Ira, 3L

I realized not too long ago that I am now entering my fifth set of law school exams. If you tack on the LSAT, MPRE, and that practice exam we took during 1L, I'm well past half a dozen.

And, even though I have the pattern and general tempo of law school exams down (i.e., vigorous studying, outlining, practice questions/essays, caffeine, and foods rich in carbohydrates, sugar, and peanut butter), I am, in a word, exhausted. Call it 3L-itis. Call it ready to be done. Perhaps those two things equal one another. Regardless, with this set of exams, one more in the Spring, and then at least one bar ahead of me, I am still in the tunnel.

I recently completed my take-home exam for International Criminal Justice. Great class; I recommend it for everyone regardless of your interests. You will learn more than just the role and existence of tribunals and the International Criminal Court, but, overwhelmingly, about the rule of law and how one goes about creating it and willing it to continue and live.

Left is an in-class exam tomorrow in Professional Responsibility and another take-home for Trusts & Estates. I'll talk more about the exams in a couple weeks after all extensions will likely have passed.

In more uplifting news, I received some news from the co-op office that I am eligible to receive work-study while I am on co-op this Winter. Receiving a steady paycheck where one was not expected, which also doubles at replacing some of my loans I would ultimately have to pay back, is a cherry on top of the awesome co-op I will likely have.

Lastly, what I look forward to most right now, is the gym. I have already arranged for sparring matches over the Winter, and I have literally been having daydreams about running through the trails near my house or having Rocky montages (replete with jump roping). It. Will. Be. Glorious.

Another 6am post. Despite the hour, I kind of expected some confetti to fall from my ceiling once I started my 100th blog. Alas.

I also hoped that I would I use my 100th blog to announce my post-graduate job. Alas, there is yet to be a job to announce. Interviews, applications, and general rejection continue.

So, instead, I am going to use this blog, at least in greater part, to congratulate all my friends and colleagues who graduated this past May and who passed their respective bars around the country. I'm told that NUSL collectively accomplished a 97.5% bar passage among first-time test takers.

But I won't stop there, I also want to give a shout out to to those who didn't pass. I am not celebrating the fact that they didn't pass, and I am not trying to sugarcoat a sour situation. Rather, I want to recognize that they put a whole hell of a lot of work in, went to school for three years, studied, then spent about two months studying vigorously, and took the bar. All that work should not go unnoticed. And it shouldn't be said it was for naught.

Finally, in the world of Ira, beyond still interviewing for jobs, I finished taking the MPRE last week and am prepping for exams next week. I may have mentioned it before: the MPRE is the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam, and nearly every state requires you earn a certain score before you can even apply to take the bar. The subject matter is no overtly complicated, but the sixty multiple choice test questions are tricky. It's tough to get a bead on how I did.

Let's hope it's easier to gauge how I do on exams. I have one in-class, Professional Responsibility, which will be similar to the MPRE but in essay format, and two take-home exams. International Criminal Justice is a twenty-four hour timed exam due no later than Monday afternoon. The other, Trusts & Estates, simply has a due date of next Friday at noon.

After that I still have a few projects to put bows and ribbons on before I head off into the sunset of co-op, but I'm already starting to amass my reading list for the Winter.

More to come...

It's 6:39am and I had a strong urge to start this blog with "Captain's Log, October 28, 2009. 6:39am. Somewhere--somewhere lost in the galaxy."

Odd as I've never been much more than a passing Star Trek fan.

As I may have stated in previous blogs, this quarter of my third year feels a lot like being a 1L all over again. That, in turn, feels a lot like constantly trying to keep yourself from drowning under the weight of it all. Early on in this quarter, I became all too tempted to assume being this busy and feeling this oppressed by time and agenda was an Ira-centric issue. However, as weeks pass and we draw near to the close of the term, I'm starting to hear from classmate after classmate that they too have been staggering under the weight of it all.

