A law student's work load

As you've probably know by now, law students have pretty hectic work loads. During fresher's week one of the first things we were told was that law degrees require the most reading and that whilst most first years will be having an introductory year, where the work load isn't so tough, law students have a tough work load for the whole of their three years at university. 

They say that if you're doing the work properly, the degree is meant to occupy 35 hours of each week. I, however, have found that I seem to spend pretty much all of my time thinking about work, unless I'm out doing the weekly shop. One of my friends, who is also very dedicated to doing well is also finding that this is the case. This is admittedly in part because I'm genuinely not interested in going out clubbing, so I just use this as an excuse. You also could say that I do set aside to do an Arabic class and the homework for that, so it's not that bad. But even if I dedicate all the free time I have to doing the reading, I tend to find that I don't get it all done. Another friend agreed with me when I said that I've either read the majority of the cases and barely pages in the relevant chapter of the text book or a lot of the text book and barely any cases. So as you can see, the first term of university is not the easiest for a law student.

Our academic advisor told us at the beginning that we would almost certainly find that we would struggle with the work load at the beginning and that we should therefore go and see her, when we found that this was the case. So naturally, I went to go and see her when I'd struggled with getting all the reading done in the first few weeks and she said that there was no particular way out of the problem because a law student has to struggle in order to find a way of dealing with all the reading.

Since having this appointment with her, I've stopped reading so many judgements of cases and I tend to use a West Law/Lexis analysis in order to learn the majority of cases. I've also stopped making as many notes on what I read because this takes up a huge amount of time and you often won't refer back to what you've written. I tend to just make notes if the text I'm reading is so dense that the only way of taking it in is to make notes on it. Nevertheless, I am considering making more notes because I don't feel like I remember so much of what we covered in the past few weeks. 

I'm not entirely sure if this is necessary because there were other reasons that could explain why I can't remember so much information from the last few weeks. I had a test and I had some essays and case notes to write, so that meant that there was less time to do the necessary reading.

If you're reading this as a prospective law student, then I hope you still remain a prospective law student. Although law is a hard degree, I still love it and I still think it's worth all the time you have to give up for it. I just want you to be aware of the work load you will face. I know a lot of people, who've either had trouble settling in or want to see their boyfriend, and therefore go and see their boyfriend/family/etc. each weekend but this really is not advisable because they often find that they don't get a lot of work done this way and therefore get behind by doing this. So my objective of writing this post is to make you aware of the commitment necessary for a law degree.