vacation

my body finally gave out on me after a crazy past six week which included finals, a move to a new city, and a new job. I spent the bulk of the last two days asleep on my parents couch with a cold. It doesnt help that I am experienceing a bit of altitude sickness for the first time in my life. It is a bit frustrating to have grown up in Colorado and feel the altitude so much. It doesnt help that my parents live at over 9000 feet. The mountain views and the sound of the creek make up for it. I hope I am feeling better for the bachelor party tomorrow. Otherwise I am going to exercise a lotof self controll.

our puppy

It works. I sent this picturefrom my phone.technology is cool. And to think, I used to be a ludite.

what a week. . .

Where do I begin. So much happened this week. I cannot even begin to describe to you all of the new experiences, starting with Monday morning arraignments in a courtroom packed with defendants, attorneys, families, cops, crazy guys in cuffs. I mostly just watch and try to absorb as much as I can. I have not gotten to do much yet. I am restricted from speaking in court until my Rule-9 card is approved by the Bar association (a limited license to practice law.) I have been in court every day. I watched a whole jury trial, sat through lots of motion calenders, have already seen a criminal plead out on Monday and get arraigned again on new charges on Thursday, have been to jail twice, found out the punk-kid who got the not-guilty verdict in our jury trial lives in my apartment complex, and am researching about drug paraphernalia.

And that was just at work. I also had a chance this week to meet, and briefly chat with the governor at a fund raiser I was invited to. Also present were lots of lawyers from the county, city counsel members, the county prosecutor, and other politically involved citizens. After two years of relatively limited assimilation in Seattle, I feel like I am part of a community after only living here for only about a month.

Oh, did I say, I really like criminal law. Now, I know it is only the first week, but I think I am going to really enjoy this work. One of the things I like is that half the time you are still sitting at a desk, but the rest of the time you are standing up in court. I am still a bit intimidated. Things move fast. The judge gets through about sixty cases in just over an hour during a trial call or arraignment. I am definitely not ready to keep all the paperwork together on my own, but they seem to be phasing me in slowly. In fact, I am going to be on vacation next week. So before I can gather more stories from the world of crime, I will be back in Colorado for a week.

As for blogging, I am trying to set up mobile blogging from my cell phone, so look for that in the interim.

New Direction

I start my new internship tomorrow. I am a little nervous. Even though I was not completely happy with the work at my old job, I knew what I was doing, and I felt pretty successful in my work, but starting tomorrow, I am going to be in completely new waters. It is not correct to say that I know nothing of criminal law. I took the required criminal law class; my legal writing II appellate brief dealt with a criminal issue; and, I have been in law school now for two years. Even though I am starting at the beginning again in some ways, I more prepared for legal work now than I did at the beginning of last summer. On the other-hand, this is all speculation now. I will probably be writing here later this week about how I have absolutely no idea what I am doing.

Besides being a little nervous, there are a lot of things I am looking forward to:

1. short commute. I only commuted from Everett to Bellevue for three weeks and that was enough for me. I am trying not to think about the fact that next fall I will still have to go to school. Is there some way I can skip my third year?

2. lots of court time. From what I can tell, I am going to be in court almost every day. We probably won't get any Paris Hiltons in municipal court here, but I am sure there will be plenty of drama. The other prosecutors I have met have lots of stories about defendants (mostly the stupid things they do.) I don't know if it is possible to do this work and not get jaded about crime. One long time prosecutor told me a story about how he saw an old man talking to child on the street one day and he was thinking "child-molester," but when he walked by he heard the child say "ok, grandpa."

3. connections. They tell you at the beginning of law school that you get your jobs from the people you know. That was not the case on the first job I got, but I had a little help on this one (I'll keep my sources secret.) Since I will be interning in Snohomish County/Everett, I am going to get to know other lawyers here, and I hope after I graduate I can get a job near here too. Apropos connections, tomorrow night I get join my girlfriends firm to dinner with the Governor. Our first question for her is going to be why it takes two and one-half hours to get a driver's license in this state. (now you know what I did Saturday)

4. a break from convincing insurance adjusters that $500 in property damage, and a two month delay before an injured individual seeks chiropractic care can still mean a person was severely injured. Anything can happen, but I am just ready to advocate for some different clients.