There are a few lessons to be had here, I'm convinced:

(1) Don't bite off more than you can chew. Being involved in student activities and extracurriculars is great, and IMPORTANT, but don't let your eyes get bigger than your stomach. It seems it's a pretty common mistake to assume you can do it all. That's when classes start to feel the pinch. There is a balance to be had, and it's different for everyone. So, find yours but don't forget about classes. They are primarily why you're here at law school, and why you're future self is paying them ungodly amounts of money.

(2) No person is an island. Realize that a lot of the time, when you feel alone in your burdens, you have good company. Many of your classmates are also feeling a little taken down by the wolves that hell week during 1L when you question why you even came to law school, or when you're having nagging, persistent 3L/senioritis musings about why are you still in law school.

You might respond..."but Ira, those are all pretty cliche and common-sense lessons." And you'd be correct and get the gold star. However, as you'll learn, much of law school is an unwitting war to disturb common sense out of your day to day thinking for a while. Not all of school has it out for your practical side, of course, and you'll probably be far better off at experiential-focused NUSL. Just know, for a while, when you're trying to delve deep into the conceptual thought pattern of whether a fictitious, objective, and quite unrealistic "reasonable person would feel harmed by such behavior," common sense may take a vacation and not tell you it's leaving.

You may also be quite calculating and notice that I said there were a few lessons to be learned. I guess that lesson is to stop reading so much into things. Some things--sometimes--need to just be taken at face value.

In less ranting news, I have two interviews this week for post-grad opportunities. Wish me luck! And good luck to all my fellow interviewers. At this point, I'm rooting for any and all of us to get a job lined up before we take the bar. I also attended an MPRE review session this past weekend, which is helping prepare me for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam. Nearly every state (except California, I think) requires that you have a certain high score on the MPRE before you can even sit to take the bar and become a licensed attorney. After all, they want to make sure that you're ethical. Or...at the least, that you can answer sixty multiple choice questions as if you are.

More on that later. Good luck to all of you out there as you start finalizing early admission applications.

So, the Sox lost it.

I'll go ahead and say it and get it out of the way: They deserved to lose. October being October, and all things being equal, the way they were playing in the post-season I'm fairly positive they wouldn't have made it to the trophy.

Oh well, there's always next year. Sad weekend for Boston and much of New England, though, to see the Sox, Pats, and Bruins all go down in a three day hat trick.

Let's all just collectively hope the Steinbrenner family doesn't get another ring.

Things are status quo in law school. Reading, researching, writing, editing, working on the Journal, applying for post-graduate positions. Interestingly, there is a general fog of starting the quarter lifting around the law school. I can tell that everyone is starting to realize (or, at the least, allow themselves to be aware) that we only have a month before exams. To butcher a quote from a friend of mine: there are two kinds of people in the world--those who feel ready for exams, and liars.

Currently, while ignoring the threat of exams, I am working on a teaching outline for my 1L research and writing class. Tonight I am going to lead the first-years through some helpful research tools and tactics. Also, researching on my own, I am working on a memo for my Section 1983 course. Section 1983 refers to the federal civil rights statute that allows individuals to sue the government and government officials for tramping over their rights. My topic is on the confluence of the First Amendment and retaliatory arrests (e.g., after speeding through a school zone, for which he was not stopped or cited, a bloke flips a cop the bird. The cop then stops him and arrests him for speeding. Constitutional? We'll find out!).

October is the post-season in Major League Baseball. This is what it all comes down to. As Joe Posnanski recently wrote in Sports Illustrated:

"ANYTHING can happen in October. Who was the best team this year? Who cares?

...

Just in the last dozen years, we have seen the Boston Red Sox come back from a three games to zero deficit, we have seen TWO Florida Marlins teams sneak in as wildcards and win the World Series, we have seen a 116-win Seattle Mariners team lose in the first round. How about the 2006 Cardinals? They lost nine of their last 12 games and looked like they might pull off the most spectacular collapse in more than two decades. They hold on, make it to the playoffs with 83 wins, win a playoff round, then beat the Mets in seven games, and then take out Detroit in the World Series.

