Thanks for sharing this with us, Kimber. I really admire the honesty of this paper.

And I do understand your ambivalence with the class structure, and shared it at the very beginning. Despite my other misgivings about the way 1L year is structured, what I did appreciate from my other classes was having a very clear idea of what the topic, page, and sentence under discussion was at any given moment. The macro structure of the class and readings, coupled with the free-flowing exchange of ideas promoted by the Wiki, just felt too ripe for opportunities of self-exposure. After a semester in the competitive, anxiety-inducing, and distrustful intellectual space created by 1L (not to mention having your thought processes probed, dissected, and ridiculed at any given moment via Socratic method), by January, I had learned to avoid self-exposure like the plague.

I wrestle with whether or not I think the way this year was structured, and the way many of us went through it, was worthwhile or useful to us. I find, like yourself, that this summer has so far been so great for me in that I am finally reconnecting with all the issues I cared about coming into law school, and sort of put on the backburner as I tried to navigate the trenches of 1L year. I’m also pleasantly surprised and happy, to realize how much I learned this year, and that I am able to put a lot of it into practice in the area of human rights. I also think law school, and this class, has changed my perspective on how much social good can be facilitated through “law”, and, thus, how much I can do as an individual. While before starting law school, I was frustrated and angry about how little I thought I could be done, and in law school I became frustrated and angry because I felt what I was studying was somewhat divorced from the bigger picture, I’m actually finding joy this summer in conducting legal research for a policy report I know will be widely disseminated or even, if you can believe it, blue-booking.

Hopefully, if nothing else, this year was useful in challenging us to remember and devote ourselves to our overriding goals and what we thought we could get out of and achieve through this profession, even as we are mired in the mundane, the trivial, and the most minute of details, or else caught up in power structures and social relationships that we find to be problematic (which, I suppose, is what we will be doing for the rest of our careers). I do still wonder if there could have been a less painful and alienating way for me to have come to this conclusion. I am also aware that many of my peers have not, and will not, come to the same conclusion because 1L year seemed very much aimed at straitjacketing us into a very specific role within this profession. I, for one, am thankful for this class because, whereas before, I think I was resigned to accepting law school and the legal profession as it was presented to us this year, Eben and this class have really inspired me to think creatively about how both can be improved, to recognize that our placid acceptance of someone else’s idea of what a legal education or profession should be is a waste of all our talents. We may have gotten here because we’re all reasonably good at “bullshit”, but I’d also like to believe that we also got here because we are capable of doing more than cowing to the status quo.

-- RumbidzaiMaweni