http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/ en Copyright 2009 Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:49:30 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss The uncomfortably short summer ended with two wonderful trips: a return flight to California to visit some of the wineries missed on the last tour (taken right before law school started), and an annual pilgrimage to Joisey to enjoy the company of various in-laws and fight a never-ending battle with Toxicodendron radicans (more commonly known as poison ivy). It is true what they say, by the way, each exposure to the vile weed brings on a more violent reaction. In that same vein, let me be the first to assure you that there are no horticulture classes offered at this (or any other) law school, which means your faithful scribe is no more adept at identifying the plant after two plus years of school. Add to this my city-boy roots, and Russian heritage (there is no poison ivy in Russia) and you get someone who is as likely to find a four-leaf clover on Mars as he is to realize that the particular ivy he’s been feverishly digging/tugging/cursing/yanking on for the last few hours is going to require carefully regimented dosages of Prednisone, Benadryl, Jack Daniel’s and coke just to keep him from going insane. Nevertheless, I truly enjoyed the break from work/school. I also participated in my umpteenth annual rite of passage for Boston-area residents: moving day. Something like 87%* of the leases in Boston turn over on September 1st. While I haven’t had to move myself on that date in quite a few years, I have been known to attempt to beef-up the pro-bono section of my resume by offering my moving services gratis to a select group of friends. Additionally, ever since piloting my then-fiancée’s moving truck from Delaware to Boston in January, I have been the driver of choice when any of said friends rents any vehicle bigger than a Ford Escape. This year, a buddy decided to kick it up a notch. Arriving in Braintree to pick up what was described to me as a “twenty-two-footah” I was presented with a diesel truck that was thirteen feet tall, required me to climb two steps to get into the driver’s seat, had a power lift-gate on the back, a side door in addition to the big rear one, air brakes and suspension, a gross vehicle weight within one pound of the limit printed on my license, a twenty-six foot bed length, a 3,250 RPM redline, and an air horn (the partridge and the pear tree were optional equipment). Agreeing to the extra $20 a day for insurance coverage was what we law students call a “no-brainer”. Driving this beast was actually quite a bit easier than I expected. Sure, you have to get used to the idea that the brake and gas pedal operate on about a five-second delay from when you apply pressure to either pedal. If you are like me, and were never very good at physics, it will also take some time and the aid of a too-close to the driveway telephone pole to get the appropriate grip on the physics of your pivot points and turning radius, but that’s why you paid the extra $20 a day. There’s also the added benefit of professional courtesy. Trucks of this size are generally leased to professionals, and so other truck drivers treat you as such. This holds true for both the parents of the college kids piloting their tiny U-Hauls to dump-truck drivers on the highway. If you are looking for a review of the experience of renting a twenty-six foot truck to move all your belongings in style, this is a highly positive one. I just recommend you don’t do it around the first of September – it will be much cheaper any other day of the year. In other news, my second-to-last quarter of law school has started, and with it the four classes I have chosen for this round. Evidence, Corporation and Trusts and Estates are all bar-exam topics, but are proving to be rather interesting in their own right. Antitrust (on some bar exams as well, I believe) promises to be an intriguing class as well. In closing for this week, I’d like to add just one thing. As constantly reminded by the likes of Brett Favre, we humans have an uncanny inability to recognize that the time to quit is while we’re ahead. Most athletes, if given the opportunity, play way beyond their prime, most politicians stay well past their ability to be relevant, most actors refuse to ride into the sunset, and most writers don’t know when or how to walk away. I don’t even pretend that what I do here, with this blog, can be considered writing, but I think the rules still apply. I have been doing this for two years. A fresh class of 1Ls is starting here at NUSL, and it’s time for me to hand the reins over to someone new. After all, I don’t want to end up doing this so long that I am writing a blog for NUSL’s divisional rival (do we even have one?). * 50% of all statistics are made up on the spot. :) http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/09/first_week_last_year.