...

It can happen -- anything can happen -- because baseball is like that. The best NFL teams win 80 to 90 percent of the time. The best NBA teams win about 75 to 80 percent of the time. The best college basketball and football teams win 90 to 100 percent of the time.

But in baseball, great teams only win about six out of 10. So you can do the math: It's a whole lot easier in baseball to take three out of five or four out of seven from a great team. Call it magic. Call it luck. Call me irresponsible. But you never know where it's going to go. I once asked Brooks Robinson if he thought his '69 Orioles were better than the Miracle Mets. He smiled and said the eight words that might best describe October baseball: 'It doesn't matter what I think. They won.'"

That's what makes baseball so great, and that's also why I tell my friends never to bet money on baseball. It's too unpredictable. And too fantastic. Who wants prediction when you can have edge-of-your seat frustration and anticipation from one pitch to the next?

As I get pumped thinking about the playoffs and thinking about the Red Sox (despite lamenting that my favorite National Leaguers, the Braves, had a long walk home with their heads hanging down), I realized that being a 3L feels a lot similar to a constant October. Applying for post-grad jobs, clerkships, fellowships, co-ops, taking classes, looking out onto a hazy horizon of your future (which may be hazier than you thought even if you got an offer from a firm)--it is all post-season. What could happen? Who looked like they had great chances at a job and were all lined up last week? Who cares? One great interview, one day, could change it all.

Stay tuned. Go strong, go well, or go home. Go Sox.

I am still working on finding a post-graduation job, but I've finally lined up my Winter co-op. I interviewed at several places, and, ultimately, it was a tough decision, but I chose to go with the Roxbury Defenders. The Roxbury Defenders are a divisional office of the Committee for Public Counsel Services (i.e., Massachusetts' public defender system), representing indigent criminal defendants for crimes allegedly committed in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood. I will get to work on cases in both Roxbury District Court and Suffolk Superior Court (both trial level courts), help attorneys with their own cases and trials, and even argue some bail hearings when the Commonwealth (aka District Attorney) are asking the judge to set a bail/bond that will keep the client in jail until his/her next court date.

As stated above, the job search goes on. A rejection has rolled in here and there, but such is the nature of the beast (and the economy). This year's graduates are competing with a larger pool of last year's graduates (and I'm talking about the national job market!), as well as a smaller pool of the year prior. I still have applications out in the ether, and will likely have some interviews before Halloween. I feel that my prospects are good, and I'll continue to put myself out there and apply for jobs. Having a paycheck (especially working in an area of law that intrigues me) would be clutch. Thankfully, NUSL's Office of Career Development is hugely helpful in reaching out to employers and contacting students about career opportunities.

The school's Law Journal is currently working towards its second publication, which will have articles about the subprime mortgage crisis and related litigation, and planning for its third Symposium and publication. The latter issue will be about the regulation of firearms, both by the federal government and state government, and will touch some of the many, many subtopics that fall under discussion of gun regulation. We are currently contacting potential speakers for the Symposium and authors for the publication (those two groups not being mutually exclusive), and laying down some of the logistical groundwork for holding a Symposium at the law school (e.g., reserving the budget, rooms, caterers).

More to come...

This is an all-business blog today; classes, the Journal, TA'ing, and life goes on unabated. Unrelenting.

C'est la vie.

Yesterday we upper-level students submitted our applications for Winter co-ops. I applied to a good number, and hopefully will start hearing about interviews next week. This co-op, whatever it ends up being, will be my last co-op and I hope to make it an educational and memorable experience.

I am also going through clerkship interviews right now. Very exciting, a little nerve-wracking (especially with the turnaround time), and, honestly, fun. I'll let you know how things went, once all is said and done.

