Opening Day
posted by Neil Richards
Today is the first day of classes at many law schools around the country (including mine). I always get a real sense of excitement with the start of a new law school year – it’s nice to see students (and colleagues) that I have not seen all summer, and each year, as in professional sports, hope springs eternal for the home team. And I always get a thrill the first time I start speaking in a new course – the beginning of a new collaborative adventure with a new group of students, many of whom I’ve not met yet but will get to know well. It’s a wonderful sense of the new and the familiar which reminds me how much I enjoy my job.
By my count, this is my eighth first day of the law school year (counting my time as a law student, faculty fellow and now full-time law teacher). But if the first day of classes is familar to me today in part because of the routine, my very first first day of law school in 1994 had excitement mixed with lots of terror – a nerve-jangling combination of fear of the unknown, fear of failure, and fear of making a fool of myself. I remember that I had to drop some form off at the law school the afternoon before the first day of classes, and walked around an essentially empty law school wondering what would happen over the next three years. I had no idea then what my law school career would bring, or that it would be a little longer than the three years I’d signed up for. But it does make me think, as someone on the other side now, that there are thousands of starting first-year law students out there now with the same sense of trepidation and excitement, about to embark on three months they will remember vividly for the rest of their lives. It’s something that’s easy for those of us who have been doing this for a number of years to forget, even though we were all once terrified first years on our first day, hoping that someone else would be the one to get called on by the scary professor.
August 27, 2007 at 1:46 am
Posted in: Law School
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