Dealing with Law School Stress

9e5f2e74ad783851eeb0312f24f2c7d5It’s a gray, rainy fall-like Friday. The fall is a wonderful season, especially in Wisconsin. But the fall, for law students, brings with it some added stressors: negotiating the fall interview season for 2Ls, keeping up with the increased workload in classes, squeezing in pro bono hours, writing appellate briefs or memos, all while trying to still have a life outside of law school. These stressors can feel overwhelming, especially to the 1Ls who are, as of yet, unfamiliar with the full rhythm of law school.

Some of these stressors are unavoidable. But others can we manage. Or at least we can adjust our expectations so that our responses to those stressors are healthier. See here  for law school’s common stressors and how to manage them.

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A Global Survey on the Study of International Law

In the United States, public international law is not an important part of legal education. By my count, only eight schools require their students to complete a course on the subject: Florida International, Harvard, Hofstra, UC-Irvine, Michigan, Nebraska, Washington, and Washington & Lee. Everywhere else, international law is purely elective. Insofar as relatively few students tend to choose this elective, we have a legal profession made up of individuals who lack formal training on topics like treaty interpretation, human rights law, and international organizations.

Is this common in other countries or another example of American exceptionalism? To answer that question, I conducted a global survey of the study of international law. The results, which are available in the form of an interactive world map at PILMap.org, show the frequency with which law schools and governments around the world require individuals to study public international law en route to obtaining a law degree. By clicking on individual states, you can look at summary statistics and details about the curricula of specific law schools.

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Learning the “Old-Fashioned Way”: Study Says Taking Notes by Hand Better for Recall

note takingThese days, it’s hard to find a law student who doesn’t come to class with a laptop or tablet of some type. Even if the student avoids the temptation to access the Internet during class and simply uses his laptop to take notes, it’s likely his recall of concepts will be not as good as a student who takes her notes by hand.

According to a post in The Chronicle of Higher Education, researchers have found that taking class notes by hand helps students better recall concepts in the lecture. The researchers asked students to take notes using “their normal classroom note-taking strategy.” Some used laptops (disconnected from the Internet) and others used pen and paper and wrote longhand. After 30 minutes, students were tested on the lecture. Researchers discovered that while the laptop note-takers took more than twice the amount of notes as the longhand note-takers, the laptop note-takers “scored significantly lower in the conceptual part of the test.” Both groups scored the same on factual recall.

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