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Some people have urged me to start blogging (again) in preparation for going to law school and I'm starting to think that it might be worth it. I'm definitely a failed blogger - I did it for a bit in college but I didn't have the energy or the commitment to write regularly enough, or about interersting things, and I tried doing it a number of times without a lot of success. 

This time I'm going to do it differently - not do posts about my life or about what happened in Con Law class this morning or why I stayed up until 4 AM doing the reading (God I hope that doesn't happen). Instead I'll just pick an incident or two and note it. Maybe I'll draw conclusions, maybe I won't, but it's more fun to pick out the unusual, provocative, or fun moments rather than do this as a diary.

We'll see how this goes - and if I continue this past the first month of school. I hope so. 

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Brief biography seems in order, right?

I grew up in Michigan, in the suburbs of Detroit, the youngest of three children. My sister is 12 years older than me and lives in Washington DC;  my brother is six years older than me, and has autism - he lives in a group home near my parents' house. My parents immigrated in the early 70s and are both doctors. I went to Columbia as an undergrad and studied English and creative writing. After I graduated, I went to go work at Random House as an editorial assistant. I loved the people and the free books, but I didn't love the dreariness of the work or the sinking feeling that there was no way to get ahead and no sense of a strong future in publishing.

So I decided to go back to school. I thought I wanted to leave New York, and I had thought strongly about going back to get my doctorate in English literature, focusing on twentieth-century American and Latin American literature. But I also wasn't sure about getting a Ph.D. with the job market being ridiculous tough and stressful, and I had thought about pursuing law after a class in college on plagiarism and copyright law in relation to post-colonial literature. I couldn't decide what I wanted to do.

So I applied to both law and graduate schools. At the same time. It was pretty dumb.

After the dust settled I ended up getting into some doctoral programs and a couple of good law schools. and I eventually decided to go to law school at the University of Michigan. It's a great program and I'm still kind of shocked that I got in, but it is definitely weird being back where I grew up (although I don't know Ann Arbor, or A2, that well). Leaving New York was harder than I thought it would be, but now that I'm back in the Midwest I'm weirdly eager to start school, to see what's going to happen, and to find out if I can handle it. I hope so. 

A piece of good luck is that a friend from college just finished her first year at UM Law, and she's been helpful so far in helping me figure out what's going on. 

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Classes this term are Intro to Constitutional Law, Torts, Property, and Legal Practice I & Legal Practice Skills. The last two are sort of combined and are about the practice of the law (duh) - writing, etc. Con Law and Property are pretty self-explanatory; Torts has to do with civil matters that don't arise from contractual duties - assault, battery, defamation. All the good stuff, right?

I'm living alone off-campus from the Law Quad, which is on-campus and has a dorm-like environment. It's a bit of a hike to classes, but that's ok - I'll have a car and a bike, etc. 

That should be it for now. More TK.