The Environmental Impact of Mid-Terms

This post is unfortunately going to have to be very brief. The law school currently in the full swing of midterms. While so far I have generally been able to keep up with the work, midterms have been a completely new and somewhat overwhelming experience.

I do have a few quick points to make. First of all, UB gives (at least to the law students), 350 free pages of printing each semester. During orientation, I looked at this amount as some absurdly high number that I could never even hope to reach. "Hmm," I thought, "I wonder what else I can print? Maybe I can download and print the complete works of Shakespeare, those would look nice on computer paper bound with staples." Having reached midterms, I realize what a silly and premature thought that was. I decided to print my lecture notes from criminal law yesterday. Even after adjusting the margins, reducing the font, and checking the "save me one more page" option on the computer, my notes came to 94 pages. For one class out of four. For the first half of the course. For those of you with an aversion to math, I'll extrapolate for you, I would need over 800 pages for one semester's worth of lecture notes alone.

Additionally, many professors assign cases that are available online. I think this is awesome because it is one less textbook to buy. Printing them, however, has become a financial impossibility, as this would be an additional fifty pages per week!

On one hand, my undergraduate school allowed free printing. On the other hand, this was three years ago. When I left my job a few months ago (I previously worked at a world leading medical institution in Baltimore), they were pretty much getting ready to charge for printing to keep costs down. So I don't really blame UB for the 350 free page limit. I do not doubt that law students could easily use an entire forests worth of trees in the print lab on a regular basis. Also, this limit has encouraged me to look into other options, like not printing every single case assigned, and doing a first draft reduction of my notes prior to printing. Just like with classic poetry, the artificial restriction has expanded my creativity. I will be interested to see how much UB charges for additional pages, as I will now almost certainly need some. Also, during orientation they mentioned that soon all the print labs will default to double sided printing, I say let's hurry up and get that running.

You know how you always hear that "Piranhas can reduce a cow to a skeleton in 15 minutes" and "Rainforest the size of a baseball field is destroyed every 15 minutes?" at which point you shake your head and wonder who thought up those bizarre analogies? Perhaps a better analogy is "Each future lawyer destroys however many trees is takes to make 1,000 pages of computer paper and 10,000 paper cups of coffee each semester." Makes me cringe just thinking about it. I guess paper is easily recycled at least.

I dedicate my witty closing paragraph in solidarity to all my fellow 1Ls who haven't slept this week in preparation for midterms. Good luck to all of you!