A shave and a hair cut

For those of you who do not see me on a regular basis were probably surprised to see my clean face and short hair. I have had that look for a while. It is part of my "look like I could fit in in a courtroom look," and it seems to have paid off. I was just offered a new job this afternoon. No, not at the firm that would not call me back. He did not offer me the job. I finally called after three weeks and he told me he offered it to someone else (thanks for letting me know.) Its the other job I applied for: law enforcement (darn, I should have kept the mustache, but then I might get mistaken for a cop.) I will be starting an internship at the City of Everett Prosecutor's Office next week. I should fit in as a prosecutor with the clean shave. It sounds like they will get me into court as soon as possible, which is exactly what I wanted. I will be mostly working on DUIs, domestic violence, and other municipal criminal violations, but it sounds like the perfect place to get my feet wet, and I no longer have to commute to bellevue. I am a little nervous, but I'll get over that.

New Look

Well, law-new-view has a new look. I will be making a few more changes, but for the most part, I think I am ready to go through the end of law school and into the bar. Other new features include the capacity to leave comments which never seemed to work with my last template, and searching all of my past post all the way back to the beginning of One-L.

I have been thinking a bit about the last year. It was a long and frustrating year. Was I worked to death as the saying goes? It did not really feel like it. I certainly did not spend as much time on law school as I did in the first year. On the other-hand, I can't remember a Sunday evening throughout the whole last semester where I was not working on either my legal writing or another paper. It was more relentless than anything else, and the fact that I had learned how get a lot more done with less work took some of the mystic out of law school. It was more like a problem that I simply had to work through. It was not especially engaging, but not yet entirely boring. I was law school's middle child.

Now a look ahead. I am looking for a new job, but I have not found anything that is both something I want to do and in the right location. I am commuting to Bellevue and working at the same firm I have been working at for the last year. I go back and forth with my feelings about work. Some days I really enjoy the work. I am getting much better at the work and it is still a lot of fun to settle a case. I have been there long enough now that I have worked on some cases from the very beginning when our clients were injured, through writing their demand and finally working out a settlement. I have a bit more independence now, and since I have been working full time, I have gotten to do some different tasks like draft complaints and edit interrogatories. I am looking for a job that will get me into court at least occasionally, but I am having the same problem I had last spring: lawyers do not call back. I interviewed twice at a firm, and then they told me they would have a decision in a few days. That was two weeks ago. I have called once and left a message with his secretary and also a voice mail. I still have not heard anything. At this point, I don't care if he offers me the job or not. I did want to work there, but that is simply rude and inappropriate. I already have a job, which removes some of the stress, but I simply want to know whether to tell my old job if I am leaving. Even if he isn't offering me the job, the lest he could do is return my phone calls and let me know.

Oh well, maybe I just don't understand how hard it is to be a lawyer and how your work is more important than common decency (add sarcasm yourself). I would like to think that even when I have my own firm, I will return phone calls. A week is understandable, two weeks and two follow up calls. . .???

Thanks blog for letting me vent my frustrations.

Quick Update

I am still in the middle of a blogging hiatus. Since the end of the spring semester, I have moved to Everett, gotten a puppy, and started working full time. I have a lot of ideas I want to blog about, but it will be a few more weeks until I have the time or stability to start writing again. Check back some time in June. Happy summer!

Note to Readers

Over the course of the next couple of days, I am going to attempt to merge all of my law school blogs into one blog so that all of the drama, the tears, the joys, the boredom can be found in the same place. You would think there would be an easy way to do this, but it looks like my new summer free time will be used copying posts from one blog to the next. We'll see how long that lasts.

Finished!

About 15 minutes ago, I printed out my Medical Liability take-home final. That means I am finished with the semester. I do not have the same sense of relief as at the end of my 0ne-L year. On the other hand, I am not completely exhausted. I have done a better job of striking a balance between my personal life and my school life (some times I think too good of a balance) and in a lot of ways, not that much will change. I have been working through finals, and now I will just be working full time. It is true that I am not taking classes this summer, and for that I am very happy. I need a break from school before I can face the last year, which by all reports is just an excuse for the law school to rob you of another $25,000.

Blogger's Life

For you faithful readers, you can tell I have been in a bit of a slump with this blog lately.  I am rethinking exactly what I want to accomplish here when I pick up with my 3-L blog.  I will blog a bit more to wrap up this year, then take a bit of a hiatus from thinking about law school, and will hopefully be back in the blogging business with a new look and new enthusiasm at the beginning of June. 



I would really appreciate from any of you who read my blog regularly any thoughts you might have on what works and what does not work. Are there topics you would like to see more of or topics I cover too much.  As law school life because lest, well, important, I am considering using this as more of a political/legal blog. On the other-hand, some of my best writing has been about the mundanities of law school. I would like to get more regular about my posting, which means I need to be more enthusiastic about the topics.  Any thoughts? 



