Reading day 4

On the eve of the the contract's final, if you don't know a rule, you better know where it is; if you don't know where it is, you better have a tab that does, and; if you don't have a tab, know where to find it, or know it, be able to spot the issue and give a policy answer. There is not much more I can do now. As you can see, my book is fairly thoroughly tabbed, marked up, cross-referenced and I have been through the book several times. It is time to relax, watch a new Grey's Anatomy and de-stress so I can get up fresh in the morning and run through everything before the final at 1:30. I am sure there are students who will be up at the library late into the night, but I am not hoping to get hired an anonymous lawyer's fictional firm (he wouldn't hire me anyway since I don't go to a top 20 school). I hope to work someplace that also allows its employees to maintain a healthy balanced life, and I don't think there is any reason not to apply the same principle to life even now. Enough, time to turn the brain, and the computer off. I'll update after the final.

Day 3 wrap-up

Right now the UCC is spinning in my head. I hope this is that confusing state right before everything becomes clear because even though I know generally where the provisions are that I might need to interpret a contract and I generally know how they work, once I get in the exam I hope I will be able to pull it together. We have learned many more rules this semester. Last semester we focused on the various theories of obligation and there were nice catagories to place the materials. This semester we covered so many different doctrines--parol evidence, duress, good faith, battle of the forms, accord and satisfaction--and each one has its own provisions in both the UCC and the restatement. The held our hand the first couple of months of last semester, but this semester they have kept the material coming at us and now it is time to see how we did. Our torts professor claimed that by second semester we are not really one-L's any more, but I don't know if that is completely true. It is true in the sense that our professors don't coddel us the way they did at the beginning of the year, but it is not true in the sense that the course of this whole year is to give us the foundation of the law. When I look at the topics that are covered in the bar or come up in cases, we have touched on all of the major doctrines, rules, procedures, etc.. This is what the one-L year seems to be about: the foundation. I am going to bed. I still have 12 more days to keep the stamina up.

Reading (Rainy) Day 3

Today had been the toughest day to keep motivated and there is a sense of closeness (or shall I say doom) to the contracts final. I am completely focused on contracts now and am trying to make sure I understand all of the UCC and Restatement provisions we covered this semester.

The rainy weather is keeping me inside today. I am studying at home mostly for lack of wanting to go outside and secondly because I feel like I have too little time to get all of contracts in my head. I probably shouldn't be blogging, but I just wanted to share the view out the window that I have been looking at most of the day. Rainy days are always bleaker after a week of sunshine. Ahh finals. The stress has finally hit.

Reading Day 2

The nice aspect of finals is that there is a lot of time, because you don’t have to go to class. Of course, much of that time is taken up with studying, but you can schedule it on your own terms. This morning I rode my bike over the top of Capitol Hill to seek out a new coffee shop to studying at. It is nice to be out exploring the city that I have been living in for 8 months but have not really seen, because I have been buried in books. On the other-hand, there is always the risk when going someplace unfamiliar that it will present for you some unforeseen frustration, and although there is time to find a new place, there is not so much time right now to always account for the unpredictable. This new coffee shop, while cute, quaint, and with good organic coffee has “limited or no internet connectivity,” and I can see how this could be good for studying, but I guess I have just come to expect that I will go somewhere and have internet. I am writing this offline and will have to upload it later once I get “connected.”

Today is a torts and property day. They are not coming up until later in the final’s schedule, but it is good to keep them fresh. Plus, Contracts and Civ. Pro. get pretty heavy, so it is good to mix it up.

I’m connected now. So much for studying without distraction. Ha, the internet: American’s greatest resource for distraction.

Reading Day 1 Wrap-up

It is quarter till midnight and I am currently entering notes from civil procedure into my text book that I can bring into the exam, filling the blank pages with a decision tree for when to apply state or federal procedure and definitions for res judicate and collateral estoppel. It is warm here and I am sitting near the window with a pleasant spring breeze blowing in. This feels so different than the end of last semester. In all my memories of that time it is dark outside and raining and I just remember sitting at my desk for hours staring at the computer and my books. It is nice to be able to get outside in the sun now. I even studied outside at a coffee shop this afternoon and I must say, it was downright pleasant. The public library wasn't bad either, although I did see another law student (can't get away from them completely) and the bathroom was painted a disturbing uniform lime-lime green. There were no more field trips and for the most part it was a nice change of scenery from the law school. I don't know now much more I have in me tonight. I have been distracting by watching Daily Show and Colber report videos. The proportion of distraction to studying is getting larger, which is a good sign I should either study sans computer or go to bed. I'll be back in the morning to give you the outlook for day 2.

