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.