Northwestern 1L/2L/3L/Grads Taking Questions and Challenges Forum

[GoCats56]

Does anyone have information on 1L summer employment? I am interested in international law (particularly http://www.law.northwestern.edu/legalcl ... ternships/), but as a recent admit I don't have student access yet. Any help would be great! Were any brochures or documents given out during ASW that give more detail on employment besides the ABA numbers?

Thanks!

Don't worry about it right now. Everyone gets something for their 1L summer. It's so routine nobody bothers to track it. What you do your 1L summer, with a very, very few exceptions, will have absolutely fuck-all to do with what you do at any point subsequent to your 1L summer. If you want to do one of those externships and your grades are halfway decent, you'll probably be able to do them.

But really, don't worry about it right now. Worry about enjoying the last bit of your summer, and then worry about getting good 1st semester grades. Worrying about 1L summer right now is hysterically premature.

[PBateman1]

anyone want to share a list of 3LOL classes with minimal work and easy to grab B+/A's??

Practical Issues In Business Law

[cookiejar1]

anyone want to share a list of 3LOL classes with minimal work and easy to grab B+/A's??

Practical Issues In Business Law

Strategy of Litigation (easy even for people who only pretend to like litigation)
Business, Gov. & Public Policy (A+ goes to the best powerpoint presentation basically)
Business Strategy (w/ Kellogg) (it's a fun class and it teaches you how to BS with the best of them)
Investment Banking (w/ Kellogg) (half the class is a JP Morgan circlejerk and the other half of the class is "The Story of Our Financial Crisis and How Jamie Dimon, American HERO, Saved the Day")
Corp. Restructuring: Workouts (if Francis teaches it again although that's doubtful)
St Tran:Financial Institutions (the two Barack partners who teach this class assume that our basic competency is that of a 3rd grader)
Securitization Law (A+ goes to the best powerpoint presentation / person who can best talk about something that NO ONE understands for 30+ minutes. It's actually an easy class and I felt prepared for my presentation after watching the big short)
and Corporate Finance if you weren't a liberal arts major in college.

The Kellogg classes are on the Kellogg curve (no B+'s) but I think 40% of the class gets an A? Plus, no matter how lazy you are as a 3LOL law student you're still going to somehow outgun your typical Kellogg student.

[FloridaCoastalorbust]

Any recommendations for a 2L looking for classes that don't look like fluff on a resume (dat clerkship hunt) but where A's are very manageable?

[czpczp]

Any recommendations for a 2L looking for classes that don't look like fluff on a resume (dat clerkship hunt) but where A's are very manageable?

Bruh, get that SCOTUS clinic- how else would you express your interest in clerking for big papa Breyer?

[sneks]

Does anyone have any insight on BA with Silver v. Corporations with Presser? I've found a few tidbits in this thread, but nothing super recent. I would prefer to take BA with Litvak, based on everyone's advice, but there is another class in that time slot I'm really interested in.

[feralinfant]

Any recommendations for a 2L looking for classes that don't look like fluff on a resume (dat clerkship hunt) but where A's are very manageable?

Remedies, Employment Law. Evidence is not necessarily all that bad and these all are doctrinal/clerkship classes. Advanced legal research is an easy grade with no work as you are expressly permitted to repurpose your note.

Can anyone explain the difference between Pre-Trial Advocacy (with Mayer and Shapiro) and Trial Advocacy/ITA (with Lubet)? Is one professor/course preferred over the other? If it matters, I also plan to take Evidence; I already took Ethics.

Well pre-trial advocacy deals with pre-trial stuff and ITA deals with trial stuff. Snark aside, pre-trial is going to be things like motion practice, whereas ITA is focused on direct/cross/impeachment. I have a long post somewhere in this thread about ITA but the tl;dr is I feel I actually learned something since I'd never done mock trial, but I found the grading incredibly frustrating, unpredictable, and uncontrollable, and I know I am not the only person who felt that way. It is four credits and if an A- will kill you/your goals be wary.

[GoCats56]

Does anyone have any insight on BA with Silver v. Corporations with Presser? I've found a few tidbits in this thread, but nothing super recent. I would prefer to take BA with Litvak, based on everyone's advice, but there is another class in that time slot I'm really interested in.

