The Croatian family with the toddling granddaughter has candles in the windows. The Indian family is pragmatic: their holiday lights are the same as their Diwali lights, which adorned their house earlier this year. There are a few nacimientos in the yards of the Mexican families. We all smile and nod at each other as we pass on our walks. Good will does not need translation.
My best wishes to all of you. I'll be back in the New Year.
Maybe I'm biased because it's haiku. The one and only poetry award I ever won was for a haiku I wrote when I was seven. Since then, my poetry career has gone downhill. Thank goodness for law school.
Long and scaly crocodile
Swimming in the Nile
Are you snake or fish?
(T., aged seven)
On Macs, however, they just happen. I could be technically illiterate and still smoothly upgrade my Mac.
Today I upgraded my iBook to Panther. I had never upgraded to Jaguar, since I was living abroad when it came out, and by the time I got back to the U.S. it made more sense to wait for Panther.
I'm impressed. Panther is slick and fast. I haven't installed the developer tools yet, but it's awfully tempting. I want to write me some software!
Meanwhile, I've been trying out some new blog-reading software, NetNewsWire. I like it better than BlogLines so far, though, unlike BlogLines, it's not free.
Once again, however, I'm puzzled by the number of blogs that I read that don't include a news feed. Do other blog-hosting sites charge for an RSS feed?
I'm not hung up about a feed like some of my friends, who won't read blogs that don't have feeds, but blogreaders are awfully convenient.
Anyhow. Back to Panther. It's good. Yay for the engineers and designers at Apple.
He may appear to have been defeated, but in fact he became Executive Vice President of Evil and Noxious Toys at Mattel, Inc. Only an vicious genius could produce this, Sauron's ultimate revenge.
For my more sensitive readers, who may not be able to handle upsetting images, I warn you that link leads to Barbie Arwen. Even more horrifically, they have taken Aragorn and turned him into Barbie's eunuch sidekick, Ken. I repeat, they have made Aragorn into Ken.
I'm glad I didn't see this before I took my exams. My poor head could not have handled the dissonance.
(Thanks go to John Scalzi for sounding the warning.)
The night it came out, I was studying for my Civil Procedure exam. Last night was our section party, a frantically celebratory affair attended by almost the entire section. My husband, who came to the party last night and met many of my friends for the first time, had wisely suggested that today I might be too tired to really be able to enjoy the movie.
He was right. Today I have slept, eaten healthy food, read a novel, and slept again. I made red snapper with a sesame/garlic sauce for dinner tonight, and we ate together at a normal time. Crazy, that.
I expect to be fully human again tomorrow.
I am so ready for the post-exam party. My section has been planning a party for weeks now. My section is awesome.
Just one measly exam left before drunken libations can begin!
Think Civil Procedure thoughts, and not just for me. Send some thoughts in AmbImb's and BT's general directions as well. Share that Civ Pro love!
Who knew you could lecture your Id?
Last night, however, I dreamed that the EU asked me to resolve their nagging constitutional issues in three hours. I was allowed a one-page cheat sheet. Tony Blair was supposed to be the proctor, but Joschka Fischer swapped with him at the last minute. Very agreeable man in my dreams, but a stickler with the timer.
Using theories of consideration and unjust enrichment, I argued that the EU should adopt Chinese as its official language to prevent unjust enrichment of the UK and thereby allowing Poland the bargaining power it seeks. It seemed very logical at the time.
I'm going to be so glad when this week is over.
For the most part, I prefer law school to engineering school, but this letter reminds me of one area in which engineering school is far superior: the cultural and social mix. I miss the variety. Law school is largely mono-cultural; most students are American, and if they aren't, they're extensively U.S.-educated. Furthermore, they're generally from the same socio-economic background.
In engineering school, by contrast, I went to school with students of many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The only diversity that engineering lacked was gender diversity; I'm still not entirely used to being one of many women in a class instead of the only one. But other than gender, engineering students were by far a more varied and eclectic bunch.
Part of this is probably that the study of law itself is a very country-specific practice. The language of law varies from country to country, but the language of mathematics is universal. Furthermore, law requires far more facility with English than engineering does. A struggling English speaker can be an excellent engineer and learn English as he goes along. It would be almost impossible for a lawyer to take the same path.
I loved working and studying with people from all over the world. I think that's something I'm going to miss in law.
As is my wont, I'm talking out loud to myself with some regularity while I study. He sits on the desk, glowering at me.
"Dammit, don't mix up springing and shifting interests. Which one is it?"
"Rowwwwwwr."
"Shut up. I didn't ask you."
