Manny Rutinel emphasizes clinics, activist organizations, networking, and extracurricular involvement as key ways for future lawyers to advance the animal-rights movement.

“I feel like I learned a lot more from my extracurriculars than I did in my classes.”

Transcription:

So Manny, what would you suggest for curriculum planning and how did you go about like choosing your classes selection? Do you have any tips about, you know, did you go heavy on bar prep courses? Did you go heavy on your interests? Was there a mix? And then we can pass that question along to others after. Great. Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier, I went to all of my classes and had perfect attendance at all of them and thought they were essential.

Now let me get into another perspective that I could have on classes and that is that. I think.

90% of what you learn in a class, you're going to forget. You're probably going to forget it like as soon as you take that test. And then you'll probably forget 99% by the next month.

And so I actually don't know how valuable I thought classes were from a learning perspective. I thought clinics were important for me because that allowed me to really contribute into a movement in ways that forced me to learn in ways that force me to really do the work and do it well on behalf of a client or an organization, whoever maybe.

I I I think it's. I tend to think that it's not what you know, it's who you know. And so I would spend a lot of my time working on behalf of the Yale Animal Law Society, which is our ALDF chapter, the Yale Environmental Law Association, all those, these groups, the student groups that I was running, bringing in folks like, you know, like animal Outlook folks or ALDF folks into. The conversation presenting them to my fellow students so that they could learn and then I could learn. In that process, so I feel like I learned a lot more from my extracurriculars than I did in my classes. That being said, in my role as a state representative.

My there was a course called legislation and maybe in different schools it's called something different like statutory interpretation or something like that.

I guess that was useful. Honestly, I'm not so sure. There's like nonpartisan staffers that draft everything. For me, having a law degree does most of the work where I can just like point to the fact that I have a law degree and then people respect me more because of it. They think that I'm going to catch a lot more stuff than I probably would otherwise. So it acts as like a deterrent effect.

In my from my perspective, spend as much as your time with fellow students, with folks who you're interested in, like learning more from. And the bar, I don't know, I you're going to learn everything you need for the bar like the summer right before law school. So I think you're probably going to be fine. So focus on everything else besides classes.

That's pretty much.