Legalese

They say that learning law is like learning a completely new language. How right they are. Pretty much all I've done today besides try to go to the gym and run a few errands is read. It wasn't even that much reading but you had to parce through it a few times to finally get the meaning. And I was lucky today. I've been told there will be many times when as many times as we do the reading, we still won't get it. As my Contracts professor, a really eccentric woman who I've been told is brilliant since she clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, said, "Even if you don't understand what you're reading, just read it. The first six weeks you're at law school you'll probably have wished you had gone to medical school."

Despite taking forever to read through cases, at least I know that those years watching Law & Order and reading John Grisham books haven't been completely wasted. While those accounts may not be completely realistic, the jargon I read now doesn't sound completely foreign. The best part is when my books explain a word and things in the tv show make even more sense. I don't know whether it's cool or scary that one day I'll be writing like the reading in my books. Imagine the day when I start writing these blog in legal speak.