He eyes me, flicks his gray tail derisively at me, and settles back down.
"Shifting, springing, shifting, springing... oh yeah, it's springing."
He blinks slowly at me. "Rowwwwwwwr." I swear he rolls his eyes.
"I said I didn't ask you."
My husband calls out, with mild concern, "Sweetie, you're talking with the cat again." Husband, I believe, is somewhat concerned with my mental state at this point.
Later I went down to dinner. When I came back, I found teeth marks in my notes. I tell you, he hates Property.
For my engineering and math friends who are now having heart palpitations, please rest assured that I have not forgotten the Pigeonhole Principle. I realize that by the Pigeonhole Principle, in my list of twenty-four legal blogs, and including my own blog, at least three of us have to be born under the same sign, Nov. 22 to Dec. 21. Assume that Denise Howell's new baby Tyler is a stand-in for Denise. Four out of twenty-five were born on or within these dates, which is within statistical norms. (I'm assuming uniform birth distribution for the purposes of this post, which I'm not sure is actually accurate.)
So, sure, it's statistically normal, but since there are so few in-crowds that I can actually join, I'm going to claim this one.
Maybe my Id just needed a good talking-to.
Of course, it might have been the intervals-only spinning class I did at 5:30 pm as well. My teacher decided that I needed some motivation for exams and the whole class paid for my exam angst by doing forty-five minutes of thirty-second intervals.
Speaking of sweet dreams, JCA over at Sua Sponte has started an exam good karma/prayer chain/benediction wave, depending on your religious preference.
I think it's a lovely idea, and I, along with many other 1L's, posted my exam schedule up. However, I'm going to post it here too in a blatent attempt to gather yet more good thoughts during exams.
Dec. 8th - Contracts
Dec. 11th - Crim Law
Dec. 15th - Property
Dec. 18th - Civ Pro
If you have good thoughts to spare on those days, send 'em my way.
I know we're all pitching in here for the upcoming exam season. The RSI-inflicted wrists keep typing, despite the tenderness. The brain keeps absorbing more information, despite the fact that it's very saturated right now.
And, lest you think I am ungrateful, let me say that I appreciate your heroic efforts. I know it must take a lot of creative effort to come up with a new variation on exam dreams every night.
However, I think perhaps you might want to redirect your efforts. For example, I really don't have a fear that I'm going to show up naked on exam day. Nor do I fear that I will start writing code in my Property exam. I am NOT WORRIED about that. That one where the exam was held in Japan and then it turned out that the exam was a stream-of-consciousness quote from an undiscovered James Joyce novel about the Uniform Commerical Code? Brilliant directorship in that piece, but wasted as far as a real fear.
Perhaps you could simply redirect your energies. I suggest reviewing all the rules of personal jurisdiction for Civil Procedure. That would be very helpful. Or why don't you go over the mens rea elements of homicide? That'd be right up your alley!
Or, perhaps, you could dream of fuzzy kittens. We all like fuzzy kittens. Nice, cuddly, non-law-related, fuzzy kittens who don't take exams. That would be very nice.
Hugs.
T.
One result of this study is that now that I know the framework well, I notice things that I hadn't noticed before. For example, I caught the following line in one of my study guides:
Under the Saxon laws, rape was a felony punishable by death. For a short time in the thirteenth century, it was treated as only a trespass punishable by two years' imprisonment and a fine. Subsequently, the offense was treated again as a capital crime. (Understanding Criminal Law, Joshua Dressler, p. 571, 3rd Edition, with apologies to my LWR teacher for the bad format of this citation.)
That's all it says. No explanation, just a citation.
I don't have time to track this down, but I have to admit that I am terribly curious about what happened in thirteenth century England to cause rape to be downgraded to essentially a property crime, and then upgraded a few years later.
My favorite quote from the case:
Promptly upon arrival at the hospital, the deceased came into the competent hands of the Chief Resident of the Neurological Service, who impressed the Court as a completely dedicated and entirely devoted physician.
The doctor gets a gold star from the Court!
I'll just leave it at this: I have many things for which I am very, very thankful. One of them is you, my readers. I hadn't expected anybody to read this regularly when I started, and it's been an unexpected pleasure.
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.
I don't belive it exists. (I'm referring to anonymity here, though upon reflection I could say the same thing of my property outline.) I worked in software for too long to believe in the myth of online anonymity. The one serious effort I could have made to hide my identity would have been not to blog.
Other than not putting my name and school on my blog, I haven't attempted to hide my identity. There are not many female software engineers to begin with, and there are even fewer of them in law school. When I write I assume my audience knows my name. A substantial percentage already do.
