Touro College: Digital Commons @ Touro Law Center

Rossi, Mayerline

TOURO LAW JOURNAL OF RACE, GENDER, & ETHNICITY 
 
58 
 
REFLECTION OF MY LAW SCHOOL EXPERIENCE 
MAYERLINE ROSSI* 
 
My first year in law school reminded me of the following crucial fact of life:  there are few 
weaknesses that a person cannot overcome to achieve a goal.  My weakness, at least the most 
glaring when it came to law school, was my need to control my environment.  I find comfort in 
stability.  I prefer set schedules and to-do lists, and I plan out my years, months, weeks, days, and 
even hours.  Planning gives me the illusion of control.  I thought that good planning would sustain 
me through law school.  It did not.  No amount of planning, scheduling, or to-do lists would 
overcome the fact that I could not control my environment nor could I change it.  I either had to 
adapt or fail.   I came to law school expecting to learn critical thinking skills, the law, and of course, 
how to pass the bar exam.  During my first year, my most important lessons were not about any of 
those things.  The greatest lesson was about how to deal with the unexpected in order to adapt and 
thrive.  
 
Heavyweight Champion Boxer, Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody’s got a plan until they 
get hit.”  I got hit early in my first semester.  I had carefully set a schedule for my 
family.  Weekends would be free to spend with family and run errands.  I would wake up at 5:00 
a.m. on weekdays, exercise from 5:30-6:30 a.m., prepare lunches from 6:30-7:00 a.m., get dressed, 
sit down to breakfast at 7:30 a.m. and be out the door by 8:30 a.m.  The afternoon schedule would 
be:  back from school by 3:45 p.m., reading my assignments, driving to whatever afternoon activity 
the family had planned that day, helping with homework, making dinner, sitting down to dinner 
with the family, reading some more, and going off to bed by 10 p.m.   That schedule lasted two 
days.  By the third day, I realized that I would have to use my exercise time to finish my 
assignments because I could not complete them after school.  The morning routine was chaos.  We 
barely ever left the house on time and my afternoons were completely overtaken by my family 
obligations.  I was lucky if I was in bed by 1:00 a.m. and could crawl out of bed by 6:30 a.m.  I 
struggled with this routine for a few days until I quickly realized that the routine had to change or 
else I might flunk out of law school.  Obviously, the schedule was not working.  It was time for 
modification.  Instead of yoga or my typical total body workout in the morning, I walked on the 
treadmill while reading cases.  Rather than preparing breakfast and lunches in the morning, I 
prepared them the previous night.  On the weekends, I split family time with reading.   I have not 
completely thrown out the schedule, but I make small changes as needed.      
 
Simultaneously with my battles at home, I was also struggling with another dilemma.  This 
issue was in my classes.  I am an introvert.  I prefer to think and observe rather than 
participate.  However, participation in law school is a substantial part of our grades.  Participation 
in law school means:  not just participation when called upon, but voluntary participation as 
well.  Just the thought of raising my hand and speaking in class caused my heart to race.  One 
professor would actually ask me repeatedly why I always looked so scared.  My anxiety level was 
so high when I had to speak in class that my brain could not function properly.  Although I knew 
the material well, often I could not process questions and my comments and answers came out 
unintelligible.    
 
                                                 
* Juris Doctor, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center. 
TOURO LAW JOURNAL OF RACE, GENDER, & ETHNICITY 
 
59 
 
For this problem, I sought advice from my professors and classmates.  Since I was already 
prepared for class, I was told that practice would cure my fear.  Of course, I did not want to practice 
something that I was terrified of doing, but when the alternative was a lower grade, I realized I had 
no choice.  I am still nervous when I am called on in class, but I make a point of raising my hand: 
(1) so that I do not lose class participation points, and (2) so I am able to become more comfortable 
with speaking publicly.  Again, I cannot change my nature, but I was able to adapt.    
Albert Einstein said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” 1 I am proud to 
say that, as I build on my intelligence, my ability to change grows as well.  Throughout my first 
year in law school, I was challenged to make changes that would allow me to adapt to my new 
environment.  Although, I did not and could not completely change my nature, I was able to 
overcome my need for control just enough so that it did not paralyze me. 
 
 
  
                                                 
1 Albert Einstein, GOODREADS, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/85475-the-measure-of-intelligence-is-the-ability-
to-change (last visited 12-12-2018). 


