attention span management

A few weeks ago, I stopped by my tax accountant's office to pick up this year's returns. She's a remarkable woman, a mother of twins who -- as I found out that day -- has not only her J.D. but her LL.M. as well. "Oooh, studying for exams," she reminisced. "I remember when my roommate and I would sit down, at either end of the dining room table, with this huge pile of books between us...let me tell you, our place was never so clean, nor our dogs so well-trained, as during finals."

I'm lucky I don't have a dog, I guess.

Civ Pro isn't so terribly difficult to concentrate on, or at least it shouldn't be. I'm a bit bothered by the way Professor Civ Pro has handled the buildup this semester, though. Last semester he was so helpful -- he distributed and graded practice exams, walked us through flowcharts for personal jurisdiction and Erie, and generally was a good deal more supportive through our collective angst. Not any more. This semester he's not offering a review session, nor has he discussed process flows at any point during class. He stopped answering email about a month ago. Worst of all, he refuses to share any of his old spring exams except for the ones already up on the library website. There are four of these, but three of them are from 1989, 1990 and 1991, back when the law of supplemental jurisdiction was something else entirely. The cherry on top: this is, as before, a closed-book exam. So not only do I need to decipher the byzantine flows of preclusion, joinder of parties, and that tricky-dicky 1367, I need to memorize them all as well.

Tomorrow I'm getting together in The City with my study groupmates; ideally it will be a productive meeting. I fear that there are just too many flash cards floating around and too little actual under-one's-skin understanding of how this mess actually works.

I have an outline, it's beautiful, it's not really helping me wrap my brain around the multilayered interactions of all of these rules. Can anyone offer any better advice or mnemonics than "Defensive estoppel, D-1, D-2" (which all the same is fun to chant silently to oneself while working out)?

thus spake /jca @ April 26, 2003 06:46 PM