November 26, 1999
By PAMELA MENDELS
Student's Online Chronicle Becomes a Lesson
Itself
"Please forgive me, Father, for I have
sinned: I have slept."
Thus begins the latest entry in Alice Marie
Beard's online chronicle of the life of a first
year law school student.
Beard is a first-year at Catholic University
of America's Columbus School of Law in
Washington, and this is November, the time that
the terror of facing first semester examinations
sets in.
Like legions of first-years before her, Alice
is going through the ordeal of law boot camp, a
place where she has to grapple with concepts like
personal vs. subject matter jurisdiction. She
lives in fear of one course taught by a professor
of the old "stand and deliver" school,
in which students are expected to be prepared to
rise at any moment and present a cogent legal
argument before a classroom of people relieved
that they were not called on.
If she can survive next month's exams, she has
a chance of going on to become a lawyer. If not,
Alice Marie Beard will have accumulated many
thousands of dollars of debt to prove she can't
cut it.
Small wonder she feels guilty about sleeping
instead of memorizing contract law and that she
has turned to what she calls "venting":
writing monthly accounts of life as a
first-year.
The chronicle, which is published on Jurist, a
Web site aimed at the legal community, has
developed a following since it first appeared in
October. Among its fans are Ann L. Iijima, a
professor at William Mitchell College of Law in
St. Paul. Iijima, who visited the site after
reading about it on a law e-mail list, now uses
Alice's diary in a class aimed at getting law
students to support each other rather than
succumb to the intense competition that marks so
much of law school life.
"Seeing Alice talk about some of the very
things they are experiencing and seeing it in
print makes it easier for them to be honest with
themselves," Iijima said.
The only thing her students wonder, she adds,
is whether Alice is for real, because they find
it hard to believe that a genuine first year law
school student could have time for anything other
than drowning in study.
The answer is that Beard is, indeed, a real
first year, and that she considers her chronicle,
taken from notes she jots down on a laptop that
is her constant companion, therapeutic. "It
seems to be smarter to write and put it online
than open my front door and scream
'aaargh!,'" she said in a telephone
interview.
Beard is what administrators call a
"non-traditional" student, meaning
someone not fresh out of undergraduate school. A
49-year-old from Bethesda, Md., who likes to
describe herself as "nothin' but a mom"
for 20 years, Beard graduated from college in
Indiana years ago and worked briefly as a
reporter on weekly newspapers before settling
into the life of a suburban mother.
Last year, after deciding the children were
old enough that she could strike out on her own,
Beard, who is married to lawyer, resolved to
fulfill an old ambition and apply to law school
herself. She is attracted to public interest law,
especially areas dealing with children and
families.
Beard's musings about law school life were
discovered by Bernard J. Hibbitts, director of
Jurist, when Beard contacted him by e-mail
several months ago to tell him about a case she
thought would interest him. Hibbitts, associate
dean for communications and information
technology at the University of Pittsburgh School
of Law, where Jurist is based, then visited
Beard's home
page and, amid a lot of information on
genealogy, a personal interest of Beard's, found
a link to something with the understated title of
"Early Thoughts on Law School."
Alice had intended the essay as a letter to
distant cousins who visit her site, but Hibbitts
thought it would appeal to Jurist readers, too.
For a while, he had been toying with the idea of
publishing a first year chronicle, a kind of
turn-of-the-millennium "One L," the
book, still devoured by law students, published
by the lawyer and writer Scott Turow 22 years
ago, after his harrowing first year at Harvard
Law School.
Hibbitts, who thought it would be nice
contemporary touch to have a nontraditional
student write the column, received Alice's
permission to reprint the chronicle, gave it the
name "Taking to the Law" and began
publishing responses. Among them is the anonymous
note from "name withheld," who
identifies him/herself as a first-year studentat
Stanford:
"This sounds painfully familiar. As I
recover from a particularly harsh midterm
(foisted on us by well-meaning Civ Pro
professors), I can't even imagine how finals will
be."
Alice is the first to understand. Sometimes,
she said in the telephone interview, panic seizes
her. "I'm worried if I can pass a single
course," she said. "It's been decades
since I sat in a class."
But, she added, there have been some rewards
as well. She likes her classmates a lot,
describing them as "treasures" in her
chronicle. Even though most are a generation
younger, "they treat me as just one more
first-year student," she writes. "On my
birthday, one brought a cake for me to share with
classmates."
And then, she also has the reward of getting
warm answers to her column. Occasionally, they
include assistance.
One e-mail message sent privately to Beard,
for example, came from a law professor concerned
that the neophyte was struggling with an arcane
distinction in the law. He tried to explain the
concept. "And he said, 'If you don't
understand this, please contact me again,'"
Beard said.
Copyright
1999 The New York Times Company