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/09/first_week_last_year.html Academics Outside Law School Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:49:30 -0500 This summer has really flown by. Not only is today the last day of my summer co-op, but we are quickly approaching that time of my legal career where I have to start thinking about post-graduate employment. That task has been complicated tremendously by the law firm I was supposed to work for this summer (they cancelled their summer program, and thus any chance of post-grad employment with them). However, this has also broadened the horizon a little. In the coming months, I’ll be canvassing smaller IP firms, as well as possibly looking at clerkship opportunities. I’ll also finally do what I should have done a while ago – join the Boston Bar Association. Finally, I’ll have to give some serious thought to studying for and taking the Patent Bar. This, of course, is in addition to classes and this pesky thing called the MPRE (if you don’t know what it is you should be happy, for now). All of this will have to wait, however, as I am about to embark on a long-planned vacation -- in a probably futile attempt to forget about everything going on in the world around me. The only decision I plan to make in the next two weeks is whether to take my laptop with me. I’m leaning towards leaving it at home, in case you were wondering. Have a wonderful next couple of weeks! Special note to the incoming 1Ls: enjoy your last month of freedom, as you can see, the next time you will have a month off with nothing to worry about is roughly… never. (insert evil laugh here). http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/08/time_flies_1.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/08/time_flies_1.html Outside Law School Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:31:48 -0500 I cannot possibly explain what October of 2004 meant to Red Sox fans. I’ve tried before – to my mother, my wife, countless non-baseball or non-Red Sox fans. I’ve failed every single time. From my descriptions they understand how it made us feel, but they do not truly understand what it meant. I had hoped one day to try and relate it to my kids, and then, perhaps, to their kids. With practice, I could become better at it. I could do more than explain that while my father and I watched the first three losses of the ALCS at my apartment, he absolutely refused to come over for game four – deeming the combination of him, me, and the apartment bad luck. I could relate how I sat in my living room, in the ninth inning of game four, still wearing my gym clothes, drenched with over two hours of a failed attempt to stay away from the game by lifting ever-increasingly heavy objects over my head. The euphoria of Dave Roberts’ steal, the defiant “we will not be swept” of Big Papi’s home run in the twelfth inning; the glimmer of hope that all was not lost. Perhaps I could make them understand why I found it necessary to call my dad to “convince” him to come over for games five, six and seven, needing to hear him refuse, all the time wondering whether he was disappointed that he had raised an idiot who was so superstitious that he needed to repeat everything he did before game four for the rest of the games. My fears were unfounded – I was ten minutes late calling before game seven, and my dad (the most non-superstitious person I know) had thought I was in a car accident. He needed to have me call and ask him to come over just as much as I needed him to refuse. Perhaps I could one day relate the pure joy of watching that team win it all -- the joy, the relief, the pure happiness. That task will be harder now. With yet another leak from the inappropriately named anonymous drug test list of 2003, we now know that at least two members of that Red Sox team had tested positive for steroids. Manny Ramirez was not a shock – the man just had a 50-game unscheduled vacation for failing a recent drug test. David Ortiz – Big Papi – that, on the other hand, was a debilitating shock. Perhaps it is because I chose to be naïve, perhaps even stupid, but I had somehow hung on to the idea that he was clean. In an era when seemingly every big hitter and every big pitcher were on steroids, I chose to think that the guy most responsible (other than Dave Roberts) for those come-back wins was clean. Some will say that it doesn’t matter. The Sox beat a Yankees team which had plenty of admitted steroid users as well. Some will say it was not illegal at the time (in the MLB) to use steroids. Some, undoubtedly, will argue that the 2003 tests do not relate to the 2004 result. None of it matters. What once was an almost indescribable emotion is now forever tainted. And that, my friends, may be impossible to forgive. http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/07/the_day_the_music_died.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/07/the_day_the_music_died.html Outside Law School Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:16:45 -0500 I find that the more times one repeats something, the less believable it becomes. So, when I am told seventeen times that being on a jury is my civic duty, I start to question the very existence of the term. Of course, this was not my first trip through the revolving doors of the Suffolk County Courthouse on jury day. The first time was when I finally registered to vote. The next was when I moved and bought a car. However, this time was different -- I did nothing to deserve a return trip to the jury room. The first time I was up, my number got called, and I was asked to come up with the best excuse I could have in ten seconds or less. I went with the predictable, though completely true, "I am one of thirteen people at my company, and I can't possibly be missing for a week, my