraf, and your friends and families will be asking you for the definition of a tort. The former we can help you with, the latter … well … we are sure we could find someone to help you out.

Without doubt, you are among some of the smartest people you will ever meet. You may feel your brains grow as you learn how to law good. It is easy to get caught up in the fray. You may find yourself lost in the maze of cases, outlines, and acronyms. See, e.g., LIPP; SPIF; EIP, etc. It is a New Deal style of alphabet soup. Would FDR have relied on acronyms if people called him Franky?

Unclear.

Amidst the chaos and academic rigor, we advise the following: have fun!

You can learn a lot in the classroom setting from your professors, but you can learn even more out and about with your friends. If Elle Woods did not go to the mixer where Tracy Marsinco was hosed down from head to toe, she would not have known that the water would deactivate the ammonium thioglycolate

and ruin her perm, and she may have lost her case. You will not likely be trying criminal cases as a 1L, but be sure to ask about clinics for next year if you feel confident with hair-care routine.

So go out. Explore Boston. Travel.

Watch Netflix. Chill. Watch Netflix and chill. ;) Watch a football game without wondering if the players’ concussion litigation qualified for federal subject matter jurisdiction under the Class Action Fairness Act. Have a beer without discussing whether Rousseau’s Social Contract contained a valid offer and acceptance. Any time is too much time to hide behind the safety of a casebook and an outline. The signatories are very lucky to have made a wonderful collection of memories, and very few of them involve reading in a Wasserstein study room (the cannibalism case in crim being a rare exception).

Believe it or not, it is possible to do well AND have fun. “Madness,” you say? “Crazy,” you allege? Don’t believe us? Then prove us wrong.

Prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

We’ll make it easier. Prove it by a preponderance of the evidence! But to prove it, you’ll need to have fun. See what we did there? Lawyered!

With warm wishes for a successful and fun start to an amazing three years, Jeremy Salinger Jacqueline Wolpoe

Watch Netflix.

Chill.

Watch Netflix and chill.

Jeremy Salinger and Jacqueline Wolpoe are 3Ls. They are the co-presidents of the Jewish Law Students Association.

Slowly, my self-confidence grew as I surrounded myself with a network of people who I could look up to. My mindset really began to change when I heard Margaret Montoya speak at a La Alianza lunch event midway through the Fall semester. Margaret Montoya was the first Latina to attend HLS back in the 1970s. She now teaches law at the University of New Mexico and has devoted her career to advocating for women and Latinx students. Hearing her story, how she experienced prejudice from people around her who didn’t think she would (or even should) be accepted, made me realize that she paved the way for me to be at HLS. I knew that I had to make the most of the opportunities afforded to me here.

I also remember sharing a class with a 2L who I met through La Alianza. She arguably also has a Latinx “accent” and she inspired me by the way she always participated and shared her opinion in class. She contributed insightful and intelligent comments. I looked up to her and she became a mentor and a friend. She made me realize that I can do this too!

Not everyone will react the same

way as I did. Some people won’t allow their voices to be lost. But I know some first-year students might feel the way I did.

My charge to you is to make yourself heard. Your experiences and backgrounds are important and can provide needed perspectives that will be lacking if you don’t speak up. Find friends, an organization, classes, activities, that provide that space where you can feel at home at HLS. Make sure that you expand the sense of confidence that you gain from that “home” to other places in HLS that might seem alien and uncomfortable to you.

For me, my “home” had to do with finding people who shared one aspect of my identity — mi Latinidad — but for others, it may be another type of group. I hope that all first year students who might feel this “impostor syndrome,” this lack of belonging, can find their “home” at HLS and have their voices heard, accent or no accent. And know, for I was there too.

The mission of Harvard Law School is to “educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well-being of society.” In three short years, you will graduate with one of the most valuable degrees in the world. Your degree from Harvard Law School will amplify your voice. You will have the power to be an advocate for people whose voices have long been ignored or taken from them all together.

I know it might not feel like it yet, but your position as a Harvard Law

School student has already given you a great amount of power, influence, and access. I urge you to think critically throughout your time at Harvard about how you will contribute to the advancement of equality both inside and outside the justice system. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

Stephanie Jimenez is a 3L. She is a co-president of La Alianza, an organization of Latinx law students and students interested in issues affecting the Latinx community.

Kassi Yukevich is a 3L. She is the president of the Harvard chapter of the American Constitution Society, an organization of progressive lawyers and law students.

4

The Harvard Law Record

Thinking Like A Lawyer Thinking like a lawyer does not mean students should discard the moral values that they brought with them.

By Deborah Beth Medows Congratulations on beginning your legal journey. Here are two important questions to consider as you start your first year of law school: first, what are the costs of learning to think like a lawyer, and second, how can you create a meaningful career for yourself while learning to do so?

