poof

I am now a 2L.

With the last click of the keyboard, I finished my first year of law school. My Contracts exam was hard, but by this stage in the exam cycle, I'm mostly just relieved to have it over. Exam season is a long and tiring haul.

But, as my friends and I were musing during the post-exam section party yesterday evening, we're sad that it's over too. We're all happy to get our lives back, to start our summer work, which for most of us is the first legal work we've ever done, to read fiction, to see friends and family, and to waste time with abandon rather than guilt. Yet the end of such an intense experience is tinged with a little melancholy. We'll go on to take more classes, and eventually the bar, but we won't be together in the same room day after day, class after class, wrestling down new, huge, and vastly complicated subjects, learning something utterly unfamiliar every day. We'll always find novel things to learn about the law, but the newness and intensity of the 1L experience is a single-ride ticket.

Yesterday at the party there were more than a few semi-sober toasts to our 1L year. "We did it," somebody would say, and there were grins and cheers all around.

I think I'm the last of the 1L bloggers that I read to finish up. Cheers. We did it.