Law Schools

It's Much Harder To Take Law School Finals After Being Hit By A Car

Holy crap! Take a look at today's tale of law school woe.

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Yeah, about those finals…

Welcome back to Foreseeable Harm, a series where we take a look at some of the most appalling law school horror stories, straight from the law school trenches. These are real e-mails and messages we’ve received from real readers. Take a look at today’s tale of law school woe:

Realizing that I am joined by about 99% of law students when I say that the first semester of my 1L year was the most challenging and emotional four months of my lifetime, I had an extra special ending to mine.

The night before my first final exam, I spent the evening reviewing my notes and doing a final “closed book” self-quiz of the topics and cases that would be covered on my Torts final early the next morning. I felt terrified but confident that I had done everything I could up to that point to prepare, and it was time to pack up to head home and get a few hours of sleep before the big day.

I don’t remember all of what happened next, but from the bits and pieces that came into focus over the following days and the detailed accounts from my law school classmates and roommates who helped me get to the hospital later that night, I’m able to stitch together that I had packed up at the library just before midnight and unlocked my bicycle for what should have been a short ride to the house where I was living close to campus with three of my 1L classmates. Unfortunately, I was hit by a car while crossing an intersection just off campus. The front tire of my bicycle was bent in half under the sedan, and I likely teetered onto the hood, striking my head hard enough to cause a concussion and what I would later find out was short-term memory loss that lasted a couple of days.

I vaguely remember standing up to brush myself off, and immediately losing my balance and falling back down, and a brief interaction with the driver who, upon asking if I was okay and receiving what I’m sure was an incoherent response from me at the time, got back into his car and drove away. I must have eventually gotten up and walked the rest of the way home, because I remember ringing the doorbell and talking to my roommates for a few minutes until they started to look puzzled and ask me questions about where my bike was, why my clothes were dirty, and why I kept asking them the same questions. I apparently left the room a couple times and reappeared repeating things I had already said, so eventually they put me in the back of one of their cars and drove towards school on the path I always took. Upon seeing my mangled bike, they surmised that something was wrong and rushed me to the hospital.

I underwent various tests, EKGs, MRIs, and remember talking to a neurosurgeon who told me in a dire tone that the direction and force of the impact to my skull was such that it could have easily been much worse. The next morning my parents flew in and I received a few visits but my roommates and classmates were understandably occupied by their own finals. The few who were able to find time to visit mentioned whispers going around that I had tried to get hit by a car on purpose to avoid finals, which wasn’t entirely unexpected from the 1L rumor mill but didn’t make things any easier to deal with. I received a call from the Dean next, who advised me that I was welcome to forfeit my tuition and come back next year (“No need to reapply!”), otherwise I would need to schedule makeup finals and complete them in the next few days.

I probably should have just come back the following year. I couldn’t remember short strings of words the nurses would ask me to repeat back three minutes later to test if my short-term was coming back, but when I started flipping through my notes and outlines and felt like it was still all there in my head. The doctors wanted to monitor me for a couple more days, so I had my parents bring all of my books and materials and I laid them out on the hospital bed and got back to work. I took my first makeup exam the day I was released from the hospital. Torts. I got an A.

What’s your law school horror story? You know you have one, so feel free to email us (subject line: “Law School Horror Story”) or text us (646-820-8477) and tell us all about it. We may feature some of them here in an upcoming post on Above the Law.

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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