deadline is next Monday." I was immediately administered a judicial talking-to, which included the words "selfish," "civic duty," "everyone has one," and "take your seat" pretty much in that order. I climbed over three rather rotund individuals to get to my designated seat, sat down and had enough time to exhale before I got bounced by the defense attorney. The climb on the way back was not more pleasurable, I assure you. The second time, I never left the big jury pool room; none of us did. All the cases got settled the day of trial, and we were all relieved to find out that we were free to go at around lunch time. This time, however, I was intrigued. You see, the first two came during my first life, spent as an overworked engineer, while this one happened to coincide with law school, newfound interest in all things legal, and right about the time I should be narrowing my career focus to either transactional practice or litigation. So, I was faced with a dilemma -- risk complete, mind numbing boredom by getting picked for the jury, miss three days of work, but also receive a rare-for-a-future-lawyer glimpse of how a jury works and deliberates on an actual case -- or play it safe, and bow out, this time, hopefully, without a lecture from a man in a robe. This was going to be particularly difficult, since last summer's job at the US Attorney's office qualified me for a private chat with the judge and the lawyers anyways. In the end, the decision was a simple one. When would I ever get another chance to sit on a jury? I can afford to miss a few days of work now, but likely will not be able to the next time my chance comes up (three years). Plus, who knows what other "warning sign" items I accumulate on my resume? While I can honestly say that my stint at the US Attorney's office does not prejudice me in cases I might hear in the future, not every defense attorney will believe me. This one did, though, and so, I get to see what life is like on the other side of that jury room door. Of course, I can't discuss the case or anything that happens in that room -- so I guess you'll have to get empanelled yourself if you'd like to know more about it. I recommend doing it before you get into law school -- much easier to not get bounced then. http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/07/jury_duty.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/07/jury_duty.html Outside Law School Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:22:14 -0500 Maybe it is because the month of June had exactly two sunny days in it. Perhaps it is because my weeks are measured by the number of curve balls from GM and Chrysler bankruptcy reorganizations. Could be that "road improvement" project that has created a gigantic pile of concrete refuse outside my window, which is, incidentally, violently shaken, stirred, and otherwise disturbed by a whole brigade of unionized men with no necks creating an ever-increasing, and completely ungodly, early start to each day. One thing is for sure -- a month of summer has gone by, and I am not exactly sure where it went. There are some things I learned along the way, however. For example, there is a post office at South Station that does not close -- at least it does not close until after 8:47pm, and I have no desire to find out if it ever does. Also, crown molding was designed by an evil man whose grasp of geometry, physics and simple arithmetic is beyond that of mere mortals. Arriving at work before 8:01am gets me the primo parking space I want most weeks, but not always. The lunch line is worst right around 12:15pm, with noon being a close second -- probably because of all the people who are trying to not be in line at noon. Free cookies will be consumed in ten minutes, even if they are not very good. When a man introduces himself as "Binky," one should not look for a meaningful conversation to ensue. The number of telemarketers who call one's office phone is not in any way related to the amount of time spent at the company. And no, I do not want a time share in Mexico, or a tropical cruise of the Caribbean, but thanks for asking. I also learned that southern New England has a "wine region" and that they produce some surprisingly decent wines, for the most part. Why anyone would try to go grow a Pinot Noir in this climate is beyond me (it smelled of pickles and tasted worse), but the Sauvignons and the Vidals were rather palatable. I do suggest also staying away from the "Port," however, unless the taste of filtered sewage appeals. Now, let's all go out there and do the reverse of the rain dance, please. Happy Fourth, Everybody! http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/06/time_flies.