In the meantime, I have been gathering some interesting reading on blogging that I will share with you:



A story on blogger etiquette

A story about a blogger journalist who is taken seriously.



An, somewhat related, the first supreme court opinion which included a hyperlink to a video. You can find it at this site, and the case is Scott v. Harris.



I have to get back to studying for my evidence final. 

Con law continues

I may be done with Constitutional Law of Terrorism, but that class just seems to live on.  John McKay is in the news again, and terrorism will be in the news long after this prosecutor scandal is over.  In some ways, I wish that class would just keep going on.  It was not unusual that there would be major news directly related to the topic of conversation for the day, such as a supreme court opinion or a major news development.  I have also never seen so much online discussion on a class website before.  It is rare if one or two people ever post in the TWEN discussion section, but for this class we had people posting several times a week and often in response to each other.  I think this indicates a need to continue having discussions on terrorism and the many constitutional issues it creates.  I'll have to see if there is some way to keep the discussion going. 

An all-nighter puts me three down, two to go

I pulled my first all-nighter of law school last night. It was probably avoidable, but I had too good of a weekend to regret anything now. In fact, I find that as I worked through the night on my treason and terrorism paper, I was enjoying law school about as much as I have all semester. This has been a very disjointed semester, and I have not been able to get excited about my work until these last minute spurts of engagement. I believe I have been writing about this two-L slump for a while now and today, on two hours of sleep, and two finals still ahead of me, I do feel I am being worked to death.

I had my appellate argument on Friday afternoon, which was probably the best part of legal writing all semester. After 15 weeks of working on the same case, all I had to do was get up in front of a bunch of wanna-be judges (local attorneys) and discuss the most important issues. It was actually quite enjoyable, which is just further proof to myself that I want to be in a courtroom. My forensics class wrapped up last Wednesday, and a few hours ago I turned in my paper for Constitutional law of Terrorism. All I want to do now is sleep. The worst thing is that my computer has been acting a bit weird for the past couple of days and now I am just hoping it will get me through the week. I don't really need any notes off of the computer because for the two classes I have left, I have pretty much stopped taking notes in class. I also don't brief cases anymore or make outlines and with Legal Writing II this semester, there were many a days when it was lucky if I had done the reading for evidence. I guess that means I have five days to learn everything for the exam.

I have had a hard time knowing what to write here lately. I think it reflects my general malaise with law school. I am in the process of looking for a new job right now, so I don't even really have much enthusiasm for my work. I am not unhappy there, but I am going to be moving north and I want to make the commute easier and maybe work for an attorney who gets into the courtroom more often. The key to the personal injury mill that I work at now seems to be to stay out of court. It works for her and I have leaned a lot, but it is time to move on. I am going to miss that job, but I have been bored there for a couple of months cranking out the same negotiation letters to adjusters. I still enjoy that game, but I would like to mix it up with some real court time, especially since I can qualify for a rule 9 (limited license to practice law under the supervision of an attorney) after this semester.

Again, I do not know what to write about. Maybe the lack of sleep is affecting me. I felt great all through the night and was really enjoying the mental puzzle of whether or not treason could be used as an effective tool in the war on terror. I will be posting my paper online here shortly if anyone is interested in reading it. I was actually quite pleased with the final product.

I am boring myself here, so I won't make you read anymore.

Some Legal Advise

I wanted to pass on some of the advise for law students and young lawyers that I have heard lately. As the semester wraps up, professors are attempting to teach us what we actually need to know for practice--something that might have been missed amidst the mass of information we had to learn during the semester.

At lease a half-dozen times in the past month, different people have given me the same advise, so it must be important: make nice with the clerks. I have repeatedly heard that your best friend in court is the clerk and the nicer you are to the clerks, the better you will get along. Several people have also said that buying them a Starbucks gift card at Christmas will go a long way.

Secondly, I have been told to do the hardest work first. This is not so much legal advise, but good advise for pretty much any difficult task you have in life. The difficult projects are always going to be there, so it is just better to get them done first.

Finally, the oft repeated phrase of my evidence professor: "the other side is smarter and better prepared than you."

Blame Game

In the wake of Monday's tragic shooting, lots of people have been quick to look for someone to blame. Could the police have done more? Could his professors have done more? Could the university have done more? It is not as if people did not try and help Cho Suen-Hui. Professors tried to speak with him and get him into counseling, his roommates tried repeatedly to get him involved in their life, and he was even committed to a mental hospital for some time (read a good summary of the details here.) I think when it comes down to finding someone to blame, I cannot find anyone but Cho himself. This kid was very very disturbed. People knew it, but he had learned a way to keep them away. His roommates and teachers eventually accepted that it was not possible to even get close enough to help, but no one imagined that he would be so violent.

