Why?

The Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy (“BLIP”) Clinic’s first-ever Legal Hackathon. With Instagram’s $1 billion sale to Facebook, the buzz of the NYC startup ecosystem, and NYU Poly’s continued success operating in the recesses of my mind, the concept of a hackathon for lawyers was too mesmeric to turn away.

Once there, I found it strange to be enjoying myself and yet still feeling productive. (Not that sitting in the library at Vanderbilt Hall for eight hours on a Sunday can’t be equally pleasing.) Highlights included:

• A keynote address from the coiner of the term “net neutrality,” Tim Wu,
• A chat with the exceedingly tech-literate law professor Jonathan Askin,
• A coffee break with a former law-student-turned-entrepreneur and a demo of his hackathon-friendly app, Pearescope,
• A chance to meet with the insightful and incredibly approachable venture capitalist, Charlie O’Donnell, and
• A romp around my former Lawyering professor’s alma mater.

The substantive portions of the day involved exploring ways to prevent becoming “yes, but” lawyers in a “why not” world and ways to add transparency to both local government and business. Ideas included crowdsourcing the next mayor of New York City and creating a Freedom of Information Act-type system for private companies looking for funding. It was a lot of fun and inspiring to find law students and technologists with like interests and a passion for civic reform through technology.

The hackathon received a "shout out" from Twitter's General Counsel, Alexander Macgillivray. Of course, the event was sponsored by Brooklyn Law School and not NYU, but I was happy to bask in the temporary glory. Alexander Macgillivray tweeted a retraction shortly thereafter.

My two major takeaways from a Sunday that saw me waking up before 9:00 a.m.:

1. Going to law school at NYU puts on tap a legal community and resources that you really cannot fully contemplate until you actually arrive here.
2. There may yet be a place for lawyers in a technologically driven “why not” world.

For more information on the BLIP Legal Hackathon, visit Twitter or the official website.

Invitations to these events are not the only benefits of being an NYU LL.M. scholar. For one, scholars are entitled to enroll in an exclusive class called the LL.M. Honors Seminar, where distinguished law professors and scholars are invited to speak on a wide range of topics. Moreover, depending on the type of scholarship, some scholars are assigned a faculty mentor based on the scholar’s field of interest or area of practice. It is also worth noting that many of the scholarships are merit-based and thus “needs-blind.”  This is in contrast to many of the scholarships provided by other law schools, which are granted on a needs basis.

NYU Law has been generous with its full-tuition scholarships, notable among which are the Hauser Scholarship, the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Scholarship, the Hugo Grotius Scholarship, and the Hans Kelsen Scholarship.  There are also merit-based scholarships in varying amounts, such as the Dean’s Graduate Award, as well as other named scholarships funded by other sponsors. All admitted students are automatically considered for some of these scholarships (i.e., the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Scholarship and the Hugo Grotius Scholarship) based on their admissions applications. A separate application is needed, however, to be considered for the Hauser Scholarship.

NYU Law’s LL.M. program is without doubt among the best in the world. This notwithstanding, the availability of these scholarships provides all the more reason for prospective applicants to consider pursuing their post-graduate LL.M. studies at NYU Law.

So what does one turn to during these trying times?

Extracurricular activities. Frequent list-serve updates are a welcome distraction on long library nights, and every now and then, amid the 1,436 solicitations for apartment sublets on Coase’s List, there’s an invitation to one of the various student groups’ eye-opening events. Or, in the case of last week’s International Food Festival, mouth-watering.

Last Thursday, NYU Law’s International Law Society, SBA, and Asia Law Society came together to sponsor the annual event, with support from IAA, Law Women, SALDF, PORTMANTEAU, LSHR, ALA, and MELSA. That’s some serious acronym firepower. Hundreds of students (and even some admitted students) congregated in Vanderbilt Hall’s Golding Lounge to sample delicacies from around the globe. All of the event’s proceeds were donated to the World Food Programme, the world’s largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger.

I sampled Nigerian coconut candy, Iranian ghormeh sabzi, and Ethiopian alicha and shiro. I gawked at no fewer than seven different varieties of French cheese. I noshed on a German vegetarian casserole curiously named Westphalian blind hen. And I avoided gluten like the plague.

