Classes were cancelled on my first day of law school at Tulane due to the feared imminent arrival of Hurricane Andrew.  I had fled New Orleans the previous day in response to a plea from the city’s mayor, having seen the destruction that Andrew left behind in South Florida.  Since I hail from Wisconsin, land of sometimes tornadoes and many times blizzards — storms that could certainly be serious but had never required flight — initially I wasn’t sure how to respond to the mayor’s plea.  I knew the phone number of one person in New Orleans, a classmate I had met during orientation.  Her father found the closest hotel vacancy: a room in a B&B in Meridian, Mississippi.  So I shoved my Macintosh Plus desktop computer into a closet (we didn’t use laptops yet), grabbed my cat, and got in the car.  My cat, my new friend, and I watched a TV screen in a Meridian tavern as the Hurricane first strengthened, then moved farther west than the original projections had shown until it weakened and made landfall again far enough west of New Orleans to cause relatively minor damage there.  The city of New Orleans was spared (that time).

I arrived late to my first Civil Procedure class a day and a half later, after driving into the city through heavy welcome home traffic.  Civil procedure was as strange as the hurricane, with all of its foreign terminology, rules, and standards that seemed to have no place to sit in my prior learning of English and French literature, fiction writing, or environmental science.  I had made it back to New Orleans, but now I was really lost. 

My other classes were a bit better in that I could relate to some of what I was learning:  I knew that people hurt one another on purpose or by accident and needed to be held responsible; I knew a bit about crimes and contracts.  Still, Hurricane Civ Pro permeated all of these subjects.  I couldn’t flee this time.

So I studied.  I looked up the terms again and again.  I outlined and memorized.  I learned new ways to count days, tried to get my head around in rem and in personam, forum non conveniens, res judicata, laches, counterclaims and cross-claims, JMOL and JNOV.  I made it through that first semester, but without really understand the workings of the courts or of lawsuits.  I was glad to put it behind me, for winter break at least.

During my second year of law school, I was privileged to have the chance to learn about similarly complicated Environmental Law from Professor Oliver Houck.  Professor Houck was the kind of teacher who could make outwardly esoteric laws like NEPA, CERCLA, CAA, CWA, ESA, and TSCA seem rather straightforward.  In an hour and fifteen minute lecture, he could tell the story of these laws, weaving in cases and politics, economics and ecology, and provide the context that was necessary to understand the complicated details and show how they fit together.  When I studied the details outside of class, they made sense because they had a place to sit, a place that fit into my old and newly developing understanding of the world.

It wasn’t until some time later that I realized that civil procedure could be better understood this way as well.  Each of those rules and standards were part of the story of a case — motivating the characters’ behaviors, dictating what they had to do next and when, telling the consequences if they didn’t.  A “motion,” with all of its requirements for content and format, was just a way of asking the court to do something.  And that court was a human being who certainly cared about the rules, but chiefly wanted to know what it was you wanted and why you should have it.  As I started to think about civil procedure in this way, I was able to see these kinds of stories in all laws and throughout the Law, linking cases and concepts, statutes and rules in ways that both highlighted and simplified their complexity, empowering me to find my place and purpose there.