Take BA with Silver. 1) Do it because BA is underrated, I think, as an essential class for everyone. Learning Agency, Partnerships, and LLCs is genuinely useful—if only for bar purposes. I would have scoffed at the idea 3 months ago, but as I study for the bar now, I'm very, very glad that I took the class. How easy your bar prep is, I think, is pretty directly proportional to the amount of black-letter law you learned in school. It's way, way easier to memorize stuff the second time around. 2) Do it because Silver is an underrated professor. You learn a lot in her class, she's really nice, and I really don't know why people seem to dislike her teaching style as much as they do. Presser is good too, but I'd take BA just for the greater breadth.

Any recommendations for a 2L looking for classes that don't look like fluff on a resume (dat clerkship hunt) but where A's are very manageable?

Second Remedies and Evidence. An additional note on Remedies: In addition to being pretty easy, and not looking fluffy on a transcript, it was one of the most useful classes I took in law school. Remedies are what your clients want, and the different remedies available for different theories of recovery really shape a lot of choices in litigation. Also, remedies is one of the few classes outside of 1st year K's where you'll learn the law/equity distinction, and how equitable remedies work. That's another underlying concept that is lurking in the background of a ton of other classes/cases. Taking remedies made it easier to understand what was going on in a lot of other classes.

[Micdiddy]

I am thoroughly confused by the advice to take Evidence as a fluffy class (I had it with Allen and know at least one of the above posters did not, so obviously it is professor dependent).
I am also thoroughly confused by the idea that Remedies (presumably with Lupo) was the most useful class someone took (though it was one of my favorite classes in law school and certainly should be taken by everyone).

Also now studying for the bar, I second how glad I am taking some of these classes (including BA, though with Litvak) because learning a lot of this for the first time would be horrible and I probably would just rather fail than put in that much work.

[feralinfant]

I am thoroughly confused by the advice to take Evidence as a fluffy class (I had it with Allen and know at least one of the above posters did not, so obviously it is professor dependent).

I mean, Ron Allen's classes seem to me to mostly be about how important Ron Allen is, so I can imagine taking an exam on evidence for a class that was about Ron Allen is why it doesnt seem fluffy.

The reason I include it,is there is really no reading necessary for say, Burns's evidence class, because you don't need to learn cases for evidence. You only need to learn a few rules (ie less than ten), and a few little twists in their application. It is entirely possible to not go to class, not do anything during the semester, and learn evidence in a day or two. The law is more or less settled, there's not a lot of difficult grey to sort through. If you only learned 403, 404, 608, 609, and 610 and hearsay you can probably get a decent grade in most evidence classes.

Compared to con crim pro, or fed jur, which have lots of cases, some of which have lots of opinions, and lots of incoherency, evidence is definitely one of the lightest workloads of all the black letter clerkship classes.

[lemons]

anyone want to share a list of 3LOL classes with minimal work and easy to grab B+/A's??

Anything taught by Lindgren

i got an A+ in a class with him last semester and i didn't have to do much work. nice to know this is a theme with all his classes!

Strategy of Litigation (easy even for people who only pretend to like litigation)
Business, Gov. & Public Policy (A+ goes to the best powerpoint presentation basically)
Business Strategy (w/ Kellogg) (it's a fun class and it teaches you how to BS with the best of them)
Investment Banking (w/ Kellogg) (half the class is a JP Morgan circlejerk and the other half of the class is "The Story of Our Financial Crisis and How Jamie Dimon, American HERO, Saved the Day")
Corp. Restructuring: Workouts (if Francis teaches it again although that's doubtful)
St Tran:Financial Institutions (the two Barack partners who teach this class assume that our basic competency is that of a 3rd grader)
Securitization Law (A+ goes to the best powerpoint presentation / person who can best talk about something that NO ONE understands for 30+ minutes. It's actually an easy class and I felt prepared for my presentation after watching the big short)
and Corporate Finance if you weren't a liberal arts major in college.

The Kellogg classes are on the Kellogg curve (no B+'s) but I think 40% of the class gets an A? Plus, no matter how lazy you are as a 3LOL law student you're still going to somehow outgun your typical Kellogg student.

nice! thanks for the list!

[GoCats56]

I am thoroughly confused by the advice to take Evidence as a fluffy class (I had it with Allen and know at least one of the above posters did not, so obviously it is professor dependent).