So why not simply put my name up?
I tell a story in my blog more than anything. I'm not a pundit. I'm interested in sharing the experience of going back to law school.
But telling a story necessarily means that I tell the story of others as well, not just myself. I have a choice in what I blog about, but the other characters in my blog do not have the same choice.
So I change their details. I change their initials, their gender, the timing of events, and other potentially identifying details. I deliberately avoid gossip that admittedly might make the story more interesting. But, fundamentally, they do not have a choice in what I blog about. My friends, by sharing their experiences with me, are giving me a gift. My return gift to them is this piecemeal attempt at anonymity.
My other motive for anonymity is far more geeky. I chose my moniker, Transmogriflaw, for one reason. Well, actually two, but I'm not sure if the fact that it was a warm summer afternoon and I'd had two mojitos when I started this journal really counts as a good reason. The main reason for the utterly awkward name is that it's completely uniquely identifiable. I think the Latin names for other law blogs are considerably more poetic, but they don't serve as unique identifiers.
A single word unique identifier in our Google-enabled world is a powerful thing. I'd like to hold onto it if I can.
I believe him. I suspect law school does not teach us much about the actual practice of law. Law school, however, is not alone in that respect.
In my prior incarnation, I studied engineering at both the undergraduate and graduate level. I learned a lot about computer science. I took abstract number theory classes, database design classes, computer architecture classes, and a bunch of math classes. I wrote a compiler, built a music synthesizer, and coded endless numbers of little programs which contained linked lists, hash tables, and other data structures that we were expected to know.
What I didn't learn was how to pull a stack trace out of a core dump after being paged in the middle of the night because three servers died. I didn't learn how to write informative log statements so that other programmers could fix bugs. I didn't learn how to code in a team, how to do useful code reviews, how to write highly scalable software.
I did learn all that, eventually. More senior engineers taught me at work. I learned by doing, by trial and error.
I think this is a natural progression, however, and not an implicit criticism of schooling. School is an excellent mechanism for acquiring a mental framework. It's not the only way to acquire that framework, but it's one of the best methods. Engineering school taught me fundamental engineering concepts, a shared vocabulary, an analytical approach to problem solving, and a healthy and needed dose of self-discipline. It didn't teach me much about engineering in the commercial world, but I'm not sure it could have or even should have.
Where school left off, my job began. I couldn't have effectively learned as much at my job without the background I had from school.
One of the best parts about law school is just how much I'm learning. My head is crammed full of new ideas and concepts. I look at the world differently now.
Isn't this departure from one's prior self the best part of education? I know I'm not learning what the practice of law is like. That will come eventually. For now, though, I relish this fundamental shaping of my mind.
"S., would you like to discuss Hanna v. Plumer today?"
S. immediately responded. "No, actually, I wouldn't like to discuss Hanna today, but thanks anyhow."
The entire class giggled.
Prof. Civ Pro arched one eyebrow. "Well," he said, "that's too bad. Sadly, however, you're going to discuss it anyhow."
S. smiled. "Sure. But I haven't read it, I haven't understood it, and really, you don't want to hear what I have to say about it."
Prof. Civ Pro laughed. "Okay," he said, "you've convinced me."
He moved on to somebody else.
I've managed thus far, but now that we are three weeks (three weeks?!?!?!) from exams, little pieces of my life keep slipping out of my scrabbling hands.
Tonight I went to the gym. I'm a dedicated weight-lifter; I get the same relaxation from concentrating on a few well executed reps that one might expect to find in a yoga class.
Normally my mind clears after a few hamstring pulls. Today, however, I couldn't shake law school. My movements were sloppy, and I lost count a few times.
"Okay," I thought, "if you can't beat it, join it."
One.
"What are the elements of adverse possession?"
Two.
"Actual entry."
Three.
"Exclusive possession."
Four.
"Adverse and under claim of right."
Five.
"Open and notorious."
Six.
"Continuous possession."
Seven
"Statute of limitations runs."
I was relaxed when I finished. Perhaps even my down time will be permeated with law until exams are over, but if I end up relaxed anyhow, I can handle that.
Heidi Bond is a law student at Michigan, and, in an exciting development, a fellow female techie going to law school. She used to administer a Beowulf cluster, and if that isn't the mark of a geek, I don't know what is. Maybe she takes notes in code too.
Michael Oliver is a law student in New York who also giggled when he read about Burger King injecting their fries, shakes, and hamburgers into the stream of commerce.
The wise old priest asks the groom, "Wilt thou have this woman to be thy wife?"
The groom, an older gentleman, answers. "I will."