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/06/time_flies.html Outside Law School Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:10:33 -0500 To paraphrase Alanis Morrissette, it is all a bit ironic. When I was a software engineer, I never had any desire to talk about what I did for a living. Now, three weeks into the third coop of my legal career, while I would love to go into what it is that I "do for a living" -- I can't. While at the US Attorney's office, and even while working for the Judge, there always seemed to be a way to discuss the cases, pending or otherwise, by changing enough details to make them unrecognizable, but leaving enough of "the meat" of the legal issue to make the discussion interesting. Oftentimes, my commute home would be spent coming up with ways to obfuscate the parties and alter the issues just enough to be able to discuss the problem. The same cannot be said about my current gig. Without making myself to be more important than I am -- a competitor armed only with the knowledge of who I work for and what the legal question I am trying to answer is would have a pretty good idea of what the company is trying to accomplish. One thing I can talk about, however, is the experience. From the first day, the interns (yes, there are two of us, and yes, we are both from NUSL -- a first, for me, on both counts) have been intertwined into the legal department. We went through training, and have been getting a steady stream of work from all corners of the legal department. The training has been invaluable. There are many things that law school attempts to teach you, but one thing it certainly does not get to is the confluence of business with law. Legal decisions inside corporations are never driven by precedent alone. Valid business reasons exist that make the most solid legal position untenable -- such as a company suing some of its biggest clients (regardless of who is right -- the customers won't be customers for long). The job of the in-house lawyer, is then to anticipate the legal challenges, and to evaluate them in light of the business reasons, producing a risk/benefit assessment. In other words -- in-house lawyers live in the real world, which is a place I long to get back to, armed with legal knowledge acquired in school. http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/06/second_summer_starts.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/06/second_summer_starts.html Co-op Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:44:13 -0500 It feels like we were just here a year ago, celebrating the end of finals and the true dawn of summer. The Celtics were in the playoffs, the Bruins were out after a seventh-game loss designed almost too-perfectly to sell more season tickets next year, and all of us then-1Ls had survived our first year. So, here we are again, except this time I crammed five in-class finals in the space that last year housed three in-class and one take-home. The school's policy on finals is that you may reschedule them if you have more than one in a given day or more than two on three consecutive days. There is no policy for having five in five consecutive days, because, frankly no one is stupid enough to put themselves through that. The reschedule blocks are during finals week, which meant that while I could move my two 1PM finals to the earlier 9AM slot, I could not really have an off day during the week, unless I wanted to have two finals on one day (and that's just not a good idea). Looking back on it, five finals in one week are doable, even when you take one of them in a newly-renovated future office of a yet-to-be-hired professor that is more suited as a meat locker than as a study place (here's hoping they hire someone from Alaska, or someone very fond of sweaters). You learn to cut your studying off by 11pm the night before the test. You learn to pop enough advil to kill a small donkey as soon as you get home after one. You also learn to take a break after you get home and before you start rotating the "old" material out of your head and replacing it with "new" material for the next test. I won't spend too much time thanking everyone that helped get me through this quarter and this year -- it's beautiful outside, I've just spent a week writing out about 80 pages worth of exam answers (I so hate keyboards right now), and I have a weekend when I can do anything I want -- which includes nothing. Have a great weekend, folks! http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/05/summer.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/05/summer.html Academics Fri, 15 May 2009 14:47:04 -0500 Joakim Noah -- and want them all to be trapped for days in an elevator with a large man who just ate a lot of beans, raw eggs and bad tomatoes" way). And I maintain that April is too early for baseball unless you happen to have tickets to the games (which I haven't had the opportunity to get this year).]]> http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/04/how_scotus_missed_the_mark.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/04/how_scotus_missed_the_mark.html Academics Outside Law School Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:16:21 -0500 Choosing a law school is something that should be taken very seriously. After all, it does determine one's future in the legal profession (assuming, arguendo, that Dr. Emmett Brown "Doc" in the Back to the Future trilogy was mistaken when he surmised that the reason why Marty McFly Jr. could be tried, convicted and sentenced within two hours of his arrest was because lawyers have been abolished in the future). Some will tell you to simply go to the highest ranked school you get in to. Solid advice, but overly simplistic, if you ask me. Let's assume that the ranking of choice is the U.S. News and World Report ranking of law schools. Now, assuming that you are choosing between a top-ten school and a school outside that area, the advice above is likely to be dead-on. While I have known some folks who chose lower-ranked schools in that situation (due to scholarships