I have the distinguished honour of publishing the first post on hopefully what will become a successful blog. JustFollowLaw.com was an idea conceived together with two of my coursemates, Wendy and Kunhe. Let me put things into perspective. I am one of the extremely fortunate ones to have gotten a place in the 2021 intake for the School of Law at the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS). The first two modules which I had to take are LAW201: Critical Thinking and Legal Interpretation and LAW203: Legal Writing and IT Essentials. These two modules were spread over four Saturdays which fortunately for my coursemates and me, was punctuated by a Chinese New Year weekend after the second Saturday. This is referred to as law boot camp in SUSS. Since I had just completed the boot camp, I suddenly have an insatiable need to be more specific in what I say and write. For that reason, I shall attempt to define what I mean by a successful blog.

Success will be defined by how much insight this blog can bring to future batches of law students. We are a fledgling law school but a law school we are. The other two law schools, NUS and SMU, started from humble beginnings as well. Reputation is built over countless batches of students, each going through the learning process and sharing common experiences. Just like I am currently seeking reference of what to expect from batches of students before me, I am hoping to share what I am going through with future batches of students. I personally do hope that this would serve as a better point of reference of what life as a law student in SUSS is like as compared to random posts in certain forums on the internet.

Success will be defined by how much my colleagues and I mature in our writing over the course of time. We will be working on case reviews, writing about concepts on top of blogging about our life as a student in SUSS. We hope that we can share our improvements over the four years with anyone who is following us. I personally am looking forward to getting my coveted degree at the end of the four years and looking back chronologically to see how far I had improved. That being said, I am truly struggling with the course and I do hope I make it through and graduate with a degree that qualifies me to take the bar exam.

Success will be defined by how many more of our fellow coursemates can we influence to use this platform to share their work so that all of us can seek reference and improve together. When I was about to start law school, one of the very few friends who I told about me entering law school told me that I should try to make at least five friends. I dare say that I blew that target out of the water. In a very short period of time, I met extremely friendly and helpful coursemates who were willing to share their knowledge and interpretation of concepts and questions with me. My work occupies a huge portion of my time and it is because of such help that I was able to save time trying to understand my readings alone. We have formed study groups and meet weekly out of class to discuss questions and cases in upcoming tutorials. JustFollowLaw.com should be a place for more of us to post our work for all to read.

Success will be defined by whether we can keep this going well into our legal careers. The law should not be made inaccessible to the public. No one group should have a monopoly over legal knowledge. I have always enjoyed sharing my knowledge through blogging. I do have a blog where I write about investing and I do blog on my company’s resource page. This brings credibility to the company and me but more importantly, knowledge is shared. Just like I picked up web design, coding and video editing over the web, I do hope that this blog can provide an insight into life as a law student and beyond.

There is actually little reprieve now that boot camp is over. Looking at the modules up ahead, it just seems to keep getting harder. I am already drowning in work and readings and I am starting to sacrifice much of my social life. Gone are the midweek football sessions or catching up with friends. I guess I will not have to annoy them by answering “it depends” to every one of their questions. Oh yes, that is what boot camp does to you. And no, I had highly qualified tutors who told me that that is how I should answer questions moving forward.

The truth is that if I were doing this alone it would be truly demoralising. However, I’ve found my team and they are my new friends I’ve made in law school. We just finished discussing the upcoming study units for LAW301 and it is past midnight on a Thursday night and now I am blogging about how I was thoroughly engaged throughout the discussion and did not feel like I missed anything even though I chose to discuss the study units rather than play the football game and now I am writing a very long sentence and I think this contravenes what my dean said about writing short sentences and but I still cannot stop thinking about whether the case we discussed constitutes murder so I think I am turning into a nerd… oh no…

Welcome to law school!

Yours sincerely,

Daryl Lum