Once I was nearly food-comatose, I returned to my apartment with newfound vigor to finish re-reading that 10-page dissenting opinion. Just kidding… I made that part up. That sounded like the proper ending though, right? But ultimately, even if events like the International Food Festival (and Saturday’s LaLSA Ball, while we’re at it) haven’t directly motivated me to do more work, they have certainly been welcome distractions along the way. Extremely delicious distractions.

The first panel: Margaret L. Satterthwaite (moderator), Catharine A. MacKinnon, Robert Howse, and Ruti Teitel

For one thing, I enjoyed getting to correspond directly with some great people in the world of human rights. The speakers who attended have amazing accomplishments, and I found it refreshing to put a human face to names I had heard so much about.

Also, I liked that I had a chance to shape an event from the ground up so it’d be the unique contribution to the Law School that I envisioned. A guiding question for me was “What sort of event is going to get me out of bed on a Friday morning when the weather is terrible and I’ve been in classes all week?” (Two caveats: 1) The weather turned out fine that day—major relief. 2) The threshold for this question is higher than I’d like to admit, given that I literally live across the street from the academic buildings.) For example, it was empowering to have the freedom to add in a debate to the day’s events based on my own interest in watching academics battling it out (and I thought hopefully other students would enjoy this, too).

One thing that was tremendously helpful was having NYU Law faculty and administrators who provided guidance along every step of the way, as well as having a very dedicated, supportive group of peers who were there by my side the entire day, completely willing to do the million tedious tasks that sprang up. Together, we created an event that I feel very fortunate to have been a part of.

Over the past year two of the four major sports leagues, the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA), experienced lockouts that threatened to cancel their respective seasons (which in retrospect, as a New York Giants fan, would have been absolutely devastating). While the leagues nearly sacrificed billions and fans looked on in dismay, at least one set of stakeholders must have been quite content with the tumult—the lawyers.

Eli Manning and Coach Tom Coughlin hoist the Lombardi Trophy after winning a Super Bowl that almost never happened due to the 2011 NFL labor dispute.

Sports law is an exciting practice area that garners much interest from students because the client and underlying industry hit close to home, since most people (including law students) tend to identify with some sports team(s) or athlete(s). Most practitioners in the space are quick to point out, however, that being a sports lawyer is not quite as glamorous as it sounds. At its root, sports law is simply a composite of different, less “sexy” practice areas, including, but not limited to, contracts, intellectual property, real estate, torts, and labor law.

Fortunately, NYU has been hip with the times and affords students many opportunities to learn more about the field. In my Labor and Employment in the Entertainment Industry class, I had the opportunity to listen to Bob Batterman, an attorney with intimate knowledge about the NFL labor dispute, pierce through the muddled media coverage of the NFL lockout and explain what really happened. We received unparalleled first-hand insights into the mentalities and bargaining positions of the two sides.

NYU Law, with an eye toward modernizing legal education, has also offered a much sought-after Sports Law class this spring. The class is taught by the estimable Professor Arthur Miller. One of the highlights of my spring semester was when New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon came into class to share his experiences in the sports business. Besides getting insight into the José Reyes free agency and the Mets’ financial woes, it was somewhat cathartic to hear the owner himself sigh in disappointment over the club’s dismal performance over the past few years.

Outside the classroom there are opportunities to get involved with the Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law Society (IPELS), which held a sports law panel last school year. Plus, when you’re living in New York, there is never a dearth of events catering to your interests, including sports law.

Even though the NFL and NBA labor disputes may be over, the world of sports will need lawyers into the foreseeable future with issues ranging from publicity rights of student-athletes to financing new stadiums. I can’t imagine a better launch pad for a career in the field than NYC and NYU.

The EJCDC is a 14-credit (16 if you count the prerequisite Eighth Amendment course) commitment that is as consuming as it is fascinating, and as challenging as it is fulfilling. In a nutshell, students provide legal assistance to prisoners on Alabama’s death row by helping prepare appellate briefs for collateral litigation. Conducting client interviews, researching sociological and historical issues, drafting memos and briefs, and engaging in seminar-style discussions about the progress of our cases are all part of the deal.

Driving – for long stretches of time – is also part of the deal.

As is staying up some nights writing memos.

So how did I wind up in a situation where I was living in the Deep South and immersing myself in work that I hadn’t had much exposure to before law school?

I got lucky.