Reading Day 1

I decided to spend the morning of my first reading day at the downtown public library. I didn't want to be at home and the thought of being at the law school surrounded by the ambient energy of hundreds of stressed out over-achievers was just to much. I am realizing that the public library is going to have its own hazards. When I walked into the "quiet reading room," which is more like an large open hall on the tenth floor with a great view, it was filled with hords of school children on a field day. Despite their teachers attempts to teach the children about proper library voices, they pretty much saw this place as a new type of playground. There were probably a few that were genuinely interested in the library, but the quiet one's never stand out. This problem, however was easily overcome with a pair of earplugs, and they seem to be filing out of here pretty quickly, which brings us to the second problem: visual noise. Whose idea was it to put purple, red, and turquoise spiriling Pollok-esk carpet in a quiet reading area. They don't make eye-plugs unless you consider burying your noise in the UCC as "eye-plugs" which is what I am going to try and do. I will post again later today with my thoughts on the success on my field trip downtown.

Law Lecture Quotes

Here is another great quote from Contracts class:

"Making a long term fixed price contract is like making an invitation to get sued."

There won't be many more opportunities to follow lectures for gems of legal humor, absurdity, and wisdom, because Wednesday is our last day of classes. I am actually all done with the reading for the semester and turned in my last memo yesterday. All that is left to do is to "bring it all together." I went back and re-read the first case that I read for my first class in law school, Bands Refuse Removal, Inc v. Bourough of Fair Lawn, 62 N.J.Super. 522 (1960), and although I did not have any big epiphanies from having come full circle, I definatly got more out of the case than I did on the first day, much more. I didn't even know that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure existed and know I can tell you pretty well what most of the rules are. I shouldn't get to excited and reflective yet, because we still have finals to get through, but it does help to see the way all of the law is connected. There are concepts in every case from Civil Procedure, and no substantive area of law is without its crossovers in the others. (Do you have the right on your own property to contract with another to commit a tort?) Bands Refues is an example of judicial power gone bad and I think the editors put it in the casebook first to show us newbies why the courts need rules. After a year of learning these rules, we finished on the the case Hanna v. Plumer, 380 U.S. 460 (1964), and we concluded the study of procedural rules with the words of Justice Warren: "the integrity of the Federal Rules is absolut." So we did go full circle. We need the rules and the rules are absolute. I realize I have completly oversimplified the internal procedural debates that exist in courts and legal scholarship, but this blog has always been about one students first experiences with the laws and I think I can say this: in order to have a functioning legal system there must be a system of rules, and you could complain, for example, that 30 days for filing an appeal is completely arbitrary and justice should not hang on a technicality, but to this I say that if you want to take advantage of the protections of the legal system, you also have to play by its rules. 30 days may be arbitrary, but it is not unfair (I am happily surprised to find the legal system pretty fair, albeit slow. Maybe it is slow because it is fair), and without someone setting the procedural rules, no justice could get handed down.

Back to studying my outlines. I'll be back. . . .

anonymous no more

I have been reading the Blog "Anonymous Lawyer" for some time now, and even though it is obnoxiously antithetical to so many of my values, I, like many other readers, just kept coming back for more. Although I always new the fictional stories from life of a hiring partner at a large firm were just that, fictional, I guess I assumed that they were simply exagerations of a real hiring partner. The blog does have that simultanious "this can't be real" / "this is how it must be" feeling of one who knows the life intimatly, but recently the author has been outed, and it turns out it is a law student. He is a 3L at Harvard and he doesn't want to be a lawyer. He wants to be a writer. An artist peeking into the law and reflecting its flaws. It will be interesting to see what happens to the blog now that he has been outed in the New York times.

Unpublished Opinions

This is a post that is probably only relevant to those readers who actually work in the legal field or will work in the legal field, but from the perspective of this One-L, the recent decision by the supreme court to allow citations to unpublished opinions seems to be pretty important. One of the frustrating aspects of learning legal writing is that you often come across a case you want to use in your memo only to find out that it is unpublished, thus holding no precedental value, but beginning in January 2007, this will no longer be the case. There is a long running debate, especially in our 9th Circuit about allowing unpublished opinions, because it will mean more work for appellate judges to write unpublished opinions with greater care, but I have come to law school in the era of online technology. We are given passwords to lexis and westlaw (combined wexis) before we even start school and our ability to access unpublished opinions is the same as published, which is one of the main reasons for changing the rules. It is just hard for me to imagine a time when I would have too actually look for cases in books (that would only contain the published opinions). So for me, I have been wondering since I got to law school why we can't just use the unpublished opinions, because this seemed like a logical consclusion of the way legal research is done, and it seems like the supreme court agrees. It is always good when the supreme court makes a decision that you have felt intuitively since starting school would be a good idea. Here is the text of the rule.

