Johannes Buchheim ’16 LLM

Once I was admitted I think it was the very warm and welcoming way that they treated us or me. It starts with a phone call, so you already feel appreciated in some way. Then in my communication with the financial aid office or any kind of communication that I had prior to my accepting the offer was just so warm and so appealing that I, yeah, I think that was an important part of motivating me to come here because I had other offers, opportunities of good law schools but none of those programs were as small so none of those could devote as much attention, I think, to any admitted students. I think I appreciated that.

I took the year here rather as a chance to broaden my focus a little, to pursue—so I’m overall working in the areas of administrative law, constitutional law, and legal theory, but I actually enjoyed the freedom of not having to make a very clear-cut choice but of being able to pursue all of that while I’m here. I think Yale is a place where you can have that freedom and very freely go choose very different interesting classes that may seem somehow odd. For example, I’m taking a class on Nietzsche’s Critique on Modernity. It doesn’t immediately follow how that relates to the law, but I think it was very important for me to kind of de-compartmentalize because German legal education is, I think, very compartmentalized, and it was good to be able to break that up a little, to see how things connect with each other, see how maybe political theory relates to the question of analytical jurisprudence. They don’t make these linkages as much in Germany. And I think it was great to have this more holistic picture here. And that is what I took out of it scholarly-wise for the rest of my life, I think, a different view of the law.