The 2013 convocation held earlier this month was the first opportunity for the incoming class at Brooklyn Law School to listen to Dean Nicholas Allard in the ceremonial courtroom of the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse on Cadman Plaza East. Dean Allard commented: “The walk you just completed with your new classmates from the front of the Law School plaza, through the heart of the Downtown Brooklyn community and into this majestic hall of justice, drives home several important facts: that you are not alone, that you are part of many communities, that our law school is inextricably intertwined – by virtue of location and intentional design – with the center of the legal profession and institutions of justice as the only law school in the largest borough in the City of New York, that a microcosm of the world is within an arm’s-length radius of Joralemon Street.”
Allard commended the students for choosing a law school education during a down economy. Noting that the legal profession has changed, he cautioned students that traditional legal jobs “will likely never return.” He said. “A good legal education, which is expensive and includes demanding reading, writing, scholarly dialogue and practical training, is more necessary, more valuable than at any time before.” Allard’s mention of the high cost of legal education and his remark that traditional legal jobs are quickly diminishing should remind students not to base the cost of their education on the expectation that they will receive a traditional law firm job upon graduation. The Dean said it can also give students the chance to “take a company public” or represent “an entrepreneur working at one of hundreds of start-ups in the Brooklyn Tech Triangle.” Attending a law school in Brooklyn will allow students to be “Brooklyn ready” which means “that we will make sure that you will be ready to be productive members of the 21st century profession from day one. [It means] being able to handle any curve-ball that a world of changes throws your way, being able to answer tough questions, and forging solutions to new problems that no one has seen or even thought of yet.”
The librarians at the BLS Library have created a Research Guide called 1L Resources, Tips and Tools which describes print and digital resources in the BLS Library to help 1Ls succeed at Brooklyn Law School. The guide has four pages with sub-pages of useful content. See below:
Library Information
- Borrowing Materials
- Equipment, Printing and Copying
- Finding Course Materials
First Year Basics
1L Court Study Aids
- Civil Procedure
- Constitutional Law
- Contracts
- Criminal Law
- Property
- Torts
Research, Writing and Citation
- Legal Citations
- Legal Research
- Legal Writing and Analysis