Classic Quotes

Another classic quote from law school lectures; this time from contracts:

"Talk about the contract litigation when the apocalypse comes: all the nice people will be gone and the jerks will be left to sue each other."

Moot Court Wrap Up

I have somewhat of a shorter entry this week and it is coming a bit later (it is a three-day weekend). I hope to bring back some deeper analysis next week, but on re-reading this, I think there is some worth in these late at night ramblings.

I. Case of the Week:

As I think back to this week, no case stands out as particularly interesting. I know I said I was going to talk about easements, but for some reason I just can’t get excited about disputes between parties pertaining to who has a right to the underground sewer pipes. In the words of our property Professor, “when you buy a house with plumbing, you believe that the effluent (this was his word and I have not yet figured out if this is the proper legal term or just how he describes the contents of sewers) must be able to go somewhere,” but just like the situation in that case, my Property (reading) is backed up and unknowingly filling the basement of my mind. In case you have not figured it out by reading these ramblings, let this be a reminder that I am full of s*#t. The reason for lack of preparedness (I still at least read all of the cases, unlike some of the students in our section [see last weeks post on passing in class]) was because I was working on our case for the moot court competition. Between getting all dressed up in my suit and standing in front of a panel of “mock judges” and a altogether independent presentation in our legal writing class called “senior partner meetings,” where a group of us associates in training presented legal research to the “senior partner,” I almost felt like a lawyer. My partner in the moot court competition even gave me a yellow legal pad before we had our day in court, but let us not get ahead of ourselves. Before my ego gets completely out of control, I must remember that my legal understanding is still trailing behind the costume, and there is still a lot to learn before anyone should trust me with their legal affairs, but that is what this is all about—this law school experience that still feels so new—and this was certainly a week were I felt first how far I have come along and secondly, how far I still have to go.

First, how far I have come: in preparing for moot court, I wrote an opening statement, I prepared a witness, I wrote questions for direct, I prepared questions for cross, and then I gave my open, directed my witness, crossed the opposing witness and objected to the other sides questions. I had no idea what I was doing. My understanding of litigation is entirely based on David Kelly and Law and Order, but somehow the “thinking like a lawyer” that our professors talked about so much at the beginning of the year has begun to pervade my thoughts, because in the midst of this exercise (completely hypothetical) I really began to believe our arguments. I believed in our case whole heartedly, and I felt what it might be like to make arguments for your client because you believe that they have rights.

Second, how far I must go: this is a summation of the advice given to me from the panel of judges: Look at the judges. It is important to make eye contact. This goes together with not using your notes too much. I used my notes as a crutch and know that I could have directed my client without them, but thus far my law experience has been all on paper, so it was difficult to stand up and intuitively react to a “legal situation.” Next, I told a story in my opening argument, but I also needed to outline the law that we were going to use and ask the judges to apply to the facts we were going to show in our “story.” There was a lot more, but one of the judges gave the advice that we shouldn’t think too much about this stuff. It was our first opportunity to get involved with litigation and we will have a lot of time to build on the experience.

II. At Lawge

Since I have been pretty involved in the moot court this week, I really have not kept up with the legal word outside of law school, but if you really need to see how the law applies to our everyday life, just go to any newspaper website and type in the words law, legal, court, etc. and you will get some story. I hate to disappoint my readers, all 3 of you, but this is going to be a short post this week. Don’t worry though. It is getting cloudy in Seattle again so it will be a lot easier to sit at the computer and write blog posts than it was in the last week of clear skies and sun.

