Fairly Typical Law School Schedule

Before you go to law school, you hear lots of horror stories about how hard it is and how you don’t get to have a life outside because you basically live at law school. From what I have been able to ascertain, this is unequivocally not true, wherever you go for law school. What I wanted before I came to law school was an actual idea of a schedule not exaggerated by an educator who intends for law students to work a certain amount or a 3rd or 4th or 5th hand account of a disgruntled student. So I am going to try to describe my schedule objectively. I have five classes: Civil Procedure, Torts, Lawyering Process, Contracts, and Criminal Law. Each class assigns between 10-25 pages of reading per class period which you cannot blow off. So here is my week. I commute about 30 miles to my law school, so that takes up a lot of time.

Monday: (1)Wake up 6:45. (2)Meet carpool 7:00. (3)Drive to school. (4)Arrive 8:00. (5)Do Civ Pro Reading. (6)Civ Pro starts 8:45. (7)Civ Pro ends 10:00. (8)Read for Torts/Study/meet with groups (there is a lot of group work in law school) 10:00-1:15. (9) Torts 1:15-2:30. (10)Lawyering Process (LP) 2:45-3:45. (11)Drive back 4:00. (12)Get home 5:00. (13) Eat Dinner/watch tv 5:00-7:00. (14) Study/watch tv/hang out with significant other (Matt) 7:00-9:30. (15)Go to bed 9:30ish.

Tuesday: Repeat steps 1-7 above. (A)Criminal law 10:30-12:00. (B)Read for Contracts/sometimes lunch 12:00-1:00. (C) Contracts 1:15-2:30. (D) Drive home 3:00. (E) Get home 4:00. (F) Ride bike/be lazy 4:00-5:00. Repeat steps 13-15 above.

Wednesday: Yay Sleep in until 8:00. Study/do dishes or laundry/bike ride 8:00-12:00. Drive to school 12:00. Arrive 1:00. Torts 1:15-2:30. LP 2:45-3:45. Repeat steps 11-15.

Thursday: Repeat Tuesday.

Friday: No classes. Sleep. Bike Ride. Clean apartment. Go grocery shopping. Work on outlines and writing assignments.

Saturday/Sunday: Bike Ride!!! Movie!! Fun! Study on weekends if there is a project or test. This has happened about five weekends throughout the semester.

Pretty sweet, no Friday classes, I never even had that in college. Some people like to do their reading assignments the night before they are due; some really wild people like to do them the weekend in advance. Either way it is about 45 minutes of reading per class. That adds up to 11 classes per week x 45 min = 495 min or 8.25 hours. (and about 14 hours actually spent in class.) If this seems like a lot, it is not terrible. If it seems like a little, take heed that it is different from college because if you haven’t done the reading class is pretty worthless because you just spend the whole class talking about the reading, and you are expected to be able to demonstrate that you have read at random when the teacher calls on you. In addition to reading, there is LP, which is a legal writing class, so there are a lot of little assignments to do. If you averaged them, they would probably be about 4 hours per week, but some weeks have no assignments, and weeks like this one had a 26 hour assignment. So in that respect, it is a lot like college. Sometimes you are so busy and tired it really sucks, but mostly, it's just life.

Hope this helps anyone who is curious.