Reading Law Student's Life :)

In this last month, I found myself having a conversation with some friends regarding our shock over the fact that we are now start third year of our law school experience.

This milestone caused all of us to reflect on our time at Faculty of Law in UGM and there seemed to be one thing in particular that was at the forefront of our minds: law school experiences. It might seem as though not that much could change in a year, but there were many marked shifts that all of us had picked up on, and more busy in many activities. In first year, I think the intense fear and confusion as to how to approach law school exams probably led a lot of the class to get bogged down in a lot of irrelevant details when reading. By second year, you develop the ability to become more intuitive about the facts that are going to actually be worth knowing. I have often heard people comment that second year is harder than first year then third is harder than second.

From an academic perspective, this is probably true. The first year are long gone and it is sometimes only when you are a day into studying for an exam that you really start to get a picture of how the cases of a course tie together. However, I don’t think that this year is harder on the whole. Yes, the volume of reading is greater, but you can get through it faster. Yes, the courses are harder in terms of the law being more challenging, but they are courses that you have chosen and thus are more likely to be interesting to you.

The main difference that I would like to explore here is the way that you learn. I still remember sitting down with my first case on PLKH is Tort (Deed of tort/Perbuatan Melawan Hukum) and not knowing where to begin. But from this kind of studying method, I was actually learn a lot rather than when I am just sitting in the class.

December instilled a small amount of confidence that we could at least make it through a law exam without fainting, but I think for most of us, we saw what changes we had made worked, and those that didn't  This was so important because it enabled us to start to truly figure out what professors look for when we are writing an exam, and in turn this greatly influenced the approach to studying.

So, i am looking forward for the next session, focusing study on international law. 

All of this, are my pics gallery when studying Law on practice, so much fun since I was so lucky for having nice friends and good team, thank you for all of  PLKH team F2 \(^.^)/

~cheers :)

M, 

Yogyakarta, December 2012

Laws and Theories.

Laws describe, and theories explain.

THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I THOUGHT when I decided to take law as my study, but now I feel like I am poisoning this life with theories and theories that never come true. Well, not that the matter all-law-theories poisoning this life, I AM, the one who exactly confused with how laws influence theories (social and political) and vise versa. Until I read this one: Laws describe things, theories explain them. An example will help you to understand this. There’s a law of gravity, which is the description of gravity. It basically says that if you let go of something it’ll fall. It doesn’t say why. Then there’s the theory of gravity, which is an attempt to explain why. Actually, Newton’s Theory of Gravity did a pretty good job, but Einstein’s Theory of Relativity does a better job of explaining it. These explanations are called theories, and will always be theories. They can’t be changed into laws, because laws are different things. But THE PROBLEM is that's how theories works in natural science, right? well, because I'm studying theories in social matters so, it quite obvious.

In science, a theory is not a guess, not feelings. Theory is also the ultimate goal, the explanation. It’s as close to proven as anything in science can be. Some people think that in science, you have a theory, and once it’s proven, it becomes a law. That’s not how it works. In science, they collect facts, or observations, they use laws to describe them, and a theory to explain them. Scientist don’t promote a theory to a law by proving it. A theory never becomes a law. NOW, I remembered what Robert W. Cox said about theory in social science, Theory is always for someone and for some purpose. Very skeptics. He added about critical theory that does not propound remedies or make predictions about the emerging shape of things, world order for example. It attempts rather, by analysis of forces and trends, to discern possible futures and to point to the conflicts and contradictions in the existing world order that could move things towards one or other of the possible futures. In that sense it can be a guide for political choice and action. 

What do you think? I think this is the way laws finally can take a place, as political choice and action. And the characteristics, as well as theories, laws is something that maybe needs proof, not only a guess, a hunch, or fiction. No wondering if some of legal experts said that law actually is tool of social engineering. True.

Aha!