I was visiting NYU during Admitted Students Weekend back in 2009 and was fortunate enough to run into a faculty member who strongly recommended me to go to Professor Bryan Stevenson‘s speaking event. I went, not knowing who he was or what he did. I left the room convinced not only that I had to attend NYU Law and one day do this clinic, but that the experience would fundamentally change the way I looked at the world.

It turned out that Professor Stevenson was the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit organization that represents indigent defendants and prisoners who have been denied fair treatment in the legal system. While its mission early on focused on capital punishment, it has since expanded its reach to include juveniles and other indigent defendants. Prior to law school, this area of society wasn’t something I knew much about. But the conviction behind Professor Stevenson’s words (go on YouTube and look up some of his remarks if you haven’t done so already) and the moral underpinnings of EJI (that each of us is worth more than the worst acts we’ve ever committed) were as powerful as anything I’d witnessed in my life.

So yeah, all told, it wasn’t a hard decision. I happily committed a semester’s worth of credits to the clinic. I happily prepped my stomach for a diet heavy on fried food and light on anything lite. And, of course, I happily delved into all the work necessary to properly do my part in the post-conviction representation of a condemned death row inmate.

And I wish the very best for the group of students going down this year.

Using a large national database, Sander found that 5% of students at the top 10 law schools come from the bottom socioeconomic half of the population, while more than three-quarters come from the richest socioeconomic quartile and more than half of students at these schools from the top tenth of the socioeconomic status (SES) distribution. A young person whose family SES places them in the top 10% of Americans is 24 times more likely to attend a top 20 law school than a person whose family SES places them in the bottom half of the national distribution.

As seen in Sander’s article, which received no fewer than 10 articles in response, affirmative-action attempts to diversify law school student bodies have largely failed to indirectly promote socioeconomic diversity. Based on data of the racial composition of the student population at NYU, roughly one-fourth is non-white.  However, Sander’s study shows that these students raise the overall population of law students from the bottom SES quartile only from 4% to 5%.  While racial minorities are certainly over-represented in lower SES groups, low-SES minorities are largely not the ones getting into top law schools, or law school in general.

As exemplified by the recent Occupy Wall Street protests that received prominent international media attention, Sander summarizes that across society, although “racial inequality has steadily diminished, economic inequality has steadily increased.”

Despite these statistics, I cannot say my classmates have either made me feel unqualified to be here or treated me as if I were any different than they were. Most have too much class (no pun intended) to do so. At times, nonetheless, I have felt isolated, as many cannot even comprehend our vastly different upbringings. Perhaps I shall convince some of them to come home with me someday to show them from where I came and how I came to make it to where I am today.

Fortunately, every student can find community at NYU Law. I have found mine through leadership and mentoring in student organizations, joining a journal, mocking the law school lifestyle, researching for professors, opting to volunteer over spring break, becoming a Lawyering teaching assistant, and pursuing clinical work, among other avenues.  Fellow journal members on the Review of Law and Social Change are not focused on becoming the 1% following graduation, but rather have chosen to forsake that path to enter into careers serving the public; our LRAP program will ultimately forgive their loans.  NYU is known, after all, as a “private university in the public service.”

NYU additionally offers an excellent scholarship program designed to give full-tuition scholarships to socioeconomically disadvantaged students, providing mentorship and a support network throughout their careers.  As stated earlier, I did not consider myself qualified for this program, so I did not even apply. Nonetheless, NYU provides a safety net through their Dean’s Award program, which considers both merit and financial need.

Sander offers alternative admissions policies to produce significant racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity, but I will leave it to you to consider the viability of these recommendations by reading Sander’s article and the responses it has triggered.

I will leave you with a closing thought, however, that has resonated with me.  The Public Interest Law Center requires 1Ls wanting to obtain funding for a public interest summer internship to attend at least four lectures given by highly successful alumni in a variety of fields. A speaker at a lecture I attended last year emphasized that, although some of us may have came from lower-income brackets originally, now that we are at NYU Law, we are all among the privileged and must be aware of our obligation to give back to society.

Exams are not fun things.

Through studying more hours than I knew I was capable of and fighting down ever-increasing waves of panic, however, I somehow managed to survive the first semester of my 1L year… and these are the three most important lessons I gleaned from the experience.