Of course, in hindsight, you can always see things that could have or might have been done, but what strikes me, is that our culture has such deep respect for individual freedom that we pretty much let people be who they are unless they are causing other's harm. I am sure Cho is not the first English major who turned in disturbing writings. Some turned into famous writers. We live in a country that gives individuals the freedom to write what they want no matter how disturbing. We value this freedom so much that we allow students to keep writing such stories, albeit with concern. Of course, individual freedom does not extend to the freedom to harm others, but the fact that Cho was living in the dorms amongst other students shows how accepting we are of people who are clearly painfully anti-social, disturbed, weird. I wish someone had been able to get inside his head and alter the path of his life. It is clear that people tried, but if anything is to blame it is not that students are mean, bullying, teasing, and cruel as was cited for the Columbine shooting, but rather that students were too accepting. I saw an interview with Cho's roommate last night and he said he just kind of accepted that Cho was who he was and let him go about his business.

America has received a lot of bad press in the last six years, but when it comes down to it, we are the most accepting people in the world. You can be who ever you want to be in this country and that freedom is incredibly important to us. Cho did not understand this and it is his fault he felt so much anger. He is the only person to blame for these tragic killings.

2-L Dilemna

I feel a bit of a quandary right now. I don't feel the same enthusiasm about the law that carried me through my first year and part of the second. Maybe this is simply the 2-L doldrum before seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. My 3-L friends are all talking about graduation. Yes, the terror of the bar exam looms silently over their graduation party plans, but there is an overwhelming sense of relief when they talk about law school. We, the 2-Ls, law school's middle child have only another year of school ahead of us.

Work has also not helped. I have only been able to work a day or a day and one half each week all year long. This places limits on how involved with work I can become. It feels like I go in, spend a few hours remembering what I was doing, do a little bit of work, and then am gone for another week. One thing I look forward to this summer is being able to work 5 days a week.

Until then, all I can do is just push through the next three weeks. I have to write a 25 page paper on treason and terrorism, give my oral argument for legal writing, take my evidence exam, and write a take home exam. If the end of this semester goes as past have, I will probably be blogging more frequently.

Apropos blogging. We had a panel of journalists in our constitutional law and terrorism class yesterday. One of the journalist made reference a couple of times to those uncredible bloggers. I do not claim to be journalism, but as a blogger for the past couple of years, I feel a bond with those other self-made publishers and it is interesting to see how those in traditional arbiters of information feel threatened by rogue writers. However, one thing bloggers could probably use is some editors. There should exist a consortium of bloggers who also function as editors for each other's works. The same logic applies for movie directors who produce their own movies. (did you see that horrible Kong!) Without editors, we tend to just ramble on, so I will stop now.

University Life

The Virginia Tech shooting today is horribly tragic. Maybe I feel more disturbed by this tragedy because I am still attending University. I have always enjoyed the quiet sanctuary of a University. There is still a piece of me that longs for the professorial life, and I spent almost all of the last 12 years in some way connected to a University. I cannot imagine how those students, especially those who live on campus, are feeling tonight. Even after the threat is gone, that sanctuary has been punctured. I do not know what is going on lately with these shootings. In the last couple of weeks there has been this shooting, the shooting at the CNN building, the shooting at the University of Washington, and a couple of months ago at the mall in Utah. Is this a trend? Or is it that we simple hear about these events immediately through the channels of modern media? My thoughts are with all of those who lost loved ones and friends and all of the students in Virginia.

Legal Writhing

My legal writing brief is due tomorrow, so I haven't been doing much more than that in the last couple of days. The problem I am up against now is that the school has placed an unrealistic page limit on our brief. I was looking through some Division II criminal briefs as examples and most of the briefs are over 30 pages and only cover two issues. We are expected to cover three issues and do it all in 25 pages. I know it is because the professors do not want to read more than that, but it is an unrealistic expectation. I realize that there is something to be learned by forcing conciseness and courts do not like excessive wordiness, but I definatly cannot get all my arguments covered in 25 pages. I have already cut two whole pages of text and have a page and one-half to go.

I'll admit it; I suffer from a specific writer's malady that makes cutting down tough. My ego is wrapped up with my writing, so when I cut out whole sentences, I feel like I am cutting something important out simply because I wrote it.

