Casebook reading got you down?  Tired of briefing pretend issues for pretend clients?  Wish you’d never heard of Socrates or his dubious method?

Have I got news for you!  Now for the low, low (HA!) price of your already-paid tuition, you can learn about the law through real life experience.

I don’t mean to denigrate the value of our classroom legal education.  It is, of course, of vital importance to our growing legal knowledge and our ability to think about the law.  However, I am of the opinion that no legal education is complete without a foray into the wide world of the real-life practice of law.  For me, Marquette’s well-developed clinic and fieldwork selections were a large part of why I chose to come here.  I remember talking to Professor Hammer on the phone while making my where-to-go decision, just to check that all the clinic experiences listed on the website were real.  He assured me that, not only are they real, but that students who participate in them do real legal work for real clients.

In spite of my pre-law school enthusiasm about fieldwork, after my first two semesters, I became fearful if I left the confines of Sensenbrenner Hall, some sort of apocalypse would ensue.  At the end of my 1L year, I asked a 2L friend about the advisability of taking a clinic in my second year.  I was worried that taking on another responsibility would take away from my classroom performance and keep me from getting as much as I could from my classroom learning.  She told me that without her clinic experiences, her classroom experiences would have been less meaningful.  She couldn’t have been more right.