It’s just like a movie.

There are characters you meet at the start and may never see again, and there are recurring characters whose stories you will follow. The plot may thicken, and at the heart of it all, is a conflict.

1L—the first year of a Legal Process-oriented law school like Harvard Law School (HLS)—has the notorious reputation of deconstruction, of filtering the sweet and sours of mundane life through an X-ray. As Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman commented in his talk for our 1L section that I hosted for our Section Committee, nothing could pass as beautiful under such an X-ray that deconstructs everything we knew before we started 1L.

And yet, I now agree with my Contracts Professor Gerald Frug (who was President Obama’s Local Government Law professor in his student days at HLS) that the case method makes the learning process resemble watching a movie. 

As a creative writer at heart who admittedly had a dangerous tendency to favour adding diverse palatable flavours to my intellectual pursuits instead of deconstructing fact patterns into precise legal analysis, I was initially somewhat disillusioned towards the start of my 1L year. I started telling close friends and family that law school was stifling my creativity. It would be so much more interesting if I could find a way to read cases as stories in a delicious work of literature or film, I thought to myself. And yet, days and weeks elapsed while I buried myself in all the readings, legal research, and writing. There was little time to think outside of the structure. 

Whilst there were certainly always elements in class that I found especially compelling and saw as justifying why I came to law school in the first place, I did not get to synthesise everything in a way that I found most stimulating until close to the reading and exams period.

Here, I must mention stress. Law school is perhaps one of the most stressful academic environments, and Harvard is no exception. Although HLS has become much more collaborative over the decades (for which I am truly grateful), stress remains. As a professor remarked (or rather, exaggerated in my view) at orientation, HLS students are “at the pinnacle” and “are winners”; consequently, it is understandable that we are all, even though to varying extent, gunners and risk-averse perfectionists at heart. When my non-HLS school friends come visit me, they frequently remark at the stress level they could feel even despite its invisibility and intangibility. 

The reading and finals period last for about three weeks. With no structured classes and given the stakes of 1L exams, it is no surprise that stress level is even higher than usual. For me personally, I felt quite stressed during the week leading up to reading week, experiencing subsequent meals for which I had a complete loss of appetite. However, I fortunately got rid of this unproductive feeling in a large part right before reading week, and tried to enjoy the process of synthesising information from various parts of the courses as much as I could. One of the ways to do so was really encouraging myself to think about the way I think—as a story-lover. I tried to understand the individuals and parties involved in the lawsuits as characters (albeit more fascinating, as they are real rather than fictional). What were their motivations? What did the players from different cases of the same segment of a course share in common in terms of their stories, and why are they different? Where did the law come in? … 

This was not a radical shift, but I did find it an effective way to fight against the deconstruction / X-ray elements of law school that I initially wanted to rebel against. After all, law school can be, and should be, fun to a degree. Ultimately, it is what you make it.