When we walked into law school, just under three years ago, they taught us a few lessons right away. My personal favorite is that "it depends." No matter what "it" happens to be, we are taught to respond, at least internally, that "it depends." While this technique is often used as a stalling tactic in order to give oneself time to think of an answer, the mantra has true philosophically practical use.
This phrase is a way of expressing how we need to think, how to examine a situation for as many angles as possible, to determine which facts determine the answer, to ask questions to find every hidden variable. "It depends" helped me see the spacious amount of grey that lay between black and white.
The other lesson they taught us is that we were not lawyers no matter how much we think we know, no matter how many classes we take, until we passed the bar. We were told not to give legal advice because we didn't have the right or the ability. Besides that, it could get us in trouble, pre-disbarred.
So if our friends asked us something about the law, we weren't to give them an answer as an attorney. We can talk about hypothetical situations but on no circumstances were we to instruct people on what they should do in a legal matter.
As a result, any time I talk about the law with a non-law student or non-lawyer, I proclaim this disclaimer, "Nothing I say is legal advice." So, anything you read here is just a student of the law's free-writing examinations. However, I'll try to do my best to explain what I can in order to increase general understanding of the law.
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