The priest in turn asks the bride, "Wilt thou have this man to be thy husband?"
She too answers in the affirmative. Perhaps there is small sigh from the audience. We are, after all, hopeless romantics at heart.
The groom places a ring on his bride's finger, saying "With this ring, I thee wed. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen."
The priest begins to pray. The audience is silent.
And then the groom drops dead.
The priest, acting so cooly that one might think he had grooms die on him all the time, cuts the ceremony short and pronounces the groom and bride to be man and wife.
Were they married?
The court, in a rare nod to romance, held that they were married after they had exchanged their vows. The fact that the priest pronounced them to be man and wife after the husband had died was of no consequence.
This case was a footnote in my book, an illustration of how property transfers to a wife in case a husband dies without a will. The legal issue is what we care about.
But what a story! Imagine the bride, wed and widowed on the same day. Imagine the audience lurching forward as he fell, the grim efficiency of the priest as he declared the dead man married. Imagine the shock, the terror, the tears.
In Estate of Neiderhiser was reduced to five or six lines in my casebook. Once finals are over, I'll probably forget the specific legal point it was making.
The story, however, I won't forget.
Rather like the One Ring, the One Outline is all-powerful and all-consuming. It sucks the life out of all who toil with it. It can turn a perfectly normal law student into a wizened, sushi-eating, light-adverse shrew who carries on elaborate conversations with herself. Indeed, it is truly One Outline, to Rule them All.
Or so I've been told. As far as I can tell, it's all a crapshoot, except maybe the part about the sushi-eating and conversations with oneself.
The Dark Lord of Mordor totally had it easier anyhow. Really, it's his own damn fault he didn't check eBay before unleashing his minions. Would have saved him a world of hassle, and, not trying to make comparisons here, but can law students buy a guaranteed Outline of Power on eBay? Plus, Sauron got to have hottie elves prancing after him in the process.
I sure don't see any hottie elves prancing around my law school.
This is a phrase that my professor mentioned in class and sort of defined, but not really. She gave a sort of example of when you have it, but not exactly what it means. If I combine her example with my legal dictionary, I appear to get conflicting results. This troubles my outline-creating self.
Shockingly, traditio manu brevi appears to be missing from my trusty Gilbert's.
If it helps, it appears to be related to attornment and constitutum. At least, I think it is related because she talked about them all at the same time and the other two, which I do understand, are types of constructive gift delivery.
Doesn't constitutum sounds like some sort of horrid wasting disease? Or perhaps some gross bodily fluid that medical students study?
Many thanks.
T.
They are making me nostalgic. It reminds me of when I did OCI when I graduated from engineering graduate school. The process sounds similar. There is an interview on campus, then an interview at the company.
The actual interview itself doesn't sound similar, though. For one thing, HR departments collectively decided somewhere along the line that an engineer who could do tricky puzzles on a whiteboard would make a good engineer. I always found that a funny assumption, even funnier when you get the same puzzle for three different interviews.
I remember at the last one I said to the interviewer, "Look, I've solved this two times already, and you're not going to get anything out of this, so can we just skip it?"
He laughed, we skipped it, and I got a job offer out of that interview.
In the end, however, I didn't take any of the offers I received from OCI. My sister's housemate's ex-boyfriend had founded a company and was looking for somebody with my background. We chatted on the phone, which led to an interview. We hit it off well, and that's where I went. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made.
I sometimes wonder if the extremely structured nature of the OCI process leads to frustrated employers and employees later on. The best employer-employee situation is one in which the employer wants that specific employee, and that employee really wants to be working for that employer. The problem with OCI is that this sort of pre-hire relationship is difficult to establish because so many people are shuttled in and out so quickly.
That having been said, I appreciate that I was lucky. OCI is a great mechanism, especially in these tough times, for getting hiring employers in touch with students who might not otherwise find a job. Not everybody has a sister's roommate's ex-boyfriend connection.
For those of you going through the process, good luck.
You may have noticed that I added some new law blogs to my law blog list on this page. Check 'em out.
Jstrizzy is a lawyer and a kickass knitter. As somebody who is utterly incompetent at hobbies that require hand-eye coordination, I stand in awe of her knitting tales.
Desiderata and Ditzy Genius are both fellow 1L's. Good reading for when I feel like I'm the only 1L out there. (Objectively untrue, I know, but we all have those moments.)
Unlearned Hand, who has one of the coolest blog names out there, clearly liked the same property hypo that I did. He's both a law student and in the military, so has an interesting perspective.
Lately he started up a group blog, En Banc, which consists of the joint musings of a group of law students. Good stuff, always thought-provoking, especially when I disagree.
