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				Course Load for law school
				Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2012 12:47 am
				by Kaizug
				I was wondering what the course load was like?  How many hours per day are you physically in class and how many hours a day are you studying outside of class?
Thanks
			 
			
					
				Re: Course Load for law school
				Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2012 5:28 pm
				by seancris
				Reasonable question, not sure why no one has answered.
			 
			
					
				Re: Course Load for law school
				Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2012 5:57 pm
				by 20130312
				seancris wrote:Reasonable question, not sure why no one has answered.
Probs because this question has been answered dozens of times. Search function ftw.
 
			 
			
					
				Re: Course Load for law school
				Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2012 6:15 pm
				by reformed calvinist
				Kaizug wrote:I was wondering what the course load was like?  How many hours per day are you physically in class and how many hours a day are you studying outside of class?
Thanks
Depends on the school. My so's law school has 3 substantive classes per semester plus legal writing. So she had 1 semester of each doctrinal class (Contracts, et al). My school has 4 per semester (but Contracts and Civ Pro are divided into parts I and II) plus legal writing. Personally, I would have preferred more material in one fewer class to less material and one more class, but either way we both took 15 credit hours per semester. 
I have class every weekday. Never more than three doctrinal classes in the same day, they each meet 3 times a week, legal writing once a week. Some days I have as few as ~2 hours of class, some days it's as high as almost 4 hour hours. I try to read the next class's assignment after the previous class (i.e. Tuesday's Contracts immediately after Monday's class) while the subject is fresh. Unless the assignment is particularly byzantine, I budget about an hour for 20 pages. Legal writing, is like any other type of writing--it becomes a real thorn in your side as a deadline approaches and sucks up an inordinate amount of your time. Overall it's manageable, just try not to get behind. 
The best mental health tip I can give is don't work right up until your normal bedtime--it just makes you feel overworked and miserable. Even if you only have 10 pages of reading that night, if you do it from 11:30-midnight because you procrastinated, and then go to sleep at midnight, it feels bad. I always try to finish my work by 11 at the latest and just mellow out before I go to sleep.