Other than above, helping manage and edit the Journal, and assisting 1Ls with their legal research and writing, I attend class. And class, ironically, is starting to seem more and more like what I do in between everything else. One of my classes, Trusts & Estates, is very interesting. Beyond reminding me that I once took property law, T&E covers the laws governing what happens to a person's property and assets after they die. The subject matter and facts of the cases we read are both morbid, fascinating, and occasionally sad. All and all, I'm glad I took it: Beyond preparing me for the bar, it's nice to study law outside my general interests of criminal justice and civil rights.

More to come...

Late, yet again. For those readers that wait with bated breath every Wednesday for my newest blog (if you even knew that Wednesday is our official deadline), I apologize. I have no excuse for my general tardiness, merely an over-developed and occasionally dysfunctional system of re-prioritizing and procrastinating. But in almost two years, blogging about my law school experience has yet to fall by the wayside. And this week is not the week for it to start.

Well, sort of. This week I am determined--DETERMINED, I tell you--to write about something other than law school or the law. Or being a lawyer. Or applying to be a lawyer. Or even being in court. No, law school and the law permeates so much of my life--so much of law students' and lawyers' lives--that I am often given mandates at parties to not talk about the law. Not about class, not about legislation, not about representing people in court. Of course, when you spend almost every waking hour for nigh three years of living and breathing the law, it is somewhat understandable that there is a difficulty to detach.

After sitting at my computer for a good ten minutes, trying hard to come up with something other than the law to discuss, thinking things like, "Dear lord, hopefully I was more interesting than this before law school. Hopefully, I had awesome, riveting things to talk about before I only spouted statutes, cases, rights and reasonable standards," I decided that what is needed--what the world needs--is comedy. Good old-fashioned, satirical, offensive comedy.

However, this being a school-sponsored blog, offensiveness and ribaldry is probably not the way to go. No matter how funny. So, instead, here's a story. If you find it even marginally funny, I can be hired for birthdays, weddings, bar/bat mitzvah's and the like. Just contact me through the comment system below.

Note: Offensive jokes cost more due to the liability of people throwing things at me and the general damage to my public character and reputation.

As many readers likely know, I have a Great Dane. Emmitt is a massive dog both in proportions and personality. He turns five years old next month (about 1/2 to 3/4 of a Dane's average lifespan), but is still very much all puppy. Emmitt weighs in around 140 lbs., but the ridge of his back comes above my kitchen counter tops. In short, he is a pony. A pony that quite naively believes every living creature is his friend.

Taking Emmitt for walks is always a publicizing event. As one cannot help but notice him--nearly three and a half feet tall at the shoulder and dark grey with splotches of black all over his coat and milky white feet--people often stop to gawk, ask if I have a saddle for him, ask if he's a horse. People even stop in traffic. It doesn't help that an extra-tall Great Dane can put his face in your face without jumping, and is not afraid of cars.

One day, I'm walking him through the neighborhood when we happen upon a woman taking her four-year old daughter for a walk. The woman asks what kind of dog he is, and then if her daughter can pet him. "Brave," I think to myself. Most people admire/stare/study from a good distance. I make Emmitt sit down. He's a smart, gentle dog. He took to training real easy and complies. As he sits there, just about eye to eye with this little girl, she starts petting him on the head and cheek with an open, stiff palm. Almost an abrasive rubbing, like someone who doesn't know how to softly pet. I figure, what the heck, it's a little girl and she's enjoying herself. Emmitt is a good sport.

Then, as she continues to pat at his face, he looks up at me confused. Then back down at the little girl. Then up at me, then back down. He seems to not be sure what exactly is going on. Suddenly, as she continues to pet away, Emmitt raises a paw and punches the little girl right in the face.

It wasn't malicious, or even playful as I've seen him do with dogs. He stayed seated the entire time. Emmitt raised his paw and mimicked the four-year-old, patting her in the cheek just like she kept doing to him. He literally mirrored her movement back. I think he thought that's what he was supposed to do.

I, however, freaked. I was positive the mother was going to sue me, call the police, get angry and yell. After all, when we picked her little girl up off the ground she had a slight abrasion on her cheek where my dog had just Jack Johnson-ed her.