The legal community that you are joining faces serious challenges. The statistics are sobering: drinking is a problem for one out of three lawyers, and over thirty-two percent of lawyers under 30 qualify as problem drinkers. A study by the American Bar Association and the Betty Ford Foundation found that 28% of lawyers struggle with depression, 19% reported experiencing anxiety, and 23% said they experience stress.

According to a National Law Journal article that quoted this study, these statistics “paint[] the picture of an unsustainable professional culture

that’s harming too many people.”

Although medical students and doctors also face competitive environments, high educational debt, and stress, these statistics are specific to the legal community; lawyers have the highest rate of major depressive disorder of any profession, and among the highest rates of alcoholism.

So why are many lawyers unhappy to the point of turning to substances to cope with life’s problems? And what can you do as a beginning law student to ensure that your career is professionally and personally satisfying?

Consider the following; an American Bar Foundation study from the 1990s concluded that beginning law students had similar rates of mental health issues and substance abuse as the general population. By graduation, however, the proportion of law students with serious mental health and substance abuse issues had quadrupled.

Anthropologist and law professor Elizabeth Mertz studied students at various law schools, and discovered that at each school, the process of teaching students to think like lawyers encouraged them to adopt a purely analytical approach, instead of relying on their moral values. This style of reasoning distanced students from their emotions and values, and as a result, students became isolated and were less likely to ask others for support.

According to legal academic Stephen Wizner, the process of teaching law students to think like lawyers causes them to suppress the very “feelings and moral concerns that they brought with them to law school, and . . . brought them to law school.”

Wizner argues that students should learn not only how the law promotes political purposes, but also how to evaluate whether those purposes are “democratic, fair, and just.”

To be clear, substance abuse and depression are serious diseases, and I am not implying that if you suffer from those diseases that it is because you have not sufficiently examined the relationship between law and morality. If you are in this situation, you need to take care of yourself and get the help that you deserve to live a

Dear Class of 2019: Consider the Clock HLS must remember the past, remain engaged with the present, and work to change the future.

By Pete Davis ’18 Dear Harvard Law School Class of 2019, Welcome! I want to take my inches here to write to you a bit about Time.

Time is frightening, because we do not have a lot of it. I probably have even less than you, because I drink too much Diet Coke, which I am told is melting my bones. None of us — even those who can live without the delicious taste of a freshly popped can of calorie-free Coca-Cola — has all the time in the world. Our lives therefore are dramatic and exciting. We get to experience the invigorating suspense of making hard choices about what we want to labor for during our brief and precious time here on this Earth.

When we stop and think about Time, we are reminded that we have to, at some point, not keep our options open. We are reminded that we have to, at some point, not prepare for the next thing. Time invites us to join the counterculture of commitment: to abdicate our throne of open options to instead work day in and day out at some project, be it a cause or a creation, a child or a community, for a sustained period of Time.

This invitation is worth considering because if we do not commit to something, if we do not find our vocation, if we do not listen for our calling, if do not choose a task to work at with our heads and hearts and hands during our time here, then we risk dying in the hallway of open doors, having never walked through one because we feared committing to something imperfect for us.

But nothing worth committing to is perfect for us. And if we wait for something perfect, we will fail to meet the many imperfect, inconvenient, unpleasant — and yet still crucial — challenges calling out to our generation. One in four of our American children grow up in poverty. Our nation’s Congress — the house of the People — has been corrupted by money. A warming globe threatens humanity’s most vulnerable. Folks in neighborhoods across this country are suffering from loneliness.

And our legal system is drastically skewed to serve a powerful few at the expense of an exposed many.

These challenges need all hands on deck. We need people — we need lawyers — who are going to devote their time to tackling them.

Unfortunately, for every 2014

Time is frightening, because we do not have a lot of it.

Harvard Law graduate who pursued work in organizations designed to, as our mission statement impels, “contribute to the advancement of justice and well-being of society,” four graduates joined organizations designed to advance the interests of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals and corporations. Even more unfortunately, only a small portion of folks who choose to work for corporate interest organizations immediately after graduation will ultimately transition to organizations designed to advance the interests of the underdogs.

Each individual’s choice of how they spend their time is their own to make. Each individual’s choice is complicated. I do not dare tell any individual what to do with their time here. But this institutional imbalance between the scope of these great challenges, and the minuscule number of Harvard lawyers who choose to use their education to tackle them, is shameful.

How did it come to this? We at Harvard Law School forgot about Time. We teach the law like it exists outside of Time. We do not discuss the history of how the law got made, the future of how the law could be different, or the present of how the law works in the real world today. In the coming years, Class of 2019, we need your help in again steeping this school in Time.

