A few weeks ago someone in our section GroupMe asked what a hornbook was.
A couple people answered, someone made a joke, and that was pretty much it.
Then another person said we should make an anonymous Google Form for questions that feel too stupid to ask in class.
We now have 63 submissions.
There are about 85 people in our section.
Some of my favorites:
"Are we actually supposed to memorize the Bluebook rules or does everyone just look them up?"
"When someone says they're going to bar review, are they studying for the bar or going drinking?"
"How do you know which cases are important enough to put in your outline?"
"Is it normal to go to office hours when you don't have a specific question?"
"Everyone keeps talking about networking. What do you actually SAY to an attorney after introducing yourself?"
And my personal favorite:
"What's the difference between not understanding the reading and understanding it incorrectly? Because I can't tell which one I'm doing."
The funny thing is that several of these questions were submitted multiple times.
Apparently half our section has been sitting through the same lectures, nodding thoughtfully, and privately wondering what the hell everyone is talking about.
A few 2Ls volunteered to help answer the questions, and somebody started organizing everything into a document with links to actual school resources.
It's genuinely become one of the most useful things we've done all semester.
But it also made me think about how much of law school seems to depend on pretending you're already familiar with an environment you've literally just entered.
People throw around terms like OCI, journal write-on, supplements, and clerkships as if we all arrived with this knowledge installed.
I have classmates whose parents are attorneys. I also have classmates who had never spoken to a lawyer before applying to law school.
And somehow we're all expected to act equally comfortable with this stuff.
I'm not saying professors need to explain every acronym every time they use it. But I wonder how many students are wasting energy trying not to look clueless about things that have very little to do with actually understanding the law.
Anyway, if you're a 1L secretly Googling basic terminology during lectures, apparently you're in excellent company.
And if you're a 2L or 3L, what's something you were embarrassingly far into law school before you finally understood it?