With the past two posts revolving around classes and the Yale LLM experience I guess I should switch topics. So why don’t I give you some idea of what your spare time might look like while you’re here?
First of all: Free time for fun stuff (in an innocent, non-nerdy sense) will not be handed to you on a silver platter. You will have to take it. The amount of it will have a strong negative correlation with your belief in the Reading Myth. That is, the more you believe in it, the less free you will be.
That being said, New Haven is small enough to make sure that the temptation to completely disregard The Myth will not be too great. But there are some things you can do:
Before winter is coming you should definitely check out Lighthouse Point Beach.
It is a charming place at the periphery of New Haven, slightly vintage, forgotten by time, looking and feeling as if the Fifties (or the Twenties?) had never ended. The view onto New Haven will convey the misleading impression that you’re actually dealing with a city. (Therefore be prepared to be disappointed once you get back to downtown New Haven!) As for transportation: You can get there by bike (for free), by bus ($ 2), or by Uber ($ 15). If I am not completely mistaken you will find it to be worth the trip.
But what else is there to do?
There are some great pizza places. That is, people here actually call it “apizza” in order to distinguish their product from the typical thick crust, greasy American style pizza. The naples-style thin-crust apizza is supposed to be some of the best pizza on the east coast and I must say that there might be a lot of truth to this claim. Of the three contenders for the apizza-crown (Sally’s, Pepe’s and Modern) I highly recommend routing for Sally’s. I have rarely had a better pizza bianca.
There’s also GPSCY’S, the graduate student club, where most of the graduate community seem to hang out. Wednesday night’s “two for one” special will most likely be your best deal if you should ever want to get drunk.
Last but not least there might be some all-American home parties with a lot of JD’s getting reasonably drunk and dressing up as if it was college spring break. The whole thing turned out to be somewhat for show when I noticed that everybody was playing beer pong with WATER. I was sincerely shocked and have not recovered since. It was my personal Waterloo, WATERgate, or whatever. What in the world is the point of playing beer pong if you aren’t drinking? Just dance!
(This rather sad episode somewhat corroborates the most recent troubling findings on Yale law students’ distributional preferences. The study I am referring to, published in this month’s SCIENCE, unveiled the student body’s firm and almost infallible focus on efficiency (http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aab0096). I guess beer pong with actual beer – and the next morning’s obligatory headache – are just not very efficient things to go for.)
For more on the LL.M. programs at Yale Law, please see the school’s profile on LLM GUIDE.