Landing Softly

[Apologies for taking an extended vacation. I arrived to Kingston on Sept 6th, went directly from the airport to a Queen's Orientation event, and it seems like since then I've been wrapped up 24/7 in either an Orientation event, reading or cheering Team Canada.]

Before I came to Queen's, I was warned on many occasions that the 1st year of law school would be . . . well, hellish. I can tell you now that they were wrong. I know, I've been in class for just over a week and so I might be premature in my declaration. I'm sure there is still time for things to turn hellish. But, if the quality of teachers or students has anything to do with it then my understanding of Dante's Inferno will just have to wait.

Some general observations:
- Ages in the class range from 21 to about 49, with the median age at, maybe, 24 or 25.
- Upper year students bend over backwards to answer our questions and ease our anxiety.
- Professors are not as mean and intimidating as they are in OneL.
- About 90% of us bring laptops to class and I've heard that by Christmas it will be 100%.
- I think I've had more beer since I arrived to Kingston than in the entire past year.
- My classmates seem pretty sharp.
- Our Dean is friendly, approachable and ignores cheeky comments (I won't name names) very diplomatically.
- We have been assigned a lot of reading! To give you an example, last night I had over 100 pages of reading for Public Law (1 article and 2 Supreme Court decisions), about 40 pages of reading for Torts (3 cases), and about 30 pages for Property Law (2 articles and 2 cases). What's that? Over 170 pages. Yeah. I was up all night reading.

OK. Now I have some reading to do for Criminal Law.