English

Reflection of My Law School Experience

Trinos, Melissa A.

TOURO LAW JOURNAL OF RACE, GENDER, & ETHNICITY 
 
64 
 
A REFLECTION OF MY LAW SCHOOL EXPERIENCE 
MELISSA A. TRINOS* 
 
I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer.  As a Filipino-American, law is not the typical or 
expected career of choice.  Most Filipino parents expect their children to go into medicine or 
become engineers.  There is often very little room for negotiation.  My choice of career has always 
been met with curiosity and not always of the positive variety.    
 
I have a number of family members who are politicians in the Philippines, but none of 
them are lawyers.  In fact, I will be the first in my family to become a lawyer.  My educational 
career has largely been driven by my ultimate goal of becoming a lawyer.  However, when it 
finally came down to starting law school, I was plagued with reservations.  I was often told that it 
was not too late to go into medicine. The dismal employment opportunities for law school 
graduates made faithfully pursuing my dream challenging. After my undergraduate studies, I chose 
to not attend law school right away.  Today, I am convinced I made the right decision in finally 
pursuing my dream and I chose the perfect time to start.   
 
I was filled with trepidation before starting law school. The Socratic method of teaching 
was never a great selling point.  I was starting at a school where I did not know a single soul and I 
had heard my fair share of horror stories of what law school was going to be like. I had also taken 
a couple of years off after my undergraduate studies and was afraid I had been out of school too 
long to compete strongly.  Despite all this, I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer.  
 
Entering law school, I thought I knew what to expect.  I had friends who had already 
finished their first year, others who graduated, and some who realized law school simply was not 
for them.  I listened to stories, both good and bad, of what law school was really like outside of 
the fictional experience depicted in the movies.  Now having finished my first year, I have come 
to realize that law school is different for everyone and much of it has to do with where you decide 
to go and the people you meet along the way.  
   
For one, the smaller student body at Touro Law Center has made the world of a 
difference.  I have attended large schools my entire educational career.  I am a product of the New 
York City public school system. While in elementary school, my classes were never smaller than 
twenty students.  Then, I attended one of the city’s elite specialized high schools, Brooklyn 
Technical High School, which boasted a student body of well over 4,000 students.  My graduating 
class alone consisted of 1,000 students from all over the five boroughs.  I truly did not understand 
how special and beneficial a smaller student body can be.  Even into my second year, I am still 
getting used to how personable and helpful the faculty and other students are. 
    
It is not what I am used to.  In larger schools, one can get lost in the monotony of 
students.  It becomes more difficult for professors and faculty to get to know you or even notice 
you.  Competition amongst students is also much fiercer in larger institutions as a result of this 
                                                 
* Juris Doctor, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, 2017-2018 Editor-in-Chief, JOURNAL OF RACE, 
GENDER, AND ETHNICITY.   
TOURO LAW JOURNAL OF RACE, GENDER, & ETHNICITY 
 
65 
 
need to stand out.  The smaller student body allows everyone to essentially flourish if they seize 
the opportunities allotted to them.  
 
Before attending law school, I had never studied in a group. I was often told that I needed 
to form a study group when I started law school.  However, this piece of advice fell on deaf ears.  I 
always thought that friends were for socializing, and so studying in groups would be too 
distracting.  I intended to study on my own as I always had and nothing was going to change 
that.  After my first day of law school, I was in a study group, a rather large study 
group.  Eventually, I noticed the benefits of forming study groups.  Four eyes and ears 
in many hours of classes and many pages of dense material were far better than two.  In my case, I 
had five sets of additional eyes and ears to help better understand material and challenge one 
another in a constructive way.  My first year of law school was tremendously benefitted as a result 
of these five individuals.  My strong support system outside of school coupled with my strong 
study group made my law school experience easier, though it is still a challenge.    
 
It took time to finally push forward and ultimately bring my dream into fruition. There is 
no universal expectation for what law school will be like.  Despite all the similarities in stories of 
what one’s law school experience was like, there are a number of factors that can 
dramatically effect the end result.  In my case, attending a small school and forming a strong and 
productive study group have been two formative factors that have shaped my law school career 
and will continue to shape my future.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


A Reflection of My Law School Experience

Barry, Kevin M.

Levi, Jennifer L.

The Future of Disability Rights Protections for Transgender People

Epstein, Julia

Rosenbaum, Stephen A.

