Read Law #3: An aside on asides
A legal education is more than just reading textbooks. Part of a legal education is how to think like a lawyer—we’ve practiced some of that already. Part of a legal education that we haven’t really practiced too much yet is writing like a lawyer.
We’ve done a little bit of legal writing in previous issues when talking about particular rulings (or are they called “cases”? What’s the difference between a ruling and a case? A case has a ruling, which I guess implies the difference.) However, those case briefs were just my synopsis of the case as presented in our text.
As it turns out, case briefs are a whole thing and have a particular structure — or at least we should create a simple standard and consistent structure for them.
This format we'll use is as follows:
I’ve had the above start of entry stagnating for months, and the winding course of that story is about to complete the oxbow lake and rejoin the main channel.
Read Law started as a formalization of what was already in progress—namely my legal education. It remained on the envisioned track for about as long as it was expected to—one entry. But, that initial entry and its sole sibling (which already felt formulaic and uninspiring to work on) provided the idea for me to ruminate on. Much like how in his own tale, Emerson inflated the remoteness of Walden pond for the sake of the larger narrative of Walden, I hope that by inflating the importance of a thing, I might enhance my greater narrative.
I realized after the first issue that my writing skills were not as well equipped for this project as I had originally thought. The second issue solidified my hunch, and was a struggle to complete. I sought to rectify this by spending one, maybe two at the most, issues working through a “how to write like a lawyer” book. I hypothesized that while my email writing skills were appropriate for Read Law, my colloquial legal writing skills were not. I felt that I could write about law academically, but not in an emotive way.
The task of working through a “how to write like a lawyer” type book proved successful. I was unsuccessful in writing Read Law #3 however. Instead, I decided to start working on two Master’s degrees simultaneously.
That’s quite the whiplash inducing moment, so let me explain. Around the time that I started Read Law, I was looking forward to a month of relaxation and catching up on household chores before starting a new role at a new employer. By the time Read Law #3 was needed and I was on my introspective journey of self-actualization on how to write like a legal reporter and was holding the firehouse of “new job information”. I realized that a Master’s in Education in Instructional Design would be a boon to my then-current role, and would be a fantastic credential in the roles I saw in my professional career. I applied for an accelerated, online only program at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) and got in! I’m reticent to share my statement of purpose for that program, but I guess I will here.
Shortly after I was accepted to that program, I left the position I had just begun less than 60 days earlier for personal reasons. With my newfound freedom from employment obligations, I then decided to simultaneously work on a second degree — an MBA with a concentration in Accounting. After a little bit of back-and-forth with BGSU and an additional application to the MBA program, I matriculated in both programs.
I am now three months into this eighteen month long journey, and I now realize that working at the intersection of learning methodology, technology, and language is exactly where I’ve always wanted to be.
I suspect that Read Law will slowly become more of a general “learning in public” forum and less of an autodidact legal education forum, but given my proclivity for legal topics, Read Law will likely always have a legal bent to it.
I’m excited to have you all learning along with me, and I’m looking forward to writing about a somewhat wider array of topics as our meandering journey progresses.