I mean, Ron Allen's classes seem to me to mostly be about how important Ron Allen is, so I can imagine taking an exam on evidence for a class that was about Ron Allen is why it doesnt seem fluffy.

The reason I include it,is there is really no reading necessary for say, Burns's evidence class, because you don't need to learn cases for evidence. You only need to learn a few rules (ie less than ten), and a few little twists in their application. It is entirely possible to not go to class, not do anything during the semester, and learn evidence in a day or two. The law is more or less settled, there's not a lot of difficult grey to sort through. If you only learned 403, 404, 608, 609, and 610 and hearsay you can probably get a decent grade in most evidence classes.

Compared to con crim pro, or fed jur, which have lots of cases, some of which have lots of opinions, and lots of incoherency, evidence is definitely one of the lightest workloads of all the black letter clerkship classes.

This is right. It's not that evidence is a fluff class per se, it's just arguably the class with the highest ratio of transcript credibility to work required for a decent grade. I took it with Tuerkheimer--her test is super, super straightforward and fair relative to what she teaches. Also, I think it's a plus for an evidence prof that she's actually tried cases.

[KunAgnis]

Hope I'm not derailing the thread of conversation here, but I was wondering if anyone could tell me when the class registration process will begin?

[Mullens]

Hope I'm not derailing the thread of conversation here, but I was wondering if anyone could tell me when the class registration process will begin?

August 5th.

[PallasAthena]

.

[20171lhopeful]

OL here hoping to apply to NU this fall. I'm interested in international human rights. So here are my questions for current NU students who were interested in the same field:

]Were you considering other schools like NYU in the admission process? If so, what made you choose NU?
Did you apply ED with the 150k guarantee scholarship?
Given that it's in Chicago, do you feel like it has strong ties in NYC and DC?
I've heard that NU appreciates work experience. I'll be 6 years post UG by the time I enroll in law school, and have had 3 different jobs (corp, ngo, and international). How can I play that up in my app?

Thanks in advance for answering!

[personofinterest]

Re: work experience, it seems like it is more common here, so it can be easier to relate w classmates who are a little bit older. With 6 years out, you'd still be on the old side.

Re: your app, unfortunately, no one cares what you did. You are a gpa/LSAT in the eyes of the admissions office.

[KunAgnis]

Has anyone interviewed with Drinker Biddle & Reath? The interviewers kept talking and asked me questions for only like half the time. Can't tell if this means they didn't have any interest in me

[Kenga]

To any current/former students: What's the credited response on buying books? I'm assuming getting them from the school bookstore is the most expensive option. Should you purchase them on Amazon instead? Or are there PDFs easily available online?

[mickey_mouse]

To any current/former students: What's the credited response on buying books? I'm assuming getting them from the school bookstore is the most expensive option. Should you purchase them on Amazon instead? Or are there PDFs easily available online?

I suppose you could find cheap (or torrented and free) PDFs of casebooks online, but most people here will probably tell you it's worth having a hard copy (1) to write up/ highlight and (2) it's easier on the eyes. I found it cheaper to buy on Amazon and then resell at the end of the semester, but renting on Amazon or Chegg was generally only a few dollars more depending on the class. Also, if money is really an issue, you can get away with getting an older version, you're just going to be bugging friends to try to match up your pages with the assigned reading.

[magikarp]

Anyone have experience with / an opinion on the Civil Rights Litigation clinic?

[crumb cake]

Is legal ethics curved?

[crumb cake]

Player will probably rewrite the course as she goes and max out the B- and B distribution.

[cookiejar1]

To any current/former students: What's the credited response on buying books? I'm assuming getting them from the school bookstore is the most expensive option. Should you purchase them on Amazon instead? Or are there PDFs easily available online?

I suppose you could find cheap (or torrented and free) PDFs of casebooks online, but most people here will probably tell you it's worth having a hard copy (1) to write up/ highlight and (2) it's easier on the eyes. I found it cheaper to buy on Amazon and then resell at the end of the semester, but renting on Amazon or Chegg was generally only a few dollars more depending on the class. Also, if money is really an issue, you can get away with getting an older version, you're just going to be bugging friends to try to match up your pages with the assigned reading.

Interlibrary loan.

[Micdiddy]

Is legal ethics curved?

No.