Leon, 3L

I made an executive decision last week: you did not need to hear from me while I was in the midst of marathon editing sessions for our final deliverable in LSSC. Trust me on this one. However, roughly 44,000 words and seventy-some hours of editing (in a group of four) later, it is done, finished, completed, kaput, konchena, finita la comedia (tragedia?)! Of course, I am now a week behind in all my classes, with a summary judgment memo that was due this morning and a project in Contracts due a week from today. And we're about 5 weeks away from finals. Nice! If there's anything else any of you would like to have us 1Ls juggle, you let us know, ok? We seem to have way too much free time on our hands.

But enough about me -- my rants about LSSC are starting to sound like a broken record anyhow. Let's talk briefly about admissions. By the time this is posted, it'll be April 1st, and I understand that is the deposit deadline at some schools. I also understand that some people are still waiting for answers from some of the schools they applied to. I was in a similar boat last year, and my one piece of advice is -- don't allow yourself to be frustrated. Well, that, and don't gamble -- losing your deposit sent to a school you were going to attend until your "reach" school finally admitted you is a small price to pay for retaining some of your sanity in this process.

One more piece of relevant information before I go back to reading Planned Parenthood v. Casey (written with the clarity of mud, thank you, supreme court). NUSL held an Intellectual Property conference this past Saturday, and the alumni folk were nice enough to let us poor law school students attend without paying the fee (though the fee was low enough so that I would have gladly paid it if I had to). Panelists on patents, trademarks and copyrights presented various topics and quite a few current and former students participated in the discussions. As a consequence of knowing next-to-nothing about IP law, my brain started to feel like a sponge after a little while, trying to absorb as much as it could. Illuminating, entertaining, overwhelming are all good words to describe the experience. Also, in a way, calming. NUSL is known for its Public Interest, so it's reassuring to see that it's quite good at the area of the law I'm interested in as well.

Posted by Leon at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mired in the depths of editing my team's (from this moment forward, the words "law office" have been stricken from my dictionary) hopefully-final draft of the project deliverable; I am tempted to write this entire posting using passive voice. Tempted, yes, but successful -- not so much. While I like editing, the time it consumes is monumental -- we have gotten through roughly 14 pages in 6 hours today. Our document is 140 pages. As a law student, I am contractually prohibited from doing the math to show you how long this will take, but I am sure you can figure out it's rather monumental. And this is on top of our classes, which do not take a break for a week so we can get this done. In other words, this next week should be a good time.

Speaking of classes, I experienced my first "click" moment of the semester. If I have already explained what a "click" moment is, please forgive me, there is no easy way to search this blog, and I am not about to go sifting through the archives for it. The "click" moment is the precise time when everything starts making sense. In the beginning of a semester, we start accumulating information about a given subject. Material is read, analyzed, committed to that space in memory which used to be in charge of knowing where your keys are and briefed. Class is attended, material is presented, discussed, rehashed, discussed some more and then the cycle is repeated. Every day -- for three substantive classes. So, it is perfectly natural for the material to just float in your head, ready to be recalled and used, but not really connected in a "big picture" way. I've heard it described as a big jigsaw puzzle -- the pieces are coming out of the box, scattered on the table; they just haven't been put together yet. The hope, and goal of all law students is that by the time we walk into the room for the final exam that the puzzle is complete, and that it all makes sense. We all prefer for this moment of clarity to come relatively early in the semester, and in some classes, the material flows relatively easily which makes this possible. Other classes require you to have more of the proverbial pieces out of the proverbial box before you can see the big picture (I think I have gotten all the mileage that is possible out of the jigsaw puzzle analogy).

This semester, the moments of clarity have been harder to come by. In fact, up until this week, I was batting .000, which does tend to scare you when more than half of a semester has gone by. The reason is simple -- the less connected the information, the tougher it is to keep it all somewhere in your head, which means the longer you go without a moment of clarity the more likely you are to start forgetting stuff. So, it is with much pleasure (and, apparently, a lot of words) that I introduce you to my first "click" moment of the semester, brought to you by my Crim class.

Without going too much into the details of the how and why -- since I do not want to rob your future professor of the joy of seeing the expression on your face when he first starts discussing the theory of impossibility -- something about that topic must have kicked the hamster taking a nap inside my cranium into action. All of a sudden, it all makes sense, from day one through today! I really can't explain the feeling, except to say that it is a wonderful thing and you should all be looking forward to it.

So, why do I call it the "click" moment (especially since it really doesn't work with my jigsaw puzzle example)? Because I am an engineer at heart (and brain), and the sign of things working properly is when they "click together"

Oh, and by the way, I made at least three grammatical errors in this posting, and stocked up on "scare quotes" as if they were being discontinued -- but that's the beauty of a blog -- no one expects much.

Posted by Leon at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think it is official: law school requires you to re-invent yourself. For example, I am currently taking a break from reading my Crim homework to write this posting. Of course, I was only reading the Crim homework as a way of taking a break from peer-editing the latest draft of our LSSC deliverable. In my pre-law school days it was sufficient to only have one "level" of break when something got overly repetitive, but law school has forced an added level of complexity. My breaks require breaks! I think however, that two is the limit. It all starts getting a bit nonsensical after that. Quick aside: I will continue to use the words nonsensical and sensical until they enter common usage. If someone managed to get people to start using irregardless when the 'ir' prefix is superfluous, I can certainly add sensical to the dictionary! I am a man with a plan.

