1L through graduation
Law school life, 1L through graduation
What law school actually asks of you: surviving 1L, briefing and IRAC, exams and the curve, law review, moot court, clinics, on-campus interviewing, clerkships, and the handoff to bar prep. Each guide explains how the activity works at most schools and what to ask your own school. Read the first-year guides before classes start, the exam guides before your first finals, and the career guides before the fall of your second year. Practices differ by school, so treat each guide as a map of what to ask, not a substitute for your own school's rules. 15 guides in 4 categories.
1L academics
Surviving 1L: What First-Year Law School Actually Looks Like
What the first year of law school actually consists of: the core courses, the Socratic method, and how the workload differs from undergraduate study.
How to Brief a Case and Use IRAC: The Basic Skills of Law School
How to brief a judicial opinion for class discussion, and how the IRAC structure (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) organizes legal analysis on exams.
Law School Exams and Grading: The Curve, Blind Grading, and Exam Format
How law school exams are typically formatted and graded, including the mandatory curve most schools use and anonymous (blind) grading.
2L & 3L
Law Review and Journals: How Write-On Competitions Work
What law review and secondary journals actually are, how the write-on competition process typically works, and what membership involves.
Moot Court vs. Mock Trial: Which One to Try Out For Based on Your Career Path
Moot court trains appellate briefs and oral argument; mock trial trains witness exams and objections. Compare time cost, tryouts and which fits appellate, litigation, prosecution or transactional goals.
Law School Clinics, Externships, and Judicial Clerkships: Real Practice Before You Graduate
How law school clinics and externships work, and how the federal judicial clerkship hiring process through OSCAR operates.
Career
OCI and the Law School 2L Legal Job Search: How On-Campus Interviewing Works
OCI (on-campus interviewing) is one piece of the law school legal job search, alongside public interest, government, and smaller-firm hiring paths.
The Transition From Law School to the Bar Exam: Building the Handoff Before You Graduate
The transition from law school to the bar exam works best when you carry doctrine, writing feedback, and administrative progress forward, instead of starting bar prep from zero.
1L subject guides
1L Civil Procedure Survival Guide: What Actually Trips Students Up
Why Civil Procedure feels abstract early in the semester, the specific traps in personal jurisdiction and pleading standards, and how to study the course for the exam it actually gives.
1L Contracts Survival Guide: Formation, Defenses, and the UCC Trap
Why Contracts rewards careful issue-spotting over broad rule knowledge, the common-law-versus-UCC distinction students miss early, and how to approach the course's fact-heavy exams.
1L Torts Survival Guide: Duty, Breach, and the Multi-Party Fact Pattern
Why Torts exams reward organized, multi-party issue-spotting over rule memorization, and how negligence's element structure becomes the course's central skill.
1L Property Survival Guide: Estates, Recording, and the Historical Vocabulary Problem
Why Property's archaic vocabulary slows students down early, and how to approach future interests, recording acts, and landlord-tenant law without losing time to terminology alone.
1L Criminal Law Survival Guide: Mens Rea, Merger, and the Model Penal Code Trap
Why matching the required mens rea to each element is Criminal Law's central skill, and why mixing common-law and Model Penal Code terminology is the course's most common avoidable error.
1L Constitutional Law Survival Guide: Levels of Scrutiny and the Threshold Questions
Why picking the correct level of scrutiny is Constitutional Law's central skill, and how to organize the course's recurring threshold questions before reaching the merits.
1L Legal Research and Writing Survival Guide: The Skill Course That Isn't Graded Like the Others
Why Legal Research and Writing is graded differently from doctrinal 1L courses, and how to treat its ongoing feedback as a direct investment in your bar-exam writing.
Plan the semester around required work first. Add journals, teams and recruiting only after you can see their actual deadlines beside your courses.
Make a degree audit you can act on
A transcript total and a graduation checklist answer different questions. Credits can accumulate while a writing requirement or required course remains unfinished. Use your school's current degree rules to create separate rows for total credits, required subjects, writing, experiential work and any other graduation conditions. Beside each row, record the course you expect to use, its term, the approval it needs and the document showing that it qualifies.
For a concrete institutional example, Georgetown's full-time J.D. page describes 85 total credits, semester enrollment of 10 to 16 credits and at least six experiential credits for students who entered in fall 2016 or later. It separately describes upperclass writing and Professional Responsibility requirements. These are Georgetown's stated requirements; they are not a graduation rule for every law school.
| Checkpoint | Student's assumed record | Planning consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Total credit count | 60 completed toward 85 | 25 credits still needed; 12 plus 13 could supply them over two terms. |
| Experiential category | Three qualifying credits completed | At least three more qualifying credits needed under this example's requirement. |
| Other requirements | Writing and required-course approvals not yet checked | Credit arithmetic alone cannot establish eligibility to graduate. |
The arithmetic assumes all completed credits count and both planned terms are approved. A 12-credit term plus a 13-credit term reaches 25; it does not prove that either term contains the required writing or experiential course. Check prerequisites, seat availability and scheduling conflicts before treating that plan as possible. Ask the registrar or academic adviser to resolve a classification question while there is still time to change registration.
Test an extracurricular commitment against your calendar
Before joining a journal or competition team, ask for its work calendar and a sample assignment. Put the editing deadline, brief deadline or tournament dates beside your own papers and exams. Estimate the work using that assignment rather than someone else's description that the activity is “manageable.” If two substantial deadlines coincide, decide in advance which optional commitment you can decline or postpone.
For recruiting, start with the documents an application actually requires. Work backward from the employer's posted deadline to leave time for a writing-sample check, a résumé review and any reference permissions. Keep interview preparation separate from coursework in your calendar so that an interview week does not silently consume the time already assigned to a paper. The useful question is which task loses time when a new obligation arrives.
Bring a concrete problem to an adviser
Instead of asking whether your schedule looks good, bring the audit with one unresolved choice highlighted: “These two classes conflict, and I believe each can satisfy the remaining category. Which approval is required, and would moving one to the spring delay graduation?” That gives the adviser something verifiable to answer. Keep the response with your plan, then update the plan when registration or career goals change.