III. Gossip Column

I have to say I was pretty impressed with the attitude of those fellow moot court participants. Everyone took it seriously, but from what I saw no one took it so seriously that they were not cordial with the other competitors. Even though there were six winners from 40, most of us were there just to improve our skills at lawyering. And for those who won, well, there were not real surprises. There are some people whose charisma and seemingly perpetual preparedness seem to just put them one step ahead of the curve and if the rest of use can put our egos aside for a minute, we can enjoy studying with these colleges. There are a few students, not the brightest, who seem unable to do this. They relate to this whole experience as a competition with the rest of the students and not as a collaborative learning experience. I understand that we have an “adversarial system,” but outside of the courtroom we are all trying to become the best lawyers we can be, or at least that is the ideal that I strive for. It is for this reason that I do not tell my grade to anyone, and I do not ask for anyone’s grades. I also try and compliment those students who do well in class, and for those who bomb, well, I will make fun of their ignorance on this blog.

IV. Judicial quote

I think this quote accurately describes how I felt about my mock court experience:

"I used to say that, as Solicitor General, I made three arguments of every case. First came the one that I planned--as I thought, logical, coherent, complete. Second was the one actually presented--interrupted, incoherent, disjointed, disappointing. The third was the utterly devastating argument that I thought of after going to bed that night."
-Robert H. Jackson, Advocacy Before the Supreme Court (1951)

Don't Mess with Texas

This is why I never plan on practicing law in Texas:

Legality Limits

First let me say that I am so greatful not to have crim law this semester. Going into finals with one less class is temporary insanity, not full blown crazy. Speaking of crazy, if you follow the Supreme Court, they heard a case today about the use of the insanity defense in Arizona and whether the Arizona statute is unconstitutionaly stringent in its requirements for making out and insanity defense. The defendant in this case was a 17 year old who thought that everyone in his whole town had turned into aliens, including his parents, and he ended up shooting a cop thinking he was one such alien. Sounds pretty crazy, but the catch is that for the defense to work you have to be so insane as to not to intend to do what you do, which is to not intend to kill. This kid knew what he was doing and intended to kill, but what he intended to kill was aliens. Here are the questions the supreme court was considering today:


05-5966 CLARK V. ARIZONA
DECISION BELOW: UNPUBLISHED
LOWER COURT CASE NUMBER: 1 CA-CR 03-0851; 1 CA 03-0985
QUESTIONS PRESENTED FOR REVIEW
(1) Whether Arizona's insanity law, as set forth in A.R.S. § 13-502 (1996)
and applied in this case, violated Petitioner's right to due process
under the United States Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment?
(2) Whether Arizona's blanket exclusion of evidence and refusal to
consider mental disease or defect to rebut the state's evidence on the
element of mens rea violated Petitioner's right to due process under
the United States Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment?
Cert. Granted 12/5/05

The reason this case caught my eye is that this is exactly the kind of stuff we learned about in our Crim law class. Our professor was not well loved, and it is pretty well agreed that we are going to all have to learn crim. law on our own in order to pass the bar. This is evidenced by the fact that although all 1000 pages of the casebook were assigned and supposidly covered during the semester, we spend most of the two-hour long, twice-a-week lectures talking about legality limits or listening to some story or another by our professor about cases he worked on or perps he met along the way. These stories, although not relevant to the exam he wrote, were usually entertaining and informative from a been-around-the-block kind of way, and they will probably stick around a lot longer in my mind than a memorized definition from the Model Penal Code. The same goes for the ideas behind analyzing legality limits. Other sections squacked when we told them what we were learning, but when I hear about a case like this, I realize that he left us with some analytical tools that are not only relevant but are very helpful. These are the kind of cases that get to the very essence of how we percieve punishment in America, and although I will be cursing my crim law prof come bar review time, in the long run, I am appreciative for his emphasis on understanding Due Process and Legality Limits. It is this kind of knowledge that makes one realize what one is learning at law school, that one can understand with greater subtlety a complex legal question that strikes at the heart of an issue relevant to our basic assumptions about governance, justice, humanity, and well, insanity.