Anyway, I just broke my rule and answered an email, which means that for a brief moment I had a triple-break going! I feel like I just accomplished something monumental. I'd like to thank my family for always believing in me, and this school for providing all this work to make it possible. I'd also like to stress that there's no "I" in team, and that we really gave it 110% on this latest draft. No one thought it was possible, no one believed in us, but we did it! I'm king of the world!

Some other things I've noticed about myself lately:

In an attempt to fool my brain, I have decided that my alarm clock does not need to be on daylight-savings time. This way, when I go to bed, I feel like it's an hour earlier than it is. I know what you're thinking, "this is stupid, when you wake up, it's an hour earlier too, or you're an hour late to class!" Couldn't be further from the truth -- I use my wife's alarm clock to wake up, and because she is not a law student, she has no desire to try to fool her brain, and her clock is set right. As to why we have two alarm clocks, it's simple: I used to be an engineer. I have the world's most complicated alarm clock. It has hidden buttons. My wife is not a morning person. In the interests of world peace, we have decided that two alarm clocks does not make us weird. Don't judge me! Besides, it makes it possible to get 4 hours of sleep in a night when you really only got 3. Actually, now that I think about this, 5 hours would be even better -- I'm going to set my clock back another hour.

I now carry cash, coins and my id card has something called "husky dollars" on it. This is because the coke vending machine closest to the classroom where I spend most of my life intermittently decides to accept only one of those three forms of currency, and when I need caffeine -- I need caffeine.

On a slightly more serious note (just slightly), on Monday a man named William Moore came to speak to our Criminal Justice class. The most impressive thing about this man was that he was alive. Our professor brought him in to talk to us about the death penalty, and the way the justice system goes about in implementing it. Mr. Moore is a pretty good authority on the subject, having spent over 17 years on death row in the state of Georgia before being pardoned. He was represented by my Crim professor throughout his appeals process. I am not a good enough writer to even attempt to relate the story he told us, but I will say that it was a powerful message. He may not have changed my views on the death penalty, but he certainly gave me lots to think about.

The reason I bring this up is because I think this experiential approach is unique to this school. While I am usually first to complain when the "huggy-feely" aspect of NUSL surfaces in my classes, there is only so much you can learn from case law. Words on a page are very impersonal and don't always force you to reconsider your preconceptions. By building opportunities such as this one into the curriculum, NUSL provides a more complete education than you can get elsewhere.

Posted by Leon at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This being a rather slow time sports-wise for me, and having already covered skiing in my posting from the upper reaches of Vermont, I find myself having to actually write about something substantive. I apologize in advance for the inconvenience.

I often get asked about the challenges of law school, and while the long days (and nights) spent reading cases, the mountains of research for the writing course and the constant threat of being the subject of a discombobulating question from a professor that makes you feel like you should be in a SouthWest commercial (want to get away?) are all things to worry about, the toughest it seems is the need to check some of our preconceptions at the door.

Law school, by definition is something you cannot do until you have graduated from high school and college. Increasingly, more and more people also spend some time after college working in the "real world" before going back to school. This gives us all a level of experience with the way things work (or at least should work) which we bring with us. The problem is, the law doesn't always agree with our experiences, and at times, it disagrees with common sense. It should surprise no one that the intricacies of the law are not always sensical (webster's dictionary tells me that I just made this word up, but I refuse to believe it) and require a decent amount of interpretation (otherwise, why would we need lawyers?), but the law has a knack for taking big every-day concepts and turning them on their head.

Here are two stories:

1. Two college freshmen live in the same dorm. One afternoon they engage in consensual intercourse (that's lawyer-speak for "doing it"). Then they go their separate ways, only to "reconnect" later on in the evening, at which point the "gentleman" claims that they went at it again, while the "lady" claims that she didn't want to, and that it was rape.

2. A 63-year-old man tells the 14-year-old daughter of his girlfriend that she has two options. The first option is to satisfy him carnally (lawyer-speak again, sorry). The second is to be removed from the home and placed in a juvenile facility. She has sex with him.

If you were asked which one of these was the clearer instance of rape, which would you pick? Let's assume you'd pick #2 (and if this assumption is wrong, feel free to tell me why in the comments). Our common sense tells us that the scenario there is much farther over the line of propriety than the scenario in the first case. What if I were to tell you that the court in the first case ruled that it was rape (while simultaneously deciding that the defendant was entitled to a theory of defense he did not get, but not allowing him to call for that theory now) and that the second was not, because the victim had a "choice"? You would shake your head, mutter something about lawyers and, if you have a teenage daughter, you'd make sure she only applied to colleges where she could live at home. Please note that the law is not completely nuts, and case #2 can still result in a conviction for statutory rape, but that carries less of a penalty than "pure" rape. Regardless, reading cases like these, or ones dealing with the death penalty makes it difficult to reconcile what you think is right with what the courts end up deciding actually is right. Worse than that, there is a fear that with every one of these cases, every one of these decisions we move farther away from the common sense we came in with and closer to these judges that have grown very out of touch with reality. The last thing I want to do is be a lawyer first and a human being second.

So, that's it in a nutshell -- the toughest part of law school is staying human. I guess I could have just said that to start with, huh?

Posted by Leon at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)