HEARSAY STAFF – Maybe you’re a 3L looking to ride off into the sunset one last time. Or perhaps you’re a 2L, and really want to make this year the year you blow your peers away with your intelligence and wit. Regardless of your motives and class year, everyone deep down has that secret urge to be the gunniest gunner in the history of all who have ever gunned. Lucky for you, Hearsay is here to help you unlock the gunner potential that lies within.

Stretch and Warm-Up Your Dominant Hand

Look, gunning is stressful work. The constant raising and lowering of the hand puts the shoulder, bicep, tricep, and wrist under tremendous amounts of stress. Many a great gunner have had their careers cut short due to injury, and have languished in anonymity when they try to use their non dominant hand. This one time, in what some described as a medical emergency, a student in an unnamed section was forced to roam the halls with their arm in the raised position when they forgot how to lower it.[1] Take it from us, you don’t want to be the guy icing your shoulder in the middle of class because you pulled something. A limber gunner is a winner gunner.

Improve Your Reaction Time

If you ain’t first to raise your hand, you might as well not raise it at all. The best way to improve your reaction time is to scout professors. Learn their cadence so you can anticipate when their sentence will end so your hand will be up and ready for your scenario-changing hypothetical. And here’s the big takeaway: Don’t be discouraged if you’re too quick on the draw and cut the professor off. Apologize and continue with your question like you planned to all along.

Stop Reading

If you’re a 3L, you’ve probably completed this step. If you haven’t, then we don’t know why you’re looking at us for ways to improve your gunnery skillz. But truly, stop reading. All the reading does is prepare you to see the lecture from the enclosed universe of the readings. That does you and your classmates a disservice. Be ready to bring in niche scenarios and major changes to the fact pattern. What if the contract is written on a Dead Sea scroll instead of regular paper? Or when discussing assault in torts, ask “What if you actually strike a person instead of just putting them in fear of being struck?” These are the differences that make or break a gunner’s career.

Write Your Intros Beforehand

Instead of reading, you can spend your free time thinking of ways to introduce your badass hypothetical. Good introductions include, “I’m not sure if the readings covered this scenario, but…” and “This may be outside the scope, but it’s been on my mind since we discussed last chapter…” or “I’ve got kind of a big-picture question about jurisprudence generally…” Bonus points if you manage to work in your personal opinion on the subject. Examples include “I just genuinely feel as if..” and “I personally don’t believe it makes very much sense when…”

Overvalue your time; Undervalue everyone else’s

We get it, class is only 70 minutes long. You can’t possibly get every permutation of your questions in in such a brief amount of time. And using office hours or an email would simply take up too much of your time. Approach your gunning with the understanding that you’ve got stuff to get done. This is the kind of stuff that none of your peers and professors could possibly comprehend. The urgency of your question should flow naturally and genuinely. This will keep everyone from acting on their fantasies of crushing you under a palate of casebooks.

Masturbate to Your Own LinkedIn Profile

O.K., fine. You’re not actually masturbating to your LinkedIn. You’re masturbating to what your LinkedIn represents.

[1] H/t to our guest contributor, who alerted us to the existence of this medical anomaly.