Chris at cogitation is in the process of applying to law school and is a fellow coder as well. That's a good combination, isn't it? Not that I've got any self-interest in the answer to that question or anything.
Okay, now I really need to stop procrastinating.
I am by far the fastest typist in my group of friends. This is undoubtedly due to years of abuse as a programmer, and I'm sure I'll end up with bionic wrist transplants some day, but for now it's a handy skill. As a result of this, I often give away my notes to my friends, because I sometimes get something down that the others miss.
What I hadn't realized was how much my years of programming have seeped into my notetaking. Here are some lines from my notes, and the English language translations:
Possession != title Possession does not equal title.
Actual deliv. == manual deliv. Actual delivery is equivalent to manual delivery.
Maj -> Recklessness == Crim Negligence++; Recklessess is enhanced criminal negligence according to the majority rule.
And yes, in that line, I did put a semicolon in my notes, and it bothered me that there was a space between the Crim and the Negligence. Old habits die hard.
I've also realized that if the professor writes = up on the board for a comparison test, I always write == in my notes. I'm constitutionally unable to write 'Recklessness = Criminal Negligence' for something that's not an assignment of value.
This has resulted in a quickie crash course in C semantics for my friends.
I will declare victory when I see a != on one of their outlines.
All that having been said, I do reserve the right to whine a wee little bit here and there, especially as exams approach. I apologize in advance.
It's not the end of the world, but I do wonder what I did to deserve two practice midterms and an LWR draft due all on the same day. Since that day is tomorrow, my weekend has been spent alternating between Crim Law, Property, and LWR.
Not only is it tiring, it feels vaguely sacrilegious to study both homicide and wills on El DÃa de los Muertos.
We don't chat. The chat room is reserved for questions like, "Did he say involuntary or voluntary?", or, "§45 or §90?", or, "Score! A guest speaker!"
Last week in crim law, however, the chat room took on a new purpose.
Prof. Crim was, as he himself put it, in a snarly mood. One poor student had just been totally unprepared in class. The rest of us cowered in silence. He started going around the classroom and doing lightening cold calls rather than waiting for raised hands.
My friend D. had been up all night working on his LWR memo. He is a good student, and he had done the reading, but he was exhausted. He must have looked vulnerable, because Prof. Crim pounced.
"Mr. D," he said, "what is the defendant charged with in Commonwealth v. Rhoades?"
D. started frantically looking for his brief to find the charge, but, as we learned later, he had accidently misnamed the brief. A silence ensued. This was not a day to face Prof. Crim unprepared.
J. typed in the chat room, "arson & 2nd degree murder!"
D. said, hesistantly, "Arson and second degree murder?"
Prof. Crim nodded. "And why was that charge used?"
M., in the chat room, wrote, "b/c arson isn't enumerated."
D., who knew exactly what M. meant and undoubtedly would have come up with the answer himself if he'd slept more than two hours before class, explained to Prof. Crim that the prosecutor wanted to use a felony murder charge and arson wasn't enumerated in this jurisdiction so first degree felony murder couldn't be used.
Prof. Crim nodded again. "So, could there have been a different charge?"
A., in the chat room, wrote, "extreme recklessnesss, depraved heart but needs mens rea."
D. relayed that information to Prof. Crim, and added that this was a lesser option because it required finding a mens rea.
Prof. Crim decided that was adequate, and moved further in the lesson. D. started breathing normally again.
There is no way that this could stand up to a full-length Socratic questioning. We all agreed, however, that it was really nice to be able to take one as a team for once.
I laughed at the time.
Today a friend of mine emailed me this eBay auction.
My first thought was, "Did his ex-wife really manifest an intention to abandon those Beanie Babies?
Sheesh.
"Suppose that A and B, joint tenants, are killed while riding in a car struck by a train. When witnesses arrive, there are no signs of life in A; B is decapitated and blood is gushing from her neck in spurts. Does B survive A?"
My first answer to this macabre question was, I think, the common sense answer. "Did you really have to specify the spurting and the gushing? Ewwwww. I am not in medicine because I prefer to avoid spurting and gushing bodily fluids. Of course she's dead, and you can't say she survived A. She lost her head! Not alive, no way. Gone to Alphabet-Family heaven. Pushing up daises. Kicked the bucket. Gone."
But I am indeed entering a glorious profession. No, this isn't just an example out of the ghoulish minds of law school textbook writers. This is from a real case, Gray v. Sawyer, decided in 1952.
