1L Year: Done

What a ride.

There is no other coming of age ritual quite like the feeling one gets when they say that a chapter is over in life. None is more enveloping as the 1L year. There is no other question about the things you can accomplish when I think of the yeah I have had.

All the late nights, studying, practice tests and reading have lead to an academic life that is mid-range. The drinking, making new friends and being in a new city has given me a life experience that I wouldn’t trade for the world.

Thomas Edison may have put my law school experience best. He said, “Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.” I started with real planning and perceived intelligence but realized that sometimes it is the head games of what others believe you seem to be doing that is just as successful. Yet, some of those hours in the library that people thought I was studying was merely me writing for this blawg. That may have made them work harder, in turn decreasing my grade.

But it’s over. At least for now.

Sugar Ray Leonard once said, “Although it was a great accomplishment to win a gold medal, as soon as they put it on you, that’s it; your career is over.” My career isn’t over, but my blawg is no longer in the realm of the 1L category. I am now a rising 2L with his own challenges and beliefs that will be chronicled to the best of my ability.

While, I am not necessarily a supporter of our current President, Barack Obama, I can say with no shadow of a doubt that he understood the same things that I am going through now as a true crossroads in understanding of law and society. In his book, Dreams From My Father; A Story of Race and Inheritance, he eloquently wrote this; “The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power–and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.
But that’s not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.”

I don’t know if I can handle that at times. This societal memory. This bigger than I sense of accomplishment with a larger than life topic. Law is bigger than any of its pundits and teachers. It is us. It is in the very fabric of our being. And now, I, Aaron Hommell, am stuck within its varied conversations. Its endless wins and losses, coupled with shame and glory. Blind or not, justice is served.

Today a 2L, things are very much the same.

~YJ_SL