time flies and all that

My time at the judiciary is marching on. I'm almost halfway done, which is hard to believe. Yesterday I was given my second assignment, which should occupy about two weeks of my time. It's a knotty criminal law issue.

I'm delighted that I'm doing mostly criminal law at the appellate court. Given my engineering background, it's not something I have spent much time working on before, unless you count occasional exposure to annoying hackers trying to break into the various places I worked or a server we had at home. There just wasn't much work with that huge segment of society dedicated to crime.*

One of the lawyers I work with mentioned that by the time I take criminal procedure, "You're going to know a lot of it already." Maybe so, though if there is anything I've learned over the years it's that I can't ever underestimate my lack of knowledge in a particular area. There's always more to learn. I do suspect, however, that classes like civil procedure and criminal procedure are easier and more intuitive if a student has a little exposure to how the system really works ahead of time.  

* Not just criminals! I include all those who work to prevent crime as well. Software engineers, unless they are either working on scary huge government spy projects or have secret identities as crime fighters, don't spend too much time on that activity.