I looked up the case. Yes, my friends, lawyers and doctors debated whether B lived longer, and they decided that B, due to aforementioned spurting and gushing, lived a "fleeting moment" longer than her husband A. She did not have her head for that moment, sure, but who are we to be picky about the meaning of life? Her heart was beating, and the expert testimony doctors testified that she therefore lived longer than her dead husband.
I love law school. You can't make this stuff up.
This presents me with a problem because I, unlike those well-established technologies, am not a perfectly adequate indexing technology. By indexing standards, I'm an awfully retarded and deficient computer. The Apple IIe that I played my first computer game on would laugh its scrawny little guts out at me.
Given my deficiency in indexing cases manually, I have resorted to ranking the law books by their user interfaces. This makes me feel like I have a modicum of control, though I swear that the computers in the library are giggling at me.
Statute book #1, your font is 10 point, not 12 point? Back of the line for you! I'll use your competitor, Statute book #2, even though #2 is so dusty that I sneeze. Appellate review book #294, you're too heavy. I pick the slimmer competitor's edition!
It's really pathetic what forced separation from technology has done to me.
And, because we're talking about LWR and user interfaces, I present to you a story of user interface design that seems remarkably topical to me. At least somebody can enjoy good technology.
Today I read a famous jurisdiction case, Burnham v. Superior Court. I always aim to serve the public here, and so I present to you an unofficial translation of Burnham v. Superior Court.
Scalia: I'm totally right. I've got tradition behind me and everything. I rule. Yay me. (Scalia talks about tradition in transient jurisdictional analysis for pages and pages.)
Brennan: Ohmigod, you totally suck. Hahahaha. (Brennan writes, "Notwithstanding the nimble gymastics of Justice Scalia's opinion today, it is not faithful to our decision in Shaffer.")
Scalia: No, YOU suck. (Scalia writes, "Thus, despite the fact that he manages to work the word "rule" into his formulation, Justice Brennan's approach dos not establish a rule of law at all...")
Brennan: Um, whatever. (Brennan writes, "I believe that the approach adopted by Justice Scalia's opinion today ... is foreclosed by our decisions in International Shoe Co. .v Washington and Shaffer v. Heitner.)
Scalia: Brennan did a circular logic, Brennan did a circular logic! Doood. You're so not even a lawyer. (Scalia writes, "Justice Brennan's long journey is a circular one, leaving him, at the end of the day, in complete reliance upon the very factor he sought to avoid.")
White: Ohmigod. Scalia totally schooled you, Brennan. (White writes, "I join Parts I, II-A, II-B, and II-C of Justice Scalia's opinion.")
Stevens: Why can't we all just get along? (Justice Stevens writes, "... the historical evidence and consensus identified by Justice Scalia, the considerations of fairness identified by Justice Brennan, and the common sense displayed by Justice White, all combine to demonstrate that this is, indeed, a very easy case.")
Scalia: OK.
Brennan: OK.
White: OK.
Scalia: That petitioner dude, he totally sucks, doesn't he? (Scalia affirms the judgment against Mr. Burnham.)
White: Dooood. (White concurs with Scalia.)
Brennan: Me too! Me too! I don't like him either! But I didn't like him before Scalia didn't like him. (Brennan concurs with the judgment against Mr. Burnham.)
Stevens: Doesn't that give you the warm fuzzies? (Stevens concurs.)
All Justices together: Dooood. Mr. Burnham, you totally suck. We affirm on your ass.
Property is dramatic. The words themselves are very dry. "O to A for life, then to B and her heirs if B reaches 21." Or, "O to A for life, then to B and her heirs, but if B does not survive A to C and his heirs." These words don't have flair. They are simple.
But they have power. I read the words, but I see vicious family arguments, suspicious deaths, aborted births, castles, feudal armies, and bloody battles. I think of Richard III's young murdered nephews, or Henry VIII's brutal search for a male heir.
The common law had a first cry rule: a baby was considered to be a live birth if a special witness stationed outside of the birthing room heard that baby's first cry. Again, just a technical requirement, but chilling at the same time. Who knew what happened behind the door? Just surviving birth into a family governed by one of these estates was a significant accomplishment.
I'm not just reading a law book. I'm reading a ghost story.
I knew I would like it after I saw that he has links to a book by Bruce Schneier (Schneier's book on cryptography is a classic), a book by the engineering cartoonist-hero Scott Adams, Apple stuff, and the First Amendment.
That's a felicitous combination in my (admittedly kinda geeky) world.
(Thanks to my fellow techie law student, Biting Tongue for the link.)
Apparently the professors have noticed that as well, and they've been calling on him a lot less. However, they can't entirely ignore him as his hand waves to and fro like a flag carried by an overenthusiastic Boy Scout.