1. Finals are not real life.

I start with the most important lesson: finals period is not an accurate reflection of reality. You will start studying, confident that you’ll keep it all together, stay ahead, and cruise to victory. You will not. There will be moments after classes have ended but before finals have begun where you will realize you haven’t eaten yet that day and probably should, or when you look around the packed library and realize that the sun went down a couple hours ago and you failed to notice because you were working on coming up with a clever mnemonic device for the prongs of the Second Restatement’s definition of ultra-hazardous activities. You will lurch through class notes and casebooks and be stupefied by the sheer quantity of material you covered over 14 short weeks. You will remember how confident you were that first day of class. You will either laugh at this memory, or you will despair. I highly encourage you to opt for the first option.

As the test date nears, relationships with friends will change. Everyone deals with finals stress differently. I had one friend who brought blankets and pillows to the library and set up a “Relaxation Corner” so we could take breaks. I had another friend who literally fell off the face of the earth and was neither seen nor heard from outside of the exam room. Be prepared to forgive and ask for forgiveness as everyone’s quirks and eccentricities become accentuated in the shared crucible of thousands of pages of cases.

For me, this lesson wasn’t fully learned until I arrived at the exam room for my first final. Here were my Sectionmates, the people I’d lived and worked with for three months. We were, to the man, exhausted. But we were laughing, cracking jokes as we filled water bottles and arranged our desks for optimal open-book efficiency. Once you realize this exercise is little more than a ludicrous game everyone has to play, the rest of exam period becomes far more palatable. That said….

2. It’s okay to panic. Just not too much.

I will not sugarcoat this even a little bit. Your entire grade depends on a single three-hour knowledge dump, and we (as law students) tend to be a competitive, Type-A bunch. At some point in your preparation for finals, there will probably be a moment when you look down at your half-finished outline and think, “This is the most important test I will take, and I’m not even slightly ready.”

Go ahead and sweat for a bit. Maybe even fight back tears. But realize that scattered across two residence halls, multiple libraries, empty classrooms, and study group rooms around campus are approximately 450 people who are thinking the exact same thing you are. Everyone’s in the same proverbial boat, and all of us are entitled to moments of anxiety-induced panic.

However, don’t panic too much. I cannot stress this enough. You’ll meet Sectionmates who seem completely unfazed by the notion of a high-stakes final, and others who turn ashen and start shaking every time you bring up a test date. You want to fall somewhere comfortably in the middle of those two extremes, where you can be both sane enough to sleep and scared enough to study. I fell far too closely to the “freak out always” side of the fence. Believe me, it’s not a place you want to spend your holiday season. But even if you DO freak out for three weeks solid, fear not! Because…

3. When it’s over, it’s over. High-five.

After our first final, some friends and I went to a local bar to “debrief” (read: beer and crepes). Without explicitly agreeing not to, none of us even breathed a word about Civil Procedure. Instead, we talked about holiday plans. A visiting boyfriend. How good the food was. Where to go Christmas shopping. We sat there in that bar for two hours, not once asking if anyone caught the Erie question in Part II, or whether Contracts was going to be harder next Tuesday. Instead, we celebrated: the exam was over. We’d survived!

Grades have yet to post (I pity the professors who must grade and curve 90 15-page exams), but preparations for next semester’s classes are already well underway. Syllabi have been sent. Casebooks, acquired. New highlighters, secured. When the results from my first semester in law school come out, I’m sure I’ll have all sorts of new opinions on exams and their worthwhileness (or uselessness). But looking back on each of the three mammoth tests and their aftermath, the quantity of information I took away was–frankly–unbelievable.

So when your first exam is done, grab five friends and find a bar. Sit. Eat. Talk. Laugh. And quietly celebrate your very real accomplishment: you survived!

1. Third Rail Coffee (240 Sullivan St., Greenwich Village)

A stone’s throw away from the NYU Law School is Third Rail Coffee. Popular among the NYU Law students, Third Rail serves a variety of coffee offerings complemented by a wide assortment of pastries. Particularly worth trying are the latte, espresso, and cortado. While the coffee is more expensive than at a chain, it’s worth the price and the wait.

2. VBar & Cafe (225 Sullivan St., Greenwich Village)

Coffee shop by day and wine and beer bar by night, VBar serves great coffee in a hip and trendy atmosphere. Wi-fi availability allows you to work and enjoy your coffee at the same time. Definitely a must-try.

