1L year: what the first year of law school is actually like

First year is the most standardized year of legal education and the one people find hardest, and the two facts are related. Almost everything about it is chosen for you, including the pace.

The curriculum

The first-year courses are largely prescribed and similar across schools: contracts, torts, civil procedure, criminal law, property, constitutional law, and a legal research and writing course. The doctrinal ones are the foundation everything later is built on, and the writing course is usually the one that most resembles the actual job.

Why it is hard

• The whole grade is usually one exam. There is little or no feedback during the term, so you spend a semester not knowing whether your approach is working.
• The curve is real. Most schools grade first-year courses on a mandatory distribution, which means you are ranked against classmates who were all, like you, near the top of wherever they came from.
• The method is unfamiliar. Cases rather than textbooks, cold calls rather than lectures, and a form of reading nobody taught you before you arrived.
• The volume. The reading is heavy and continuous, and falling behind compounds faster than in undergraduate courses.

The curve deserves a moment of honesty, because it is the part that surprises people most. Half the class will be in the bottom half. That is arithmetic, not a judgment, and it happens to a room in which nearly everyone has previously been an excellent student.

What first-year grades affect

More than later grades do, because the recruiting cycle for summer positions and the selection for journals and some clinics happen before you have many others. That is why the year carries the weight it does.

It is also why the standard advice — do practice exams, early and repeatedly, rather than only reading — is nearly universal. The exam is a distinct skill from understanding the material, and the students who discover that in November do better than the ones who discover it in the exam.

What it is not

It is not three years of this. Second and third year are more self-directed, more elective, more practical, and by most accounts substantially less punishing. If you are weighing law school and someone has described 1L to you, remember you are hearing about a third of it.

Attrition figures are worth checking before you enroll anywhere. A school where a meaningful share of the first-year class does not return is telling you something about the experience that no brochure will.