C.A. Esquire: A kid in a candy story

…who happens to be a fat kid that enjoys gorging out on candy, like Augustus Gloop from Charlie and Chocolate Factory.

Thats me and the law now.  I came into law school with the idea that I will not narrow down my area of legal focus until I had an opportunity to survey whats out there.

Need I remind you that I come with a good deal of years under my belt on civil rights focused work in a non-profit that is the largest American Muslim civil rights advocacy organization in the United States?  Civil rights work is a passion I want to pursue.  But I am finding that serving on a board for an organization, doing mentoring and programming around civil rights in my spare time is just as satisfying.  The study of law and a career in law are not just about passion.  I won’t be doing any “civil rights” reading for a long time, so how do you approach all this reading on contracts, property, torts, civil procedure and criminal law during the first year?  In fact, just because I am taking classes this first year, I realize now, I won’t really know any of these subjects because all I am doing is scratching the surface of something that is monumental area of legal study in each specialized areas.

Prior to my stint in public interest law I was studying under the area known as International Studies, its this specialized majors designed for ADHD  folks who have commitment issues because IS lets you take classes all over the place, its know in academia as “interdisciplinary study”- basically a nice way of saying your not cut out to specialize so take a crap load of classes and get the hell out of dodge.  But my focus there was in developing countries and I liked dealing with international conventions, treaties and trade-social issues.

Law school was an opportunity for me to explore that a bit more, maybe try to get my career track in the international direction more.  With my experience in civil rights, I still had a component of international related to it, because the American Muslim community I dealt with and portions of counter terrorism policy I advocated on (-against) involved the international element.  So exploring International and Comparative law was not to far afield and definitely still applicable to the civil rights world I had worked in prior to law school.

But being in law school there are all sorts of possibilities that are presenting themselves to me.  There are area’s of law I am being introduced to that I find myself attracted to, wanting to get to know more about it.  How do you choose?  How do you figure things out? (especially if you don’t have experience or background in that area of the law!)