Law-new-view's turns 50

I just noticed that this is the 50th post to this blog. I have already discussed the role of blogging at law school and even began to reflect on the One-L year in my last post, but I havn't talked about another event that has run simultaniously with this time in law school: living in Seattle. 50 posts in 8 months is not not really that many, and if I look back, most of those are weighted more heavily toward this end of the school year, but on the other-hand, 8 months is not that much time either, especially when you have to read and actively understand thousands of pages of legal texts. When I started law school, I also started a new life in a new city. Starting both at the same time seems to have made my integration into this new city somewhat slower. I still constantly confused when people talk about places in this city, although, as the weather gets nicer I have been out exploring on my bike. I know my neighborhood relatively well, but I am continually bumping into other law students who live a block or two away, and I had no idea that they even lived in the neighborhood. Outside of lawschool, I know maybe a dozen people in Seattle, and while I have met a lot of people in law school, as I said in my last post, it is healthy to have contact with others who are not struggling to learn the same things you are. This explains another aspect of moving to a new city for law school. It has been hard to make friends at law school. Part of that is that I moved here with my girlfriend and we formed a kind of sociel unit unto ourselves that I am sure affected the process of meeting others, but I also think law school itself is not condusive to making friends. Sure there are people I chat with at school, I chat with online, I occationally chat with on the street, but we are all under the same time constraints, and unless you make the library an opportunity to meet others (i.e. turn studying into a social event, which is pretty common) when you leave school, most people are going home to study or to spend time with people they know outside of law school. In addition, I think law school attracts certain types of individuals that I have previously tried to avoid. If I had thought about it before law school, I probably could have predicted that there would be a lot of frat boys and sorority girls in law school, but I guess I didn't let my mind wander there, so it was kind of a shock to realize that this sub-culture of individuals that I had purposely avoided for years had somehow returned in numbers not seen since living in the dorms as a freshman in college. This is not to say that there arn't people in law school that I find interesting or that I could see spending time with outside of school, but rather that this hasn't really happened yet. (summer is coming, which tends to bring people out of their winter-time hovels,) Otherwise, Seattle is a good place to live. It is easier to study when you don't want to go outside in the rain, but at the same time it can be demoralizing, especially if you come from a place with a lot of sun.

Welcome

Welcome to the second year of lawschool! The beginning of the second year is initiated with the call of little attention. Frankly, the boundary between the first and the second year is a blurry line between finals and searching for a summer job. So for those of you who were there with me for my first year either in person, at the distance, or in my virtual imagination of mysterious readers of my blog, I shall take this moment to thank you for your support, friendship, readership, comments, and patience and I welcome you to my official beginning of the second year of law school.

I have a good feeling about this year. I knew so little about the law or law school last year that I did not have too many expectations to be either disappointed or fulfilled, but now that I have been at this for a year, I have a little better idea of what this law thing is all about. I can say the same thing about blogging. When I first started to blog, I did not really know what I wanted out of the experience or how exactly I would use the medium, but I have grown to really value blogging as a creative outlet, and I hope to use this blog even more efficiently and hopfully more enjoyably than even last year. Probably every law school is filled with individuals like myself who had dreams of some sort of writing career in the past. Lawyering does afterall consist of a lot of reading and writing, but legal writing is, at least at this point, fairly rigid and until you are a judge, no one really wants to hear your opinion. Most legal writing is more like plagerism where you are recapping the applicaple law to a specific set of facts and using the law to make arguments about the way those facts should be be understood. Blogging, on the other-hand, is mostly opinion, and that is one of the reason it is so refreshing. Finally, law school is pretty absorbing, so keeping a journal of my experience of the law is like keeping a journal of much of the activity of my days.

I will be working on the links and such to this blog over the next couple of weeks, but the ball is rolling. Once classes start again, I will continue to post "Classic Lines from Law School Lectures" and I hope to resurect the "Law School Gossip" that was the subject of some posts last year. I will also use this space as a dumping ground for legal articles and sites that I find on the web that caught my interest. And hopefully soon I will be able to comment on work in the legal profession. The second year has the reputation for being the year when you work the hardest at law school, the first year being an intro, and the third being the time when students are just ready to be done. In all this I feel like I will be looking for the answer to one simple question, a kind of leitmotif throughout this blog. That question is goes something like: how does one do meaningful work in the law? What does it mean to be a lawyer or a law student today? what is the place of law in the greater scheme of society? what is my place? basically, how am I going to find meaningful work? and since the law will be a part of my life for probably most of the rest of my time on this planet, how do I make this work my own? How do I go from an uninformed student who sees the law as an interesting intellectual inquiry to one who can feel, live, understand, and make a life out of work in the law?

It might seem like that is more than one question, but they are all getting at the same point. On top of getting a job and learning as much as I can at school, answering that question is an essential next step in my legal education and understanding myself.

The best. . .

