position statement...

i realize i've been doing a fair amount of mild-mannered 1L-bashing here on throckmorton. and i shouldn't. because i don't hate the 1Ls. okay, so maybe there's that girl who never wears a bra or the jackasses who wear the mesh baseball caps down in the lounge, but i can definitely name at least three 1Ls who i genuinely like. wait -- four. yeah. four. nope, five. see? i LOVE the 1Ls!

and i'm not so self-important as to pretend that i don't remember my first semester of law school. it was, in a word, the suck. i remember it taking hours to read cases about parol evidence or promissory estoppel or the UCC; absolutely detesting pennoyer v. neff and international shoe and feeling like i would never get my head around personal jurisdiction; wishing that actus reus and mens rea and causation would all go take a flying leap; sitting there like a bump on a log while conversation about duty/breach/causation/damages or (heaven help us!) proximate cause hung in the air around me.

so, as a good-faith effort, to try to make amends to the fates for having made disparaging comments about this year's crop of 1Ls, i'm now going to e-mail my mentee and see if she wants my examples and explanations books for contracts and crim law, since they're just collecting dust on my bookshelf now.