The little girl never cried, the mother laughed it off (laughs which I returned nervously), and then finished their walk. I apologized again and then Emmitt and I high-tailed it out of there. We now live 750 miles and seven states away.

My dog punched a four-year-old in the face.

What a first week. The first in a while that feels like two.

Let's hope it's not a trend.

All my classes are great. I am particularly interested in International Criminal Justice and Section 1983 Litigation. There is so much to learn in every class I'm taking, but those two in particular strike a reverberating chord. Section 1983 Litigation, for the un-indoctrinated, refers to the federal law (42 U.S.C s 1983) that allows a person to sue officials (generally, the police or local government entities) for violating their civil rights while acting "under the color of law." The latter means, in short, that the official violated the rights while acting as an official agent (even if s/he wasn't authorized to do so). A common (and inflammatory) example is police brutality and the excessive use of force (e.g., Rodney King). The class is taught by a NUSL alumnus, the widely renowned civil rights attorney Howard Freidman.

I have also met with the 1Ls who I will assist this year as they learn legal research and writing. I blew through much of the first instruction at top speed, as I was given limited time with them. So, I look forward to working more with them. Legal research and writing are vastly, hugely, Grand Canyon-like important in the law. They are, of course, not everything, but they go a great deal into the ability to communicate effectively within the legal industry and make accurate, successful arguments. Thus, employers are bent on finding law students who can research and write really well.

Nothing new on the clerkship job front. Just more turning in of applications. Just more waiting.

We also had the first meeting of the Law Journal yesterday, and, as the Managing Editor, I spent a great deal of time talking to the interested 2Ls and 3Ls about the commitment the Journal requires. And it does. We are still hoping to publish the next issue (our second issue!) before the year is out, and have a great deal of work on the articles to make them publication worthy. Also, we are simultaneously planning next Spring's Symposium (and thus, next year's issue), which will be on Second Amendment Issues after the 2008 Supreme Court decision in Heller. That opinion determined that the right to bear arms is an individual right, and not one (as understood and argued by many) merely pertaining to membership in a militia. I'll talk more about that as we develop the topic.

More to come.

Back from Maine, six days until classes start.

I have all my books and most first-day assignments and will (with a little sadness and a bit of countering excitement) soon start reading for next week. I am also a TA for the Legal Research and Writing component of first-years' LSSC course, and have to read all that they read. Good times. Let the onslaught juggernaut of the quarter officially begin.

Around making my way through The Kite Runner, which I've nearly completed, and which is powerful and fantastic, I am still sending out resumes and cover letters for post-grad jobs and for clerkships. As of last night around 2am, I sent out the last and final of my clerkship applications.

I wish there was confetti to celebrate: I now have applications in for federal and state clerkships. And now I must play the waiting game. Good thing I'll be busy.

As far as post-grad jobs go, I am applying to them like a fiend. Jobs I would all love, but essentially contingency plans in the event I don't get a clerkship. I even have one interview already, scheduled for mid-September. Hopefully, I will soon have others lined up. I am eager to write about all of them specifically--jobs and clerkships--and specific trials and tribulations and bumps I encountered while applying, but I am over-eager to not damn myself. I will write about it all once there are decisions one way or the other. What I can say at this juncture--start early. Some advised that I started way too early, researching in the spring and early summer, contacting my recommenders in the spring and having them pump out drafts by mid-summer. I disagree. When you are applying to clerkships, and then start applying for jobs simultaneously, and, then at NUSL, start applying for Winter co-op the moment you're back into classes, the earlier you can feasibly start the better.

Alright, I'm off to the gym. Or to The Kite Runner, we'll see which grabs me first. Last night I wanted to read the book, couldn't wait to sit down and grab it, then I got sidetracked with putting a final gloss on a writing sample, eating pizza and watching the original "Ghostbusters." What a fantastic, fantastic film. I think it might be the first movie I ever remember watching.

More to come...