offered, or the type of program at the school, or the professors, or students, or geography), without some sort of personalized extenuating circumstance, the general advice is to take the higher-ranked school.. However, the choice becomes much less clear when you are choosing between two schools that are ranked somewhere in the "top tier" of 100 schools, but outside the elusive top-ten (or even top-fourteen). The differentiation between schools ranked in that range can be so small as to make a decision based solely on the ranking seem rather arbitrary. Would it make sense to go to a school ranked #50 over one ranked #80 if the lower-ranked school was in the geographic location you wanted to practice after graduation and the higher-ranked one was not? Some folks will instead tell you to visit every school and go to the one that "feels right." This is simply dangerous advice. A school might feel great, and might be a great place to spend the next three years of your life, but it might not prepare you for practice. It might limit your career options -- both geographically and in terms of the types of jobs available to you at graduation. Some will argue that if you have an interest in a particular area of law you should seriously consider schools that are known to excel in that area, regardless of their rank. However, what happens when you get to school and realize your assumption was wrong? Instead of wanting to focus on environmental protection for the three-legged-swamp-rat-of-upper-Vermont you now are more interested in labor law? Worse yet -- what happens if you go through law school only to find out that there is no job market for protectors of the poor swamp-rat? If you specialize your education from the get-go, you leave yourself few options. So, what will I tell you? That is a difficult question to answer. Perhaps it is easier to start with what I will not tell you. I will not tell you to come here. It's not that this is not a wonderful school -- in some ways it is. It's that the decision is a deeply personal one, and a one-size-fits all answer simply won't do. I chose this school because, given my options, I thought it would give me the best opportunity to get where I wanted to be when I graduated. Almost two years into this process, there have been highs and there have been lows, successes and failures, disappointments and pleasant surprises, but in the end -- I still think I made the right choice. Assuming, of course, that Doc was wrong about that whole abolishing of lawyers thing. Good luck with your choices -- and if you have any questions you think I can answer -- feel free to drop me a line. If you don't want your comment published (just want a question answered), let me know, and it won't end up on this site. http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/04/choosing_a_law_school.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/04/choosing_a_law_school.html Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:39:02 -0500 I am convinced that most everything one needs to know to be successful in law school can be learned by watching Saturday morning cartoons. For example, have you noticed that when Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff, he only starts to fall after he looks down? That's a valuable lesson: when running off a cliff... don't look down! Stated in a more law-school instructional fashion: concentrate on the task at hand, and not on what's going on around you. This is especially true in quarters (semesters for all those of you not on the NUSL plan yet) where you have attempted to prove, once and for all, that a law students' math skills regress to the point of not being able to add single-digit numbers together. As some of you might recall, I signed up for five classes this term. What this necessarily means is that I will have a final on each day of our finals week. Now is perhaps a good time to recall that NUSL doesn't have a "reading week" before finals (except during your first year). Classes end on a Friday, exams start on a Monday. To think that during my first year, I actually opined that the reading week was a touch long. Ahh, how foolish we are when we are young... So, with finals in three short weeks, I am spending "marathon weekend" cooped up indoors trying to get a feel for corporate tax law that is at least somewhat rooted in the Internal Revenue Code rather than my feelings of how taxes should be handled. A small part of the weekend was also dedicated to supporting the economy, however. I suppose that's something I should explain from the beginning. As some of you remember, I was supposed to be spending the summer toiling for a large law firm, as a "summer associate." I say supposed to, because a few weeks ago the firm informed us that due to the continuing downward spiral of the economy they were forced to eliminate the entire summer program (there was no meaningful work to give "the summers" and there was no chance of the firm needing us full-time when we graduated). Having never before been "fired" before even having a chance to start a job, I admit the news made me take the proverbial look down at my feet only to see that I had indeed managed to fall off a cliff. As anyone who has seen those aforementioned cartoons would know, rapid descent into the canyon below follows shortly on the heels of such realizations. Except poor Wile never did