If we can do better at teaching the history of the law, we can cut the present order down to size, showing how it came to be and how that process was often less reasonable than

You Don’t Have to Do It All Just because HLS offers a buffet of extracurriculars doesn't mean it's a good idea to sign up for everything.

By Jennifer Marr ’18 Congratulations 1Ls and welcome to Harvard Law School!

As you will all soon realize, between its curriculum and extracurricular activities, HLS will be one of the most valuable resources in your life. However, with the multitude of opportunities for student involvement at HLS, there often comes a certain 1L anxiety, a notion that there are certain activities you “should” participate in by mere virtue of your attendance here, especially if other people are doing it as well.

The desire to throw yourself into every single interesting activity you come across is understandable, and we are lucky that HLS has so many attractive offerings. I am here to at least try to alleviate this anxiety with one piece of advice: eradicate the word “should” from your brain, at least for the next three years.

Instead, trust the instincts that got you here. 1L year is tough, but

being selective and intentional with the extracurricular activities you decide to do can help make it less so.

One of the most positive ways this attitude impacted my life 1L year was my decision to focus my energies on the Recording Artists Project (RAP).

In RAP, I served as a Team Leader, a student leader who guides a team of four during the duration of a project, in RAP for both semesters of my 1L year. RAP was the only SPO I participated in and the only organization that I pursued a leadership role in.

SPOs are wonderful organizations because you can work with real clients on real projects, something you can’t do in the formal curriculum. Coming into HLS, I knew that I wanted to join an SPO, and I knew that I wanted to join RAP because I wanted to learn about transactional law and I had a general interest in the entertainment industry.

However, after arriving on campus I began to doubt myself. I remember listening to my classmates talk about which organizations they wanted to

join, and walking around the student activities fair with its myriad booths, each representing a different path that I might take. I found myself feeling an urgent sense that I must partake in everything. This sense was not driven by internal motivations.

Rather, it was spurred by a perception of external pressure. I started thinking that I should not only join RAP and began to identify activities that I felt an HLS student “should” be doing or “should” be taking advantage of. “Why not?” I thought.

But there is a “why not.” If your heart and personal interests do not lie with what an organization does, that organization will only take away from the valuable time that you have and become an additional, unnecessary stressor.

I chose RAP as my primary activity because I wanted an SPO with substantive transactional work, interesting clients, and leadership opportunities. Thus, whenever I had to do work for RAP, it was never a burden, but instead an enjoyable learning experience.

Not only is a lack of selectivity and intentionality in choosing your student organizations harmful to you

HMP Members Offer Advice to New 1Ls

By Lauren Godles ’17, Victoria Hartmann ’17, Alicia Daniels ’18, and Benjamin Hecht ’18 • If you’re confused, there is a very good chance others in the class are confused too. Don’t be afraid to speak up and ask questions.

• You will get faster at reading cases,

so try not to panic.

• Not all lawyers are court lawyers. The case method of teaching law biases us toward thinking litigation (specifically, appellate litigation) is what it means to be a lawyer. In fact, many lawyers end up doing something else and there are lots of opportunities at HLS to try your hand at policy work, academic research, business

development, and alternative dispute resolution.

• Your grades matter, but probably not as much as you think they do.

• Three years feels a whole lot shorter than the four we spent in undergrad, so take advantage of the opportunities!

• Remember that everyone here is extraordinary. You will not be the

August 31, 2016 full and healthy life. But as you train to become a lawyer and throughout your career, whenever you find yourself feeling stressed or starting to disregard your values, remember that you are first and foremost a human being.

You will leave behind the legacy of how you live your life and the ways that you touched the lives of others.

Every lawyer I know studied a case that personally him or her during law school. The toughest, most popular guy in my section even admitted (after the consumption of a few beers) to literally being moved to tears over one such case. As your career progresses, these responses will become quite rare. It is necessary to harden ourselves to some extent to become professionals, but we need to also keep that spark of humanity and compassion alive within us.

There is no lawyer who is always

happy. That would be pathological.

As you progress during your legal career, give yourself the “permission to be human.” If you find yourself turning to substances during your career because of the stress of your profession, take a moment and think about what it really means to think like a lawyer.

As lawyer Anne-Marie Slaughter expressed so eloquently, “thinking like a lawyer is thinking like a human being, a human being who is tolerant, sophisticated, pragmatic, critical, and engaged. It means combining passion and principle, reason and judgment.”

Never lose that perspective.

Learn now what it takes people their entire careers to understand. At the end of your days, you can't take with you the money you earn, nor the luxuries you will acquire. But you will leave behind the legacy of how you live your life and the ways, for better or for worse, that you touched the lives of others. Always think like a lawyer; but an informed, moral lawyer, with intellect and values.

