"OK, so that first turn is a sharp left, around that tree there, but then you kind of just want to duck under that tree you can’t see from here, and then it’s all downhill, well, unless you miss that right down there, and then it can get a little hairy…" – a friend explaining the proper sequence of events that need to occur to keep me from never being heard from again.

That was about the time that I stopped thinking about my finals. Three runs into my much-delayed start to the ski season, following a gaggle of friends into "the woods" at my favorite east-coast ski mountain, I finally realized that if I failed to concentrate on the task at hand, and kept thinking about whether the torts final required me to talk about the Hand formula or not, that I’d end up hugging a tree in a way that was not conducive to my continued ability to breathe… or worse, I’d find that "little" cliff that these guys keep telling me to avoid. A few well-timed turns and a head-first plop into a mound of soft snow later, I found myself surrounded by some of the most beautiful terrain you can picture.

I spent three days on that mountain, with spotty cell phone reception, no internet, and certainly no law books. We talked about the Pats, the Celts, the fact that some of us are getting old(er) and told war stories from each day. We traded tips on how to keep your edges on ice for advice on how to handle snow that easily goes above your waist. We argued over which local brew was better and whether it was possible to ski off the roof of the condo into the parking lot without breaking anything expensive. In other words, for three glorious days I felt like I wasn’t in school – and that was the best gift anyone could have given me.

Happy holidays!

Posted by Leon at 2:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"All this horsepower and no room to gallop." – Jim Carrey as Bruce Allmighty.

For those of you keeping score at home, I have now quoted the great Mark Twain exactly the same number of times as I have Jim Carrey. I think I’m going to go ahead and leave that off my list of accomplishments on my resume.

By the way, I take back what I said about no one reading these blogs. I do this not because Brian (with an I!) accused me of not only having something called a legal soul but also of pouring it out, which I am pretty certain would be a misdemeanor in 49 states (I do appreciate the sentiment, however), but because the mythical "powers that be" read my rather ineloquent complaint about ice storms and dumped a foot of snow on my head. The day before the first final of my legal career! Nice. Awesome. Thanks.

Don’t get me wrong – I love snow. First of all, snow means skiing, but it also allows for some of the most fun you can have in a car without being arrested. For instance: look, a donut***. So, imagine emerging from the library which closes due to the rapidly falling snow to find that the world around you has been covered in roughly six inches of fluffy snow. An empty parking lot served as my sandbox for a good ten minutes before I started attracting enough attention to charge admission, at which point I decided to wrap it up and go home. Two hours later, my three-mile long commute ended, and I was one of the lucky ones, as I’ve heard of people spending 7 hours sitting on busses, or having to dump their cars because they ran out of gas after idling for a few hours sitting in gridlock. So, to recap, snow = good, two hour commute home = bad.

Why does this happen? Why is it that the first real snowstorm of the year always makes people forget how to drive? This is New England, folks, it snows here every winter! Without fail, the first storm of the year always snarls traffic, confounds snowplows and wreaks general havoc. By March or April, with the last of the storms, all the drivers are pros at handling the white stuff, and everything flows smoothly, but by the time next winter rolls around, poof, the knowledge is gone and everyone acts like they have never seen snow before.

As a public service, and mostly in an attempt to prevent more two-hour long commutes home, I will now use this space to talk about proper driving technique in the snow, which can really be summed up in three words: No sudden movements.

This means no sudden stops, no sudden starts and no sudden turns. When you get stuck in some snow (and you will get stuck in snow at one point or another), rocking the car back and forth is the way to get unstuck, not mashing the gas pedal and pointing the steering wheel in the direction you want to go. Without divine intervention that will only lead to the spinning of a wheel, the smell of burning rubber and sometimes, if you are really lucky, a sideways shimmy into a snow bank which is entertaining for everyone but you. When starting from a stop pick something other than your lowest forward-facing gear, this reduces the torque applied to the wheels, and reduces the chances of them spinning in place. If your car picks your gears for you (I think the young kids call this an automatic), then read your manual to see if putting the lever into ‘2’ will allow you to actually start in second gear (most imports will, most domestics won’t). Here’s a special tip for SUV drivers: they call it four wheel drive, not four wheel stop, and there’s a reason for that which is self-explanatory, but you can try to prove everyone wrong, just make sure to have your insurance payments up to date.

One last tip: if you see a small four-door passing everyone by using the unplowed, snow-drift covered lane do not assume that you can do the same, because chances are that little car is equipped with all-wheel-drive, a manual transmission, a proper set of snow tires and someone who has not forgotten how to drive in the snow; all of which enable it to drive through the snow as if the roads were clear. I do admit, though, I derive entirely too much guilty pleasure out of watching people try to follow only to get themselves stuck, which inevitably leads to them mashing that gas pedal to try and get out....

*** Disclaimer: the driver in that link is not me, and it’s not my car, I don’t even know who it is, but I am sure that it is a professional driver on a closed course, using superhuman strength and powers, please do not attempt, product may glow in the dark, be harmful if swallowed, batteries not included, laws of physics still apply and all that jazz. Besides, that guy really needed more snow.