have a proper support structure... With an abbreviated timeframe for a job search, there was precious little time to waste. I had planned to work for either a smaller intellectual property firm or an in-house counsel next winter (to see how I liked those types of employment compared to a large firm). It became very clear that my best chance at a job this summer that would allow me to do the type of law I want to do was with one of those types of employers. With an immense amount of help from sources both within and outside NUSL, I was able to round up some potential employers very quickly. In less than two weeks, I had gone on a number of interviews, and had a choice to make among a number of excellent opportunities. In the end, I chose to work for an in-house counsel at a software company, and am very excited about the mix of intellectual property and corporate law matters that await me this summer. The only downside is that any hope you, my faithful reader, may have had for a play-by-play like account of a summer program at a large law firm have been eviscerated. Just as my job search was coming to an end (and as my wife was taking a much-deserved mini ski-vacation with her family) my trusty refrigerator decided to have a crisis of confidence. Perhaps it was more of an identity crisis, but the end result was that it absolutely refused to keep food cold. For those of you who happen to be engineers, it will not surprise you that my first reaction was to take everything out of the freezer, and then "monkey with it" in an attempt to figure out what was wrong. Long story short -- after multiple attempts at resuscitation, aided by a volt meter, a pair of pliers, a hair dryer and a toothpick, the no-longer-frigidaire was declared dead shortly after noon on Tuesday, April 7th. Turns out I can't fix a broken compressor. I don't know how many of you have had a chance to shop for refrigerators recently, but for those who haven't -- you aren't missing much. For starters, stainless steel has swept the nation and no one stocks "plain old white" appliances anymore. Now, I worked in an ice cream store for three years while in high school. Part of my daily duties was to polish the stainless appliances to remove fingerprints. I will never own a stainless steel appliance as long as I get a vote, and as long as my wife is skiing while I am talking a refrigerator through a mid-life crisis, I get a vote! I also learned that the part that fails most often on new refrigerators is... the motherboard. Yup, that's right, the computer inside my new refrigerator is likely to fail before anything else does. Fantastic! Can someone please explain to me why a fridge needs a computer inside? Unless it's planning to scan its contents and automatically order whatever I happen to be running low on, I am not interested. At long last, the fridge was delivered this past Friday -- a feat of both great engineering and incredible brute strength. Imagine a 32x36x96 box that weighs 360lbs walking up the stairs to my second-floor apartment and through a 31-inch doorway (that is not a typo, the doorway was narrower than the fridge until its doors were taken off) without getting a scratch on it and you understand why I always tip the delivery guys. It was hooked up and producing ample ice, water and, most importantly, cold air in short order. So, there you have it. A long weekend in law school -- spent preparing tax law outlines and installing a refrigerator. Now, if only I can remember not to look down... http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/04/dont_look_down.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/04/dont_look_down.html Academics Co-op Outside Law School Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:37:23 -0500 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! http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/03/everybodys_working_for_the_wee.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/03/everybodys_working_for_the_wee.html Academics Student Life Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:21:40 -0500 The first week of class started with a whimper. Someone decided that a schedule without classes on Fridays makes law students too comfortable, and so class was canceled (due to 6-8 inches of snow) on Monday. I missed four classes, which means I am in line for four make-ups, two per Friday, meaning I just lost two three-day weekends because someone was afraid of a little snow. (Insert angry shaking of fist here). At least this time the school did not call all my emergency contacts at 5AM to cheerfully inform them that my classes were canceled. They sent an email instead -- a much welcome change in procedure! Midweek into this first week, I've decided to stick it out with the five classes I thought I was taking. Secured transactions seems to have sufficient overlap with bankruptcy law to alleviate some of the pressure of carrying all those credits. Then again, talk to me the week before finals. Actually, on second thought, don't (I am sure NUSL would not want me talking to actual human beings at the end of this quarter). While most of the classes so far have featured a history of the law to this point, some got us knee-deep into law on the first day. Take the following (quoted directly) from an abstract section of a patent: A box is formed from a unitary, double-sided corrugated cardboard