Today, Prof. Contracts finally gave in.
I had already moved into my little open-eyed nap, so I didn't hear Mr. MCLP's opening statement. I did, however, hear Prof. Contract's highly unusual interruption.
"No," he said. "We are not, in fact, concerned with euthanasia in this class."
Mr. MCLP, shocked by the interruption, protested, "But it has to do with what I was talking about."
Prof. Contracts sighed. "Sadly, that is the case. However, I submit to you that euthanasia has nothing to do what I was talking about."
We had been talking about a contract between a patient and a hospital, but nobody died, there was no discussion of euthanasia, and I still can't figure out how he got to euthanasia.
Mr. MCLP was not deterred, however, and gave one last try. "But you should be talking about euthanasia because that was what I was saying."
Prof. Contracts raised a quizzical eyebrow. "No," he said patiently, "I do not want to talk about euthanasia. However, at this point, I think you've convinced me that I should consider the subject for entirely different reasons."
I think the entire class shared his sentiment.
I copied and pasted a few of my entries into their little calculator, and the Genie said they were all male. Not only that, the Genie said they were overwhelmingly male, with a big spread between my girl points and my boy points. One entry had no girl points at all.
I wonder if their other "female" entries are super girly or something. Maybe I need to talk about mascara?
Thanks to Bekah for the link.
Great stuff.
"Yes," the first woman said dramatically, "he did a Clinton on me!"
The second woman, visibly horrified, gasped, "He Clintoned you?"
The first woman nodded solemnly, and they both moved off to pay for their food.
I had no idea our former president had been turned into a verb.
Prof. Property started in the mellow, friendly way she usually starts. "A., can you tell me about Mannillo v. Gorski?" A. complied and stated the basic facts of the case.
Prof. Property then asked, "A., where was the complaint originally filed?" A. was clearly confused, but she hazarded an answer. "Um, the district court?"
Prof. Property moved into smackdown mode. "A., did you read the first line of the case?"
A. frantically paged through her book to find the first line of the case. "Uh, plaintiffs filed a complaint in the Chancery Division?"
Prof. Property nodded pleasantly. "Yes, that is true. A., what is the Chancery Division?"
A. clearly had no idea, and after stumbling through a few ideas, finally gave up.
Prof. Property frowned slightly, and said, "The Chancery is a court of equity. A., can you tell me what a court of equity is?"
Poor A. bravely muddled through an explanation that included the phrase, "A court where justice is done."
After letting A. struggle in vain for a few minutes, Prof. Property finally held up her hand. "Yes," she said drily, "we do hope it is a court where justice is done." Seeing as there was nothing further to be had from A., Prof. Property delivered the coup de grâce.
"A., do you have a legal dictionary?"
A. nodded.
"A., do you know how to use it?"
Not me, mind you. Ever since my last conversation with Prof. Civ Pro, I have briefed each case extremely thoroughly. I've done web searches to see if there have been relevant articles published about the case. I've checked commercial outlines to see if I understood it correctly. I've looked up the case in Glannon to read what he has to add. I've rehearsed questions in my head. In short, I have been utterly prepared to feel that Socratic love.
However, Prof. Civ Pro is playing hard to get. I have not been called on, despite these heroic and totally unmaintainable efforts. No, I am not feeling any love at all. He hasn't even looked at me as he skims over the class for a victim.
Harrumph, I say. I am declaring a cessation to any further excessive case reading. If he calls on me, I'm secretly going to say to myself, "You had your chance, buddy!"
That'll sure show him.
Lacking coffee in my apartment this morning, I stumbled downstairs to the very nice little café nearby. Mr. Coffee Man made me my usual latte with a minimum of conversation, but with a friendly and sympathetic smile.
He put the steaming latte down and took my money. I smelled it, and my brain cells did their little happy-happy-caffeine-is-coming dance, and I exclaimed with feeling, "Lovely! Thank you very much!"
At least, that's what I intended to say. But after the words left my mouth, the man in line behind me gave me a really funny look and edged away slightly. Mr. Coffee Man, on the other hand, smiled broadly at me, carefully picked up my latte, tenderly wrapped it in two little cardboard latte holders, and handed it to me.
I had said, "Love you! Thank you very much!"
Thankfully, I wasn't called on in Civ Pro today. God knows what I would have said to Prof. Civ Pro.
In hindsight, I must admit the first mistake was mine. In the scramble for seats on the first day, I noticed your crisp linen suit and shockingly red tie, and thought to myself, "Hm. He's probably annoying. I shouldn't sit near him." Then years of training in social correctness jumped in, I mentally corrected myself for my narrowmindedness, and I sat down near you.