Posted by Leon at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mark Twain once gave a speech at the New England Society’s annual dinner (which inexplicably was held in New York), that contained the following quote:

"If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries -- the ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top -- ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume."

With all due respect to one of America’s greatest authors – bull crap! The trees may look glorious indeed, but when I am chiseling out my car from its cocoon of ice, I fail to see the beauty. Furthermore, I’d like to send what the kids call a "shout out" to our dear friend Mr. Murphy, because true to his laws, my scraper was ensconced in my trunk this morning, which made this process that much more interesting and entertaining for the neighbors, as I am sure I was only one Moe and Larry away from a complete episode of the Three Stooges. Nyuk-nyuk!

In other news, we’re in the middle of what is called reading week. Perhaps a better name for it was given by my Torts professor when he called it hell week. The reason why this week is so tough is simple: there are no classes. It seems counter-intuitive at first, but in reality, when studying for finals, classes are actually more like breaks. They also help to organize the day into segments such as morning, afternoon and evening. Without classes, the hours of the day cease to have meaning, and everything runs together. For example, right now it’s close to midnight, but it feels like morning to me.

The good news is that at 1:00pm on Wednesday the 19th of December, 2007 our first semester of law school will have officially ended. We will have survived, and as the saying goes, if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you into a lawyer. On second thought, that might not be quite right, but oh well. At any rate, finals will be over, and we will have our winter break to do with as we please. Well, except the monstrous amount of reading we have to do for our LSSC class, which is starting to behave like a rash that just won’t go away (our entire first week of spring semester is devoted to this class). Perhaps this is the appropriate time to mention that winter breaks in law school are not nearly as long as they are for most undergrads. We are off from the 20th of December to the 2nd of January, which is just long enough to taste freedom, but not long enough to not want to come back. I think they do this on purpose, like the intermission between acts in a play – make it too long and people don’t always come back.

In non-law-school news, the Patriots are playing the Jets this weekend. That was the punch-line, please provide your own joke.

Posted by Leon at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First things first, can someone with connections please tell the Patriots that it’s ok to win all their games by 46 points or more? My schedule does not allow for games that go to the wire. I can safely dedicate a quarter, maybe two to a game, but watching the whole thing results in borrowing time from somewhere else, and since I refuse to borrow it from studying, I am dipping into the sleep "reserves." At this point, I am not scheduled to sleep until January 7th. Oh, and for those of you who think the pats are cheaters, here’s a link: Sports Law Professor

In other news, it’s almost finals time. I won’t bore you with the details. Yes, there are exams in law school, yes they are tough, and yes people freak out. If someone does something totally nutty during one of my exams, I’ll be sure to share, even if it’s me.

In other, other news, we read an interesting case for Property, that I’d like to share (Intel Corp. v. Hamidi for those playing at home). The gist is that an ex-employee of Intel gets an employee directory and starts sending out emails to all the employees that disparage Intel’s hiring practices. Predictably, Intel sues, but on what grounds? Intel claims that Hamidi’s emails constitute a trespass to chattels, which is a fancy way of saying that they violate a property right associated with non-real (not land) property, which is a legalese way of saying someone’s messing with my stuff. The case is brought in California, which is fortuitous, because the Supreme Court of that state turns out to be reasonably versed in computers. As a software engineer (and until I get to write that Esq. at the end of my name, I will continue to claim to be one), nothing scares me more than a bunch of "outsiders" trying to regulate technology. The court splits four ways in their decision, but the casebook authors thought only three of those were important:

The majority explains that a trespass to chattels, under CA law, requires actual damages to the chattel (property in question). They use this to differentiate this case from those of spammers sued by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) whose computers crashed or were otherwise affected by the spam. Intel’s contention that the emails cause a loss of productivity, while legitimate, are not enough to be compensable under their theory of the case as trespass. Basically, with spammers, the objection is to the volume of the communication, whereas in this case, the objection is to the content. The court entertains the idea of expanding the law to cover this case, but decides that would be too radical a solution. The consequences of treating computer networks, and more importantly, websites as private property for which you need permission to "enter," can be catastrophic – imagine receiving an email with a link which you cannot click until you obtain permission from the owner of the site linked to.

The first dissenting opinion chooses to see it differently. As they see it, Intel’s objection is not to the content of the email, but the fact that the defendant is using Intel’s computers to deliver it. They decide that while authorities disagree on how to handle these cases, they do agree that the plaintiff should be able to preclude the defendant form repeatedly trespassing in this manner. Since Intel’s attempts at blocking the emails ultimately failed, the court sees an injunction as proper in this case. Without it, the law gives Intel a right to exclude unwanted communication, but does not give them a way to carry out this right.

The last dissenting opinion differentiates between the Internet and an intranet (a company’s internal network). They make analogies to driveways, which, while attached to public roadways, are not open to all sorts of protesters. A further analogy is made to a company’s mailroom, in that Hamidi, in sending his emails, is basically commandeering the mail cart, and delivering mail to each employee. So, if Hamidi were to send the emails to the employees at home, there would be no problem.

The law that comes out of the case is that, in CA, you need to prove damages in order to be able to sue in this situation, but there are more important questions. Did the court get it right? Why? Why not? Was one of the dissents better? Why do we care?

Posted by Leon at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)