Random advice: "I'm going to law school in the fall. What can I do this summer to prepare?"

Sleep. No, seriously. Sleep, eat, see friends, do something fun. It's your last summer without pressure to go work for a law firm, or something else similarly legal-sounding. Try not to feel any pressure to learn any law or anything like that -- there are people here who started reading when they got their professor and textbook lists in August, who took pre-law preparation courses (Law Preview I think is the big one... it's done by the Princeton Review people, and, from what I hear, is a huge waste of $1000), who found jobs as paralegals thinking it would give them a head start... all seem pretty useless.

What I found slightly useful over the summer, just to give me a sense of what to expect, was reading some books about law school -- One L, by Scott Turow, is the famous Harvard memoir -- written about 25 years ago, and painting a picture of a law school world much more intense than it is now. Some people say it scared them, but I thought it was an interesting read, and as long as you know it really isn't terribly representative of reality, I don't think it's too frightening. I also read Law School Confidential and Planet Law School, two guidebooks to law school life -- Law School Confidential isn't bad, although it has a chapter about reading cases using six different colors of highlighters that I think is a pretty bad idea. Come to think of it, if you head all the way back into the weblog archives, there's reviews of all these "pieces of literature" (and some other cool stuff, if I remember correctly) back last August.