blank having a plurality of scored lines which enable a set up in box form. A bottom panel of the box has cemented thereto a single-sided, fluted corrugated cardboard medium with the fluted side facing upwardly. A moisture-resistant glue is used between the smooth faces of the fluted corrugated medium and the confronting liner of the blank to provide an impenetrable barrier which prevents grease from penetrating through the box. The boxes are manufactured on a conventional production line which is modified by, in effect, running one stage in a reverse direction in order to invert the single-sided medium and to apply the glue in a different manner to establish the moisture barrier. In other words: a pizza box. Now, please keep in mind that this was the abstract, I spared you the full gory of patent-speak by not quoting one of the claims -- the first claim (which is one sentence) contained the word "said" no less than five times before I stopped reading because I briefly fell into a coma. The immediate question is simple: is this sort of language required in describing inventions (to prevent legal loopholes), or is it just that generations upon generations of law students learn from previous patents, perpetuating the legalese exhibited above. Let's revisit this topic in three months. Or, perhaps, I should say that it would be pertinent for us to withhold judgment on the appropriateness of the language in said patent application until such a time as at least one of us has completed the course of action known as the patents course and has familiarized himself with said language in greater detail. Hmm... http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/03/on_the_intricate_relationship_between_snow_storms_and_sundays.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/03/on_the_intricate_relationship_between_snow_storms_and_sundays.html Academics Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:47:53 -0500 What is the difference between a linked list and a vector? And with me failing to answer that relatively simple question, we came to the stage of my legal education where I realized that I could no longer pass a Microsoft interview. Actually, since I have never interviewed with Microsoft, one could argue that I might never have done very well, but I choose to give myself the benefit of the doubt. Guess it's a good thing I like this "law stuff," otherwise, I might be in trouble if I were looking for a job. My time in Providence is wrapping up next week, with my final draft opinion going to the Judge tomorrow (I hope) and then going through a round of revision and then circulation to the other judges. It is unbelievable how short the time I spent there seems. If I could convince everyone involved to let me stay there for the rest of the year, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I guess that's what judicial clerkships (after graduation) are for, and I am going to have to seriously weigh the positives and negatives of those when we get closer to application time. In preparation for returning to campus, and partially because our day-trip skiing this Sunday was scuttled by an unusually strong allergic reaction to the bleating of the alarm clock, I decided to go to the gym today (for the first time in something like six months). If I can steer my car on the way to work tomorrow morning, I will consider this a small victory for mankind. I wonder if the GPS in my phone can chart a route to Providence that does not require any turns. Speaking of GPS -- not sure if this is going to sound a little like when people complain that the clock on their VCR (remember those?) is impossible to program, but what the heck -- I think GPS hates me. My first experience with this then-emerging technology was when a friend decided to substitute this gadget for the paper directions I had directing me from the Tampa airport to a hotel on the beach. Roughly 45 minutes later, the infernal device told us to take a right in 500 ft -- we had arrived at our "final destination". Given that the device had picked a cemetery (which was nowhere near the beach or the hotel) as our resting place for the evening, I wondered aloud whether there was a setting to perhaps pick a "final destination for this evening, not my entire life" or if, perhaps, the device knew something I didn't know. Then there was the time that a different friend insisted that his GPS knew the cow paths Boston calls roads better than I did. He finally gave up trying to direct me after the third time his little black box tried to make us drive through a wall. Then there was the time a friend wanted to know how fast we were skiing. With the GPS hanging out of my jacket pocket, I achieved a speed of roughly 64 miles-per-hour on a relatively steep groomer. I was somewhat impressed by this (it was not a very well-groomed run, and I was not going flat-out) until the device registered me going about 35mph through the lift line... while I was standing still. My latest encounter with the limitations of satellite-based navigation came last weekend, when the maps of Lincoln, NH absolutely refused to line up with the actual town. The streets were right, but the numbers were all off by an unpredictable number of blocks. So, basically, I think GPS hates me. But now, I am back to more important things, I have to figure out how to weigh an elephant without the use of a scale, and how to figure out which one of otherwise-identical bowling balls is heavier than the others (you are given only a balance scale, like the ones Lady Justice is holding, and can only use the scales twice). Both are relatively famous Microsoft interview questions. http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/02/random_thoughts_1.