Revisiting Ashley X: An Essay on Disabled Bodily Integrity, Sexuality, Dignity, and Family Caregiving

Perlin, Michael L.

Lynch, Alison J.

McClain, Valerie R.

“Some Things Are Too Hot to Touch”:  Competency, the Right to Sexual Autonomy, and the Roles of Lawyers and Expert Witnesses

Dell, Marin

Fake News, Alternative Facts, and Disinformation: The Importance of Teaching Media Literacy to Law Students

Russo, Omar T.

How to Get Away with Murder:  the “Gay Panic” Defense

Silver, Theodore

The Glannon Guide to Contracts

Discusses policy and constitutional arguments against the ACS, a yearly survey administered by the Census Bureau

Lewyn, Michael

In Defense of the American Community Survey

Barry, Margaret

TOURO LAW JOURNAL OF RACE, GENDER, & ETHNICITY 
 
10 
 
ON THE OCCASION OF DEBORAH POST’S RETIREMENT 
 
MARGARET BARRY* 
 
 
I first met Deborah when I managed to make my way to the Northeast Corridor Collective 
gatherings, ages ago. I got to know her a bit better as a member of the SALT Board in 2004-2007, 
but we became joined at the hip in 2008 and 2009 as co-presidents of SALT. I still miss our daily 
contact on the important issues that we tackled in that role.  
 
One of those issues was trying to shed light on the inequities that affirmative action sought 
to address. It is amazing to think of how optimistic such an agenda seems in the wake of the raw 
hatred boldly expressed regarding President Obama, police killings of black men and women and 
what that inexorably brought to the nation’s attention.  We did not anticipate how quickly public 
sentiment would veer from the goal of inclusion and tolerance to embracing the hatemongering of 
Trump. But then we knew the road was a hard one, and it was a great experience to walk it with 
such a brilliant and fun person.   
 
I selfishly look forward to spending quality time with Deborah starting with her first year 
of retirement and my upcoming sabbatical.  We have enjoyed the great music and meals that my 
husband prepared and, with all that is distressing about our country and the world we now live in, 
the times spent with friends like Deborah are reminders of how good life can be.   
 
That said, I recognize that while Deborah may be ready to turn to the next page in her 
impressive career, her leaving legal education, if indeed she stays away, will be a real loss. I know 
that she loves teaching and that she cares deeply about preparing students to be excellent lawyers. 
When she talks about her concerns for her students, I think to her 1990 article Reflections on 
Identity, Diversity and Morality, published as part of the Northeast Corridor Collective’s articles 
in the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal. In the article, she spoke of how she felt about being a law 
professor: 
 
There were times when I was in law school and later when I was in practice when 
I would experience a mild case of dissociation. I would look around me and think, 
“How did I get here?” I had a feeling that I was in a dream because my life had 
this surreal quality. It was not exactly a Fellini film, but for me it was almost as 
unnatural. That feeling disappeared when I began to teach. It was as though I had 
emerged from some sort of maze having successfully negotiated my way to the end 
without any idea of how I managed to get there. I did not know, at first, why I should 
feel so differently about teaching. I just felt like I belonged: I was doing what I 
should be doing, what I was supposed to do all along.1 
 
 
 
                                                 
* Professor of Law at Vermont Law School. J.D. University of Minnesota Law School. 
1 Deborah Waire Post, Reflections on Identity, Diversity and Morality, 6 BERKELEY WOMEN’S L. J. 136, 164 (1990-
1991). 
TOURO LAW JOURNAL OF RACE, GENDER, & ETHNICITY 
 
11 
 
Deborah, you certainly belong, we all have benefitted from your role in the academy, and 
you will be missed in that role.   
 
Much love, 
Margaret 
  


On the Occasion of Deborah Post’s Retirement

Not a member yet

Reflection of My Law School Experience

A Reflection of My Law School Experience

The Future of Disability Rights Protections for Transgender People

Revisiting Ashley X: An Essay on Disabled Bodily Integrity, Sexuality, Dignity, and Family Caregiving

“Some Things Are Too Hot to Touch”: Competency, the Right to Sexual Autonomy, and the Roles of Lawyers and Expert Witnesses

Fake News, Alternative Facts, and Disinformation: The Importance of Teaching Media Literacy to Law Students

How to Get Away with Murder: the “Gay Panic” Defense

The Glannon Guide to Contracts

In Defense of the American Community Survey

On the Occasion of Deborah Post’s Retirement

3,298

3,484