The best thing about going out to dinner with someone who is not in law school is that you realize how much you have learned. While you are in law school, how much you have learned is always compared with how much everyone else has learned, and no matter where you stand on that scale, you professors are always there to make sure you pale against them (not that they rub it in, but they just can't help being able to tick of the 9 elements of fraud as if they were telling you what groceries they need to pick up on the way home.) When you are out with your non- law school friends, even those that know a little bit about the law like my friend who I had dinner with tonight who reads Supreme Court slip opinions for fun, you begin to realize just how much you have absorbed over the year. I also notice this when I listen to NPR in the morning, which has been as essential part of my morning routine along with my cup of coffee for as long as I can remember. I begin to hear and understand concepts that I never picked up on before, like when the court grants certiorari or even things as simple as discussions about phases of a trial, described in Nina Totenburg’s firm but welcoming voice. It is good to get this perspective when you feel like you don't know anything, because if there is any way to describe One-L year, it is that you are constantly feeling like you don't know anything, because you are constantly learning new things. Just when you feel like you got a concept down, you move on to something new, and it doesn't really stop all year. It is good to always be learning, but sometimes it is nice to know that you actually have learned. For that, talking with another One-L just won't do. You got to go to an outside source.

Sharing Stress

As the end of the semester approaches, I wonder what is the best way to deal with the impending stress. You hear a lot of people talking about what they are doing to study, how far on their final memo they have progressed, and all they still have to do, and having these discussions can have at least two different effects. On the one hand it can cause you to feel a bond of companionship, a camaraderie with your fellow students as we are all in this together. On the other-hand, it can induce worries that arise only "but for" the conversations. By this time of the year, if you have not figured out for yourself what the best way to work on memos, brief cases, make outlines, or learn the material is, then you have a valid reason to stress. Otherwise, I think it is reasonable to say that we all know what we are doing. Now I have never been one to need to vent my stress to others, and I understand that for certain people discussing how stressed they are actually helps, but for me I would rather talk about something else and stress by myself, which means that if I am going to study at the library, I am going to have to make a b-line for the study carousel.

Besides the school work, this has been a pretty good week. I have been consistently working out this semester, and although this takes some time out of my day, it also helps clear my head and keeps me focused during the time I am studying. I also made croissants for the Environmental Club Bake sale which has been going on all week. I sat at the table yesterday afternoon trying to sell cookies to raise money and had a conversation with the girls at the Rigos Bar Review table, and one was so frustrated with Pres. Bush she wanted violent people's uprising. It is nice to meet some ultra-liberals at the school. I know there are others, but there are more young pro-business conservatives at law school than I have had to be around in the last 10 years combined. I am all for an occasional political debate, but as a friend once wisely said, sometimes you just want to have a conversation with someone who see things the way you do. That is the kind of venting that can relieve stress.

But before I get too caught up with thinking about violent takeovers, back to property

Momentum

Things are gaining momentum now. The library is busier than the long island train platform where Mrs. Palsgraph stood and there is a feeling that something is about to explode. Yes, it is that time of the semester again where everyone feels like there is not enough time to do all that we have to do. Our final memos are due in two weeks, classes end in three and finals begin shortly after that. I still have a lot of outlining to do, let alone reading that keeps piling on, but before this post drowns in the weight of pending stress, I want to point out another momentum that is gaining speed, and that is the progress of "thinking like a lawyer." "Thinking like a lawyer" is the ultimate goal of this year, and in studying for exams, we should try not to put the cart before the horse. If you can think like a lawyer, you will do well on the exams, but working to pass the exams does not necessarily mean that you will think like a lawyer. What does this mean exactly? The way I see it most clearly coming into play can be seen in the melding of ideas from different classes. The procedural knowledge from Civ. Pro. is making the understanding of Torts easier and the concepts from property come up in contracts, and on and on with almost daily examples of this kind of circular sharing of ideas.
That's all I wanted to say. Now I have to think like a lawyer and not spend a long time blogging so that I can focus on my real work: understanding express contractual conditions.

The Socratic Method

Blogging and questioning the efficacy of the Socratic method is shared by law students all over this country. I cam across this post on a blog called One-L Hell

My contracts professor described the the Socratic method as similar to electroshock, where the student is led further and further to an absurd legal conclusion. At the point where your logic fails, your gut instinct fills in, and hopefully, if the professor has done his job correctly, you will not worry so much about "having the right answer," and can actually be present in the class to hear the question, pause, think about it, and answer from a place of gut understanding. This is an ideal situation. Yesterday in Civ. Pro, our prof spent ten minutes going down the row through about 20 students trying to elicit an answer to a question about removal. To the rest of us who were not in that row, it felt like a complete waist of time, but then again, the answer always seems a lot clearer when you are not hooked up to the electroshock machine. while taking a break from Contracts.

