Maverick

Speaking of trials, we had our introductory meeting for the intensive, three-week Trial Advocacy Workshop this afternoon. The instructor paced back and forth across Ames courtroom as he explained to the hundred-odd students what we were in for. It felt like a speech on the first day of flight school.

This will be the most intense academic period of your law school career. You will be forced to confront what is consistently found the most frightening situation in all of human experience: public speaking. I can personally guarantee that you will not be the same person at the end of this program that you were when you started it.

They make it clear that our training will be rigorous.

You will be expected to work hard every day, and show up prepared. You will work with your classmates. Some of them will be able to teach you just as much as we are. Because we are learning together, we will also be eating together, every day. We will regularly videotape your performance in class and review it for errors. By the end of the course, you will have conducted direct and cross examinations, made motions and objections, and argued two full cases in their entirety.

We are reminded as well of the stakes.

Your trials will be held with real judges, in real Massachusetts courthouses. The juries in your trials will not be other law students, or the families and friends of law students. They will be complete strangers, and they will be returning verdicts. Some of you will win, and some of you will lose.

I'm pumped. I want to go watch Top Gun.