classic lines from law school lectures, or not!

Things are still kind of crazy over here. Saturday is my admin law final and I am going to be working for most of the rest of the week. I have had guests in town from Germany, and even though their timing could not have been worse, when friends I haven't seen in 5 years decide to plan their whole trip to American around visiting the town where I live, I have no problem rearranging my schedule a little bit. It has actually been quite nice. I have been a bit of a tourist in Seattle over the last couple of days. I rode the ferry to Bainbridge yesterday and today we went to the aquarium. Starting tomorrow I am going to send them off with a map on their own.

At least I am not taking the bar which starts tomorrow; I still have another two years to prepare for that torture. Studying for Admin law is comparatively mild, which is not to say that it is enjoyable. I have been thoroughly enjoying my work in the law, but class has been a real drag. Probably the most valuable knowledge I gained from taking this class was about myself. I am pretty sure i no longer want to work in environmental law, which largely consists of admin work (discussing the difference in regulating .oo1 and .002 percent of particulate matters and what standard of review should be used to decide if the EPA can set a standard at all if the statute claims they should take all feasible steps to prevent pollution.) I think I am going to have to eat crow for some comments I made earlier this semester about the student who wanted our teacher to just teach us what is going to be on the bar. Right now, I would be grateful if he had only have that focus in his teaching. Today, actually right now since I am writing this during class, he is reading us verbatim the Washington Public Disclosure Act and giving us short comments about each section. I could see how this might be helpful if everything he said was not completely obvious. I think he can be pretty sure that all of us know how to read. Having taught classes myself as a grad student, I know that when a teacher starts to read the assigned text verbatim to the class that he has not prepared anything for that class.

A lot of people complain that law professors are lawyers who couldn't make it in the real world, but if teaching is what they are good at, I prefer a good teacher any day to a bad teacher with lots of real world experience. The two teacher I have had so far with "lots of real life legal experience" have been the worst teachers and have made their subjects seem utterly uninteresting. Give me any day a teacher who failed in practice but who can make the UCC interesting to a man who has been deeply involved in Government for his whole life and who thinks it would be fun to teach in his retirement but has no idea how to make even controversial topics interesting. Admin law professors are, as a friend described them, much like CPAs. The closest thing to a sense of humor in this class came when our teacher made a comment about "pre-mature adjudication," which would have been funny if he hadn't felt it necessary to also point out that "it sounds like something else, doesn't it?" That turned from funny to creepy pretty quickly. Explain the subject, not your bad jokes! The only other memorable moment came when he performed what I have called the "Admin Law strip tease." During one of our almost two-hour-long classes last week, he slowly took off various pieces of clothing--tie, jacket, button down shirt--until he was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of an endangered bird. It just so happened that he revealed his support of endangered species at the exact moment in class when we were reading a case about the endangered species act. To me, that is just gimmicks. When you can't teach, you blame your students for being lazy or you try gimmicks such as described above or you bring food to class. While I in no way want to give the impression that I did not appreciate the blueberries he brought to class last week, but I would prefer an engaging lecture even more.

That said, I have to try and teach myself admin law in the next 5 days. That is not going to be especially easy, but if there is one more thing that I have learned from this class, it is that learning the law is up to me. I can't count on the professor to impart some great wisdom, no matter how much he supposedly has stored far off in some recess of his real-world-experience mind. So, I'll be back next week to let you know how it goes.

quick update

Don't think I have abandoned you blog. I am still here, and I am still making observations about the law and law school, but they have taken a back-seat to the actual practice of law. I have entered a somewhat different stage in my transition toward becoming a lawyer. Everyone says that when you leave law school, you are a different person than the one you are when you arrive, but this process has many different stages and some build on the previous stages and some consume them. Even though the One-L year was overwhelming, it also left me plenty of time to be reflective, whereas my summer working/volunteering/night-class-in-admin-law leaves me very little time to reflect on what I am doing. It is all very new, exciting, and engaging, but unlike the past year, I do not feel I need the release of this blog journal to keep the chaos in check. I have entered a stage where I am doing without thinking--which is not to say that I don't do a lot of thinking at my job or in class. I use my mind, but I use it for the purposes of practicing law as opposed to thinking about what it means to practice law. I am sure once I get my feet on the ground and begin to feel "legal" in a more intuitive way, I will be in a position to reflect on it, and the likely place to look for those reflections will be this blog, but until then I am a little too engaged to step outside and want to look in.

The only small wisdom I can bring forth today is more of a public service announcement: in the last years, I have somehow become more relaxed, or fatalistic, about wearing my seat belt, but after a wrongful death case came across my desk last week, I have had a sudden resurgence of a desire to make sure I live as long as possible. When you read about car accidents all day long, you realize how quickly an accident can occur, and while one party is usually "at fault," I see again and again how just about anyone can have a spmall lapse in attention at the wheel, and the difference between the "at fault" driver and the "injured party is not always clear cut. That said, personal injury is mostly a game between lawyers and insurance adjusters, but if you can do anything to make sure you stay out of that game as a driver, then you should do it.

Summer time

Supreme Court Sum Up

It definitely feels like summer now. With the Supreme Court wrapping up last friday, I can take a break from following the daily output of 9 old sedentary authorities and follow the turns and twists of 150 sweaty young men. Yes, the Tour de France started on Saturday, and with the top 5 riders from past years out of the race (Lance retired and the next four caught up the the Spanish doping scandal) it proves to be an interesting year for lesser known riders. For those who find watching bike racing to be an increadibly boring and worthless way to spend time, don't forget that following the Supreme Court holds comparitively less excitement, and yet there are those of us that wake up and check the docket like the sports pages to see what opinions have been released. If you are reading this and feeling hopelessly left out because you happened to have missed an entire year of legal opinions from the most important court in the country, there was a wonderful wrap up in this Sunday's Times, including a great many graphs, that summarizes the most important decisions of the year. Roberts is at Court's Helm, but he isn't. . .

As for the tour, because I don't have cable I have to watch it at a bar. Luckily, I just discoverd that the Summit Public House, which is only a couple of blocks from my appartment is legendary for showing the Tour and gathers quite a crowd of bike geeks for the replay at 5:00. It is actually the perfect place. It gets me out of the appartment and has the added bonus that they allow dogs. George has been on his best behavior sitting at the foot of my barstool quietly watching the door and steeling the attention of all of the girls as I watch the tour. He was even rewarded by the barkeep with some leftover bacon, so he probably won't mind going back.