Alas, my atavistic instinct that the annoyingly-dressed are annoying in person proved to be prescient.
Mister MCLP, allow me get to the meat of the matter. I am sure that you are a skilled air drum player. I am sure you are the Keith Moon of air drumming, the air drummer all those other air drummers secretly envy. Perhaps even Prof. Civ Pro appreciates having a sharp staccato sotto voce to accompany his discussion of Hanson v. Denckla.
Sadly, however, I am old and crabby. I do not find my learning is enhanced with a backbeat. And, just a hunch, but I'm betting that those other students don't really appreciate it when you drum faster if they don't have the answer fast enough. Really, I can't say for sure. What do you say we both think about that for a little bit?
And finally, really just a little small note in closing, if you don't stop humming the Oompa Loompa Song, I'm afraid I will not be able to guarantee any continued sane behavior on my part.
Hugs.
T.
I went to his office hours today because I had a question about in personam jurisdiction. He was very gracious and he answered my question clearly and directly.
While I was packing up to leave, Prof. Civ Pro asked about my background. I think he was just making polite conversation, but I briefly explained to him my software engineering background.
When he heard what I had been doing before law school, he perked up.
"Really?" he asked me.
"Really," I said, "that's what I did."
"Ah," he said, smiling broadly, "you're really going to like one of the upcoming cases."
"Mmmmmhph. Um, yeah," I replied, trying for as non-committal an answer as I could muster.
"Yes," he said, "I think you'll definitely like it." He smiled at me. "Now, how do you pronounce your name again?"
Eeeeeeeek.
The first case was for Property. We read Virtual Works, Inc. v. Volkswagen of America, Inc., which was a dispute over the domain http://www.vw.net.
I've never read any cases involving Volkswagen as a defendant in criminal law, which is probably a very good development as far as they are concerned, but in one case it was specifically mentioned that the defendants were hiding in a VW bus.
Volkswagen now is the only corporation that has had the honor of being mentioned in three of my classes. They win my most recently created prize, the 'Most Popular Corporation In Law School' award. Lucky them!
A few of the students who sit near me were going to review some material on Friday afternoon. They asked me if I wanted to join, which was nice of them, but I had other plans.
Stressbunny #1, curious about what could be more interesting than a Friday afternoon study group, asked me what I was doing.
"Oh," I replied nonchalantly, "I'm going to go see the Dead tonight."
There was a shocked silence as the gathered stressbunnies absorbed that.
Stressbunny #2, bless his heart, protested, "But you're not that old!"
I replied, honestly, that it was my husband who was the big fan, but I always thought the concerts were a lot of fun.
Again, there was a slight pause. Then Stressbunny #1 asked dubiously, "How old is he?"
I explained that he wasn't that old, but that he had got into the Dead as a teenager, when they were already well-established. The concerts are trips down memory lane for us. My husband accompanied me on my nostalgic-oh-Lord-did-I-really-dress-like-that trip to see The Cure, and I go with him to see the Dead, even after St. Jerry moved on to that great big VW bus in the sky.
The stressbunnies registered this, and then Stressbunny #2, trying enthusiastically to bridge the generation gap, nodded knowingly.
"I see," he said sagely. "It's like my little sister. She was born in 1989, but she totally loves 80s music!"
I gravely acknowledged that yes, it might be like that.
I should explain what makes this class so amazingly difficult to get through. It's not the material itself. Legal writing and research are good skills to learn.
No, what kills me are the absurd limitations that are placed on us. We are not allowed to use well-established technical solutions to legal research questions. No, if we so much as touch a computer for our research, we become candidates for expulsion.
The full horror of this restriction didn't become apparent until a few days ago. Our classroom darkened and the instructor placed slides on the overhead that were photocopied index pages from various books. I realized, as he droned on about index page after index page, that what I could undoubtedly do in seconds on the computer was going to take me hours of manual labor. I'm a software engineer, and this is my water torture.
My instructor claimed, "You won't understand how the computer works if you don't do it the hard way first."
I muttered, "Try me.", under my breath, but luckily for me he didn't hear.
What else is this but a data indexing and layout problem? We have a lot of data, which includes the statutes, the cases, and persuasive commentary. Then we have methods by which we have to index into that data. How on earth does it matter whether I index by computer or by book? That isn't key to understanding the underlying schema of the data itself. What I have to understand, and what is important to know, is how all this legal data is interrelated, not the methods that I use to get to it.
I'm surprised they don't insist we write our legal memos with quill pens and candlelight.