Deborah Beth Medows is a Senior Attorney in the Division of Legal Affairs at the New York State Department of Health. She can be reached at dbmedows@gmail.com.

one would expect. If we stop asking “Why do you think this law is set up this way?” and instead ask “How do you think this law wound up this way?”, we can better remember that the folks who made the present order were no better than we are.

If we can do better at teaching the future of the law, if we can discuss not just how to navigate the legal order, but also how to change it, then we will better prepare ourselves to join our ancestors in co-creating our social order. If we start remembering how much can happen in a generation’s lifetime — how many Constitutional amendments or political watersheds can come to pass in just a couple of decades — we will start valuing not just legal analysis, but also legal imagination.

And finally, if we can do better at teaching the present of the law, if we expanded our curriculum beyond case studies to include direct experience with the realities of the justice system, then we would learn not just how to think like attorneys — advocates for specific clients — but also how to think like lawyers — members and caretakers of the legal profession, tasked with serving the justice system and advancing its public interest mission. (Our only required field trip in my 1L year was to a corporate interest law firm.

If you, as a class, can advocate to have yours be to a border detention center or a union hall or a prison, your class will be better equipped to, as we are instructed by Canon 8 of the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Professional Responsibility, “participate in proposing and supporting legislation and programs to improve the [legal]

system.”)

We are too often led to believe that some looming threat, be it an invading horde or an insurgent demagogue, is what's going to be our nation's downfall. But if our country comes to an end, it will most likely come from something much less dramatic: our failure to sustain the necessary work.

If we can acknowledge Time again, if we can see ourselves as inhabiting a brief and special scene of a great tapestry, then we will be better able to make the commitments necessary to sustain the work with which we have been tasked right from the very beginning of this country: the day-inday-out, year-in-year-out, generation-in-generation-out civic work of forming a more perfect union.

Our time may be finite, but our challenges are too. And to our immense benefit, our grace is not.

And when those three meet, it is a beauty and a joy.

So do not be afraid to take a moment to consider the clock. In fact, your law school years might be the best time to ask yourself, as the poet Mary Oliver once asked, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” If you feel too timeless here and forget to answer the question, there are forces that will answer for you. Don’t let them. You have much better ideas than they do about how you should spend your time, both here at law school and in your life after.

Sincerely, Pete Davis

personally, your experience with the organization could be less enriching and will not carry as much outward weight as you want. Because I dedicated myself to RAP, I produced excellent work product, grew as a leader, and developed a close relationship with my supervising attorney.I was also able to host the Boys and Girls Club of America on campus — something I likely would not have had time for if I had overloaded my plate of activities. And when I got my summer internship, my commitment and purposefulness resonated with my interviewers.

When you choose your activities — and I do recommend getting involved with something — do so with a keen eye. You will inevitably feel a pull towards roles that you do not truly want, whether it’s when everyone in your section has seemingly joined multiple journals, or perhaps during the job-search period when someone says they want to work at X, and you begin endlessly wondering if perhaps you should also want to work at X. It’s hard for a 1L to avoid the temptation to associate with a large number of organizations or to embody what an HLS student is “supposed” to be. That is not to say that you must or ought to only do one activity or pursue leadership in only

one organization. There is nothing wrong with doing more activities if your interests naturally tend toward those activities.

best at everything, and that is a good thing. Don’t get caught in the trap of comparing yourself to others; instead, use this unique environment to learn as much as you can and to grow as a person.

• To that end, remember to be the person you want to be. Law school can be stressful and we have all made major sacrifices (personal, financial, and otherwise) to be here, but it’s also an immense privilege to be here. Take the time to look for opportunities

that allow you to develop attributes of kindness and compassion.

Pete Davis is a 2L. He is the online editor of The Record.

When I got my summer internship, my commitment and purposefulness resonated with my interviewers.

Follow the instincts that got you here. Do what you want, not what you “should.” By applying this to your approach to 1L year, you will experience a fulfilling year of opportunities and growth rather than a daunting year of obligations and perceived shortcomings. Use the resource that is HLS to your strategic advantage, because you have all earned it.

Jennifer Marr is a 2L. She is the industry relations chair of the Recording Artists Project, an SPO that aims to provide musicians with free legal counsel.

Lauren Godles is a 3L. She is the president of the Harvard Mediation Program, an SPO that trains HLS students and community members in mediation. Victoria Hartmann is a 3L. She is the vice president of HMP. Alicia Daniels is 2L. She is the advanced training and events director of HMP. Benjamin Hecht is a 2L. He is the communications director of HMP.