Classic Lines from Law School Lectures

Here for the first time in what should become a regular instalment, Classic Lines from Law School Lectures:

From Torts: "Comparative negligence and res ipse comparisons are like comparing apples and dreams of oranges"

From Property: "Well, there is at least one way to get out of a Joint-Tenancy? Anyone? You could kill your wife (but you might have some other problems)"

Spring Brings in the New

As you can see, I have been updating the look and feel of this blog recently. As I was thinking about what blogging means and about the phenomenon of social networking websites, I though I should spruce up this blog a bit. I promise that I will return to thoughts about law school and that no amount of cool widgets and profile features can make up for lack of interesting writing (or can they?), but in the mean time there are some cool new parts of law-new-view.

1) My Library: you can scroll down and check out the books that are in my personal library. Besides my bicycle, my books make up probably my biggest asset. When you are twenty-nine and this is the case, it does indicate something about what I have been doing with my time. There is a cool site, Library Thing, that allows you to catalogue all of your books, and in my little spare time I have been slowly building my online catalogue. Right now I have pretty much only made it through my German books, so it will give somewhat of a skewed view of the kind of books I spend most of my time reading, but then again, before studying the law, I did receive a Masters in German Literature and Philosophy.

2) My Profile: For a while I was afraid to put too much personal information on this site, and although I hear that big law firms will Google applicants and search for them on Myspace to find out if that person has a juicy personal life that would conflict with the values of a firm, I don't think I have said or will say anything that I wouldn't feel comfortable with an employer knowing (with one disclaimer, if you right now are a future employer, I don't always write my posts were perfect grammar or impeccable legal logic, but that is not for lack of the capacity to do so). Secondly, I think I was just nervous about having that much public information about myself accessible to anyone who could access it, but after I began to see just how much social interaction actually takes place on the web these days, this did not seem to be such a big deal. Call me old fashion, but I am still part of a generation of individuals that worked on Comador 64's, Apple IIe's and had a non-html "pine" e-mail account all through college. I didn't exactly come-of-age in the internet era, unless we consider my current focus on career, health, and greater personal relationships a coming of age. I did start out on a whole new path when I came to law school last fall, and this does feel like for the first time in my life I have a long term goal, a direction, a focus, and a chance to have a few greater assets than some bookshelves full of books (not that I don't value what I got from the books, but, god, what I wouldn't give to go on a trip to Mexico at the end of this semester. Would I give all my books? All? Couldn't I keep just a couple? OK. Anyone want to trade? I keep a dozen books, you back a week's getaway in Mexico, and you get all the rest of the collection? It could happen. . .check out what this guy traded for one red paper clip!)

3) Finally, I am testing out a new function that allows me to post comments as a MP3 files from any telephone. I can't quite picture a situation where I would use this feature, but you never know until you have it.

So that is what is new around here, as well as law school, which is on the verge of getting very busy. We just were assigned our fourth and final memo, finals are about a month away, I am only about halfway through outlining, and I am sure we will be learning new material right up until the end. I may not have time for all of this fun stuff, but I will try and keep you updated during the last push to the end of the semester.

BBBbbbllllloooog!

There comes a point for many bloggers when the burden to blog 'bout blogging itself bares the benefit of a few moments of the blogger's busy babble. Blogging is a relatively new phenomenon and since blogging is self reflective by its very nature, it makes sense that you often see blogging about the phenomenon itself. Blogs can be many things. There are opinion,blogs where people find a forum for their incessant takes on this or that, because their friends/family/co-workers just don't seem to care as much as the illusion of an audience (or in many cases an actual audience that you never knew existed) that blogging provides. Then there are blogs about all sorts of interests: cooking, hiking, reading, you name it there is a blog for it. Then there are the random observation blogs, much like this one, that seem to collect the detritus of one's web-surfing, external observations, and internal dialogues. This blog probably falls into that category, although I certainly could write about many other aspects of my life but have chosen for mine and everyone else's sake to limit it to the general theme of life in law school. (disclaimer: I am sure there are many other different types of blogs, but I am not going to get into that here)

Beside blogs, there are a whole series of "social network" sites out there such as MySpace and Facebook, which incorporate some of the elements of blogging (usually a personal blog is one part of these sights) along with friends comments, and are a host to a plethora of profile-type information (favorite foods/classes/movies/etc). These sites are especially popular with teenagers and law students, both of which seem to have plenty of time to gossip with their friends, post videos, and take personality quizzes to post to your site. There has been plenty of hype about Myspace lately and again, I do not really wish to get into a discussion of such activities but to say my dabbling with that world left me frightened--either because it disturbed my deep Luddite longings or because I saw the vast potential for "time-sucking" (if that word hasn't been coined yet, I want credit).