3. Joe The Art of Coffee (141 Waverly Place, Greenwich Village)

A steady stream of customers makes it difficult to find a spot at Joe during its peak business hours. Coffee at Joe is consistently good, but its mocha is exceptional.

4. Grounded (28 Jane St., West Village)

Grounded serves organic coffee, tea, smoothies, and other drinks. The ambiance is fun and eclectic, with the occasional celebrity sighting. While Grounded is some distance away from NYU Law, it’s close enough to be worth the trip.

5. La Colombe Torrefaction (270 Lafayette St., SoHo)

With its loft-like atmosphere coupled with great, reasonably priced coffee, La Colombe hits the ball out of the park. The latte is a standout. Other reasons to drop by include complimentary still and sparking water and free seating. But be warned: expect to wait in line during peak hours.

6. Abraco (86 E. 7th St., East Village)

Abraco arguably serves the best cappuccinos and drip coffee in New York City. Its coffee and a nice slice of moist olive oil cake make a perfect combination.  Because of its immense popularity, you will have to queue in line to get your coffee, even during weekends.

1. I read a lot.

I was assigned more reading in my first semester than I was during four years of undergraduate study. And unlike in undergrad, I was actually required to read most of it.

2. I highlighted… a lot.

For most of my life I assumed that a highlighter was an infinite entity: I never imagined using one to its limits. But now? I don’t think I have ever been so wrong about anything. At the very least, I have done my part to keep BIC and Sharpie in business.

3. My fears were (mostly) misplaced.

The thing I feared the most coming into law school was the infamous “Socratic Method.” Reading Scott Turow’s One L over the summer had me terrified about some grizzled legal scholar making a mockery of me in front of my peers as he methodically dissected my subpar preparation. Once classes began, my anticipation grew as a few unlucky classmates were the first to be cold-called.

It finally happened when I least expected it. During the fourth week of classes, I took my assigned seat near the back just a minute before my 9:00 a.m. Contracts lecture. I was still yawning and patiently waiting for my coffee to kick in when my professor walked to his lectern at the front of the class. The first words out of his mouth were, “So, Dan, let’s talk about Evertite.” If the caffeine had been failing me, adrenaline had no trouble taking the reins. Before I’d even managed to open my casebook to the correct page, the interrogation began. Luckily, I had read the case the night before and was prepared. For the next 50 minutes I answered a barrage of questions, only being afforded a few chances to collect my thoughts when other students volunteered answers.

But before I knew it, my professor announced our 10-minute break, and I was released from further questioning. Ultimately I realized that being the target of the “Socratic Method” was not so horrible after all. Over the entire semester, I sat through 84 lectures and was subjected to just a handful of harmless “cold-calls.” Certainly not what I had imagined, although I will never forget that first time.

4. Exam period was as draining as advertised…

Over the course of the last several weeks, I easily spent twice as much time in class or studying than I did doing the things suddenly much lower on my list of priorities, like sleeping and eating meals. Down the stretch, I inevitably neglected friends and family in my life. And I admittedly have little idea about what’s been happening in the world outside of the triangle between D’Agostino Hall, Vanderbilt Law Library, and the Belgium Waffles coffee shop on 3rd Street that refilled my IV drip with caffeine every so often.

5. …but the camaraderie helped.

It was comforting to have classmates going through the same thing as the workload intensified. I appreciated being surrounded by people who were just as busy as I was, if only so I felt less horrible about spending a Friday night struggling to teach myself Civil Procedure. Having said that, I knew things were bad when I found myself silently nodding “Hello” to suddenly familiar faces around the library, despite the fact I had never seen many of them outside of the building.

6. It feels good to be done.

And that is the understatement of the year. At times it was difficult to remind myself that there was an end to the madness as I went through the motions of preparing for and taking exams. But upon finishing my last one, I did not feel the instant elation I had expected. After emerging from three hours of furious typing I was more frazzled than anything; it took me a few hours to decompress. It did not hit me that I was actually done until I woke up the next morning without a full day of craning my neck over my books ahead of me, without any assignments to stay on top off, and without any more exams looming. The moment almost made the struggle feel worth it… almost.

Many congratulations to all of my fellow first-year students for making it through the fall semester. It began with an earthquake, and there were definitely a few rough patches along the way. But as far as I know, all of us survived. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to go into hibernation for three weeks. See you next semester.