Digesting

Digesting. For a law school student, that term is synonymous with drudgery and toil.

Digesting refers to the act of reading a legal case, sucking its marrow, and spitting the masticated bits onto a piece of paper. To be more blunt, it's the act of summarizing a case into its vital components: the facts, the issues, and the court's rulings on the issue.

I hate digesting. Three months into law school and I still hate it. The reading part is easy but the writing part isn't. Writing on a notebook is something I left back in college (My handwriting leaves much to be desired). I can understand but when understanding must translate into written text, I let out a silent scream. Putting a pen on paper is, for me, an agony.

But still, I digest. And one thing I cannot fathom is the fact that I'm digesting pretty much what should be left alone. The prose of some decisions of the Supreme Court are quite beautiful and expertly crafted that to simply summarize these is tantamount to sacrilege.

Maybe, that's the entire point of the exercise. One is to read and read some more until the vocabulary, the language used, the semantic undertones of each legal phrase employed by the justices are sublimated into one's mind. Writing is simply to prove that, indeed, this act of sublimation has actually happened.