Everybody's working for the weekend...
I just realized that at the end of this week we will be more than 1/4 done with this quarter -- scary thought, given that it feels just like yesterday that I was on co-op. Actually, the last opinion I worked on while I was there should be published this week. This is the only one of the three opinions I drafted that I did not get to see after the Judge's revisions, so I am both excited and terrified of what it will look like. If it turns out well, I'll provide a citation in a future posting, and if it doesn't... I'll pretend like we never had this conversation (which we did not, since it was more of a monologue).
Classes are progressing, some more slowly than others, but there is certainly enough work to keep me quite busy, especially given that the school has taken away most of my class-free Fridays by rescheduling classes missed for snow and other reasons on what I had erroneously considered as a buffer day between class and weekend. I celebrated this turn of events by spending the last weekend in NYC. This meant I missed the "law school prom" -- a semi-formal gathering of law students at a location that provides libations and musical entertainment in exchange for an exorbitant fee -- but given that I hear the lines at the bar were very prohibitive (and the fact that I "dance" with the grace of a bull in a china shop) I can't say I feel bad I missed it (and the scores of innocent bystanders who may have been injured by aforementioned "dancing" most definitely did not miss me).
The one thing I've noticed that differentiates the second-year classes from the first-year classes is that theory is much more intertwined with practice. For example, just because the UCC tells us that when dealing with foreign corporations, a creditor is only required to file a financing statement (to perfect a security interest) in Washington DC in certain situations, the professor made it very clear that any lawyer worth his fee would file it in anyway, rather than litigate whether the circumstances were appropriate or not later. While this seems minor, the fact that we discussed it at all (beyond just reading and understanding the statute) is what makes this education useful. Losing the "business" or "real-world" perspective in the caselaw or statutes is dangerous -- in order to provide a client useful advice you have to be able to understand the business world they exist in.
Perhaps a better example is a case we read for international intellectual property. The plaintiff was an Austrian( I think) company that produced very expensive eyeglass frames. They sold at the most expensive boutiques, limited the supply to maintain a level of exclusivity and in all other ways protected the brand as a premium brand. At the end of one year, they had roughly 20,000 frames left over that were no longer considered to be "in style". They decided to sell these to an outfit in Bulgaria (for roughly $10/per frame), agreeing that they would then be resold in the former Soviet Union. Naturally, the frames ended up back in Austria, being sold at discount stores. The case then devolved into a discussion of the exhaustion doctrine -- a question of whether the original sale by the manufacturer should prevent them from enforcing trademark rights in an attempt to prevent the re-importation (I'll spare you the discussion). However, an equally interesting question was why did the sale take place in the first place? Impossible to answer without knowing more about the finances of the manufacturer, but I certainly hope someone in the legal department ran the numbers to see if the potential reward of $200k or so for the left-over frames was worth the risk of having to litigate over their re-importation.
And now off to corporate tax!