Editor’s Note: This article is one in a series of blog posts from first-year faculty members with their best advice to incoming law students on how to spend their summer before entering law school. To see every piece of advice in one document, click here.
Take the summer to relax and get poised for the large efforts that will arrive all too soon. Law school can be wonderful, engaging, and fun; but it’s also one of the most difficult and demanding academic endeavors anyone can experience. Some prospective students think they can “get a head start” on law school, but for most folks, it’s even more important to arrive fresh and ready to work.
Your professors will have plenty of materials ready for you on arrival, and if you could choose between one hour of self-directed legal study before law school versus one hour of professor-assigned work during law school, the latter is going to be much more helpful. To put things simply: play at home over the summer, so you’re ready to work hard at school when it comes.
“Some prospective students think they can “get a head start” on law school, but for most folks, it’s even more important to arrive fresh and ready to work.”
Second, if someone really does want something to do, I’d recommend starting to read a little bit about law, especially about its historical context. What to read? Where to begin? I’d start with your existing interests. Maybe you like immigration issues, or racial equality, or criminal justice, or global warming, or international trade. Maybe you’d like to know more about the eighteenth-century Constitutional Framers, or the 1960s civil rights movement, or global feminism, or the United Nations. Or maybe you’re curious about the Supreme Court and some of its most famous justices or cases. There are far more books on any of these topics than any law student should read — which is another way to say that there’s no one book or set of books that’s authoritative or comprehensive.
Start anywhere you like, but know that no start will definitely be The Final Truth. A very different, more eclectic approach is to read newspapers or magazines, find a topic you like, and follow up from there.