I should take some lessons from our new Chief Justice, John Roberts. In his first dissent for the court in Massachusetts v. EPA, he wrapped up his views in 14 pages. Granted, justices have more leeway in dissenting opinions because they do not have to worry about being binding. It is simply a place for them to say how the rest of the judges got it wrong, and he dismissed the case based on standing. Regardless of the merits of his global warming opinion, his writing style is wonderful. He is very concise and easy to read, especially compared to Steven's majority opinion. The other thing that worries me about Steven's opinion is the creation of a new basis for standing, a "special solicitude" for Massachusetts. Robert's called this "an implicit concession that petitioners cannot establish standing on traditional terms" Id at 44. The majority creates a new standing doctrine without citing any precedence. Maybe this is revenge by the liberal justices for the court choosing Bush as president in 2000, or as one blogger said, this case should be renamed Bush v. Gore's Movie.

Weekend Update II

Before the weekend gets too far away, I wanted to finish the posts I have been meaning to wright about it. On Saturday I celebrated my 30th Birthday. It was a great night. I invited a bunch of friends to come bowling with me (to get in the mood of the year I was born.) Even people who did not think they were going to bowl got on the rented shoes and rolled. There is just something so fun about knocking things down, especially when you throw in your friends and a bunch of pitchers. I must be getting old though, because I didn't end up in the gutter by the end of the night. I have learned recently that it takes a lot more out of me if I drink too much, so I have been taking it easy.

Also, now that I am getting older, I thought I should get a more clean cut hair cut. I had the barber chop off that mop that was growing on my head recently and I got rid of the mustache that was also taking us back to 1977. I almost look courtroom ready, but alas, I still have more than a year of school. It seems like too much school. I saw a friend from high school this weekend who started medical school the same time I started law school. He was out here during a break after finishing the first portion of the Boards. He is done with the classroom aspect of his education. What? Maybe you didn't read that right. Yes, in medical school, they understand that practical education is as important as classroom education. Law schools have not quite learned that. I think its because they don't want to give up that third year of tuition money, but from what I can tell, the third year is pretty much a waist. And it would be a lot more helpful if that year was used as part of a full year apprenticeship. I do not think anything will change any time soon, because the only people with the power to make that kind of change are people who have already completed law school and the bar exam. They simple do not have any motivation to make things more efficient.

I better get back to legal writing. I am going to a Mariner's game tonight, so that means I will not be getting anything done this evening. However, even at this late point in this semester, it is important to take a night off and to something fun.

We're number 2!

All of us who have legal writing this semester are under the thumb of our appellate brief. Our school prides itself on having a very good legal writing program. I have no doubt that there is some truth to that. We used to be number one. Even Harvard uses the textbook written by the professors in our department. But this year we fell a spot to number two. You can tell that some of the teachers and the administration had its pride hurt a little bit. When they sent out a school-wide e-mail with the new rankings, they included a rationalization for how we could have slipped a spot: the number one school hosted the major legal writing conference this year, so that must have been the reason they were number one. How else could Mercer University, who no one has ever heard of, have beat us?

It is probably good that they got a bit humbled. When you are number one, you stop working as hard. For example, I asked my legal writing professor to explain why you only put facts after the when clause of an issue statement. Her first response was: that's what the book you are supposed to be reading tells you to do. I was a little shocked. I know what the rule was, but I was still making the same mistake, so I was hoping she could explain it. Normally I like her hands off attitude, but it bugs me that I should be doing something simply because the book tells me to do it that way. However, in the end, that seems to be what legal writing teaches you: how to write the way you are supposed to write because we tell you what the rule is. It does not require thinking per se. It requires creative plagiarism.

Weekend Fun: Part 1

It was a busy weekend. Friday night was the mock trial competition. We did exactly what we wanted to do: good enough to put the experience on our resume but not good enough to qualify for regionals--i.e. third place. It was actually a lot of fun and got me even more enthused to get in an actual courtroom. It takes so much energy to do a good job at trial. Not only do you have to be very prepared and have thought of so much prior to even walking through the door, but you have to be constantly listening to your witness to make sure they give you the answers you want and to your opposing counsel to make sure they are not asking questions they should not be asking. My favorite part, however, was the opening and closing. I like the performance aspect of being in front of the judges. I like using timing and emphasis to keep their attention, draw them in, and hopefully see that your theory of the case is more reasonable than your opponents. I also had a really good partner, and my girlfriend did a wonderful job as a witness. At one point she had the whole panel of judges laughing at her character.

(if you read this post earlier today, I apologize for the strange " " that appeared in the text. I seem to be having some bugs with my blogging software)