For me, I am happy with this blog. Since I am in law school and my time is limited, I think I will keep my focus on this particular vehicle for maintaining my presence on the web. I realize it doesn't have the same social networking capabilities, and comments are left anonymously and not with nifty pictures of my friends, but be it selfishness or just taste, I like this medium. I really never even thought people would read this blog, but as I began to take a greater interest in the quality of my posts, I began to want people to also read them. I have told more people in the last months and I am even thinking of e-mailing all the people in my adress book with a link just in case they want to keep up on these observations. I guess our personality in cyberspace does take on some of the characteristics of who we are in real life. I have a tendency to be, well, slow to let other's in on what is going in on my life (so I hear from my parents) and it has taken more than six months to really think, hey, maybe I should share this little piece of internal dialogue. We'll see.

As far as this blog goes, it has never really been one thing. There was that phase where I was very structured, posting weekly with specific themes for specific sections and as of late my posts have been more ad hoc. I guess I haven't figured out what I like best: maybe a combination of both, but I am sure this will not be the end of the evolution, and the whole point of this was to chronical the first year of law school. You might ask, what does blogging have to do with that? Well, for one, the legal profession, consisting mostly of reading and writing, is full of blogs, blogging, and bloggers, and two, anyone who has been in a law school lately will notice that everyone is on the computer and that a huge percentage of social interaction and connection takes place through IM, blogging, profiles, social networks, e-mail, etc. You can't fight the flood, but you can choose the boat you want to float in.

Law School, Drinking, and Editing

I have had a comment that my last post was somewhat difficult to follow and that maybe it was not written in the most clear and concise language. Before you get suspicios, that was not the result of trying to write while drunk but rather was caused by the fact that I wrote that post while taking a break from editing my legal writing memo. After five hourse of getting all my commas in the right place and making sure everything sounded logical I guess I just wanted to write without that little mental editor getting in the way. So if you are reading this post first, read the following post without trying to make much sense out of it. Stream of conscious writing is not popular in legal writing, but as a break from such writing ,it is wonderfully theraputic.

Law School and Drinking

In light of recent converastions taking place on this blog concerning drinking (and believe me, I am flattered that people care enough to notice when I update and leave their comments on posts) I thought I would weigh in on the subject. I don't know if suprises non-law students that plenty of drinking goes on at lawschool. From my other life experiences, alchohol doesn't appear to be any less, or greater, of a social lubricant amoung those who aspire toward professional careers of the mind than it was amoung the cooks, stagehands, truck-drivers, and law-mowers I have worked with in the past. Alchohol is a universally appreciated drug. In fact, there have been several books published in the last couple of years that have tried to undersatnd the high level of drug use and alchohol abuse in the legal profession, and the general, overly simplified, explaination seems to be that the pressure, compitition, and discretionary wealth are perfect soil to plant a socially acceptable addiction (and being a lawyer or doctor are for many familys the pinacle of socially acceptable). For me the most shocking realization, and in that matter difference from drinking in other professions I have observed, is that drinking for lawyers is seen as less of an escape from the difficulties of your work and life, but as an acceptable and in many ways encouraged behavior. The most pathetic example of this is when you see the most like professor of our section, who is mostly liked by ladder climbing egotistical emulators of the idea of intellectual sucess and who, despite his genuine concern for helping students, basks in the sunlight of their pathetic praise, when you see him joking around with students about how drunk they got on the Friday night before a review session as if it was a right of passage on one's succesful path toward partner. (if that is the only fun allowed an associate outside of his 80 hour work week, I have some serious doubts about life at a law firm).

Let me say, I have problem no with drinking per se. And I myself have not been immune from binge drinking, although I am making an effort to maintain as many brain cells as I have left in order to learn the law as well as loose the beer belly that was beginning hanging over my belt like a bowling ball in a baseball mit. My major gripe at this moment is that it is difficult to meet other law students for activities besides drinking. I understand we are all busy with studying, g/f's, b/f's, working out, jobs, etc, but there must be social life that is somewhere between a study group and a drinking game. If it is out there, let me know. E-mail your thoughts to hiltops@gmail.com and I will compile them into a later post.