FIRST SEM FIRST YEAR LAW SCHOOL IS OVER.

With a click of a button, I officially end my first semester as a first year Law student.

Now that I have a reasonable time to unwind and retrace my initial journey in Law School, permit me to share a thing or two about the new challenges and changes brought upon by this.

I would keep on sharing to people the opportunity cost I have to bare in this decision to study Law. I even had to call off a management job because I already enrolled.  At the beginning, it was a bit awkward seeing all your batch mates land good jobs and paying their families’ bills while I was carrying expensive Law books that my parents bought with their own money. These feelings and “what ifs” are there but it has devolved into a subsidiary feeling already. The resolve to finish and pass the bar is beginning to take its shape and has become the primary source of motivation. This is all what matters for me now. Be a lawyer first before overly thinking about the future.  

I miss college. I miss the easiness of life during undergraduate years. The world of thick books, miles of reading and legal analysis are alien to most part of my life and this needs getting used to.  Most importantly, I miss dealing with people. Not that Law school is void of it; it only has added the books as part of the “people” you have to develop a relationship with.

Now into the subject matter of Law. First year of learning the fundamental substantial laws of our jurisdiction such as Constitutional Law 1, Persons and Family Relations, and Criminal Law 1 as allowed me to see things that I have not seen nor understand before. It practically gave me a preliminary understanding of why things are what they are.

Constitutional law, in a nut shell, showed me that theoretically power resides in the people. We are only delegating our unlimited sovereign capacity to our “public servants”. Since power has its great temptations, we allocate which department gets to do what power and build a system that checks the others. Persons and Family Relations taught me that the law touches almost all aspects of human relationships even to the most private. Criminal Law taught me that it is legally alright to kill as long as three elements of self-defense are present. Sadly so, we know the theories and we also know the ocean of difference between it and reality.

To sum it all up, Law school in its preliminary taste is bitter sweet. So far, I think I can get a hang of it. at the same time, I feel anxious if I can manage the exponentially growing work load. However, with all these constraints, necessary or self-inflicted, there is a truth that I dearly hold in Law School.  That is that the Study of Law should be enjoined with a social purpose. We may be trained to master the substance of the law but we should also understand the wisdom and impact it delivers to our society, the very entity the law is established to serve. Ultimately, I do believe that the worth of the legal profession does not solely stem from winning the interest of a client but more than that, it is by being facilitators of nation-building by letting others know their worth and their rights and mobilizing such awareness to improve our policies and systems.