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/02/random_thoughts_1.html Co-op Outside Law School Student Life Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:27:48 -0500 I spent this past Monday night at the Museum of Fine Arts. The entire night. From about 6pm to almost 10pm. In case the significance of me voluntarily spending four hours at a museum is lost on those that don't know me very well... let's just say that those who do know me well are probably looking for some way to secure themselves to the ground, since the Earth is sure to stop spinning momentarily and gravity will cease to work. Don't get me wrong -- I like museums. I just like other things more. I also find that museums, unlike good wine, are good in moderation. Despite my wife's excellent tour-giving skills and endless amount of knowledge when it comes to any exhibit we have seen, my attention span tends to wane after hour number two, and tends to approach that of a fruit-fly by hour three. At four hours, my body switches to self-preservation mode and starts trying to pick a fight with said wife, seeing the potential marriage-ending conflict over whether a particular artwork could have been made by a crack-addicted monkey with only one arm and a lazy eye as better than the alternative of staying at the museum any longer. Come to think of it, this pick-a-fight to leave the museum ploy may have gotten overexposed during our trip to Europe a few summers ago, and now seems less effective due to my wife ignoring my tantrums and pretending not to know me. So, what was I doing at the MFA for four hours on Monday night? I was attending an opening ceremony for the "Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings" exhibit. It turns out that at some point between on-campus interviews, my fall quarter finals, my wife's birthday and Thanksgiving, I somehow agreed that we should upgrade our membership at the museum (yes, we were both paying members even though one of us gets free admission because he is a law student -- there was a perfectly logical reason for this, I just can't think of it right now) to something called the Museum Council. This level of membership gets you into exhibition openings not open to the public, and gets you invited to other events as well. In exchange, the museum gets your soul when you die. Well, not quite, but they get more money from you than they were before, and a chance to cultivate some serious donations when we all make it big and compete to see who can get the new wing named after them. Any fears I had of being bored to tears (or having to come up with a new exit strategy) were removed when a waitress presented me with a tray of wine glasses to peruse the second I entered the "closed-to-the-public" museum. Wine and art? Now, this a man can get used to. The exhibit was truly amazing, consisting of furniture and drawings the details of some of which left me scratching my head in a "how did they even do that?!" way. Seriously, the inlay work on some of the furniture was done with precision that I can't even imagine any human being capable of. The slide-show presentation was... well, a little dry, I admit, but it was book-ended by chatting with some friends and an impromptu (and very exclusive) tour given by my wife, so even it was palatable. Then they fed us dinner -- a pleasant surprise for those of us who thought the hors d'oeuvres earlier in the evening were going to be it as far as food goes. Did this one evening turn me into a connoisseur of all things MFA? No. But it was a lot of fun. And I am looking forward to the next one. http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/02/gravitational_pull.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/02/gravitational_pull.html Outside Law School Wed, 11 Feb 2009 22:31:51 -0500 or rather it will not be viewed on youtube during class. One downside to being away from school for three months is the difficulty of staying "in the loop" about things that happen on campus. Some things are relatively minor: the ongoing renovation of the library seems to have relocated its entry point, a situation sure to cause confusion for those of us who auto-pilot themselves to the third floor only to find a wall where a door used to be. I expect to do this at least thrice when I come back, hopefully with hilarious results. Others, however, have a much more far-reaching and long-lasting impact on our education, for instance: I just found out that one of our professors has banned the use of laptops in her first-year Constitutional Law class. Arguments over the use of technology are not new. My father-in-law recalled people's use of typewriters when he was in law school. I remember the first programmable graphing calculators (banned from the SATs). People sometimes tend to see technology as enabling negative behavior, or as being a distraction to others, and this creates conflict. In the interest of full-disclosure, I should mention that the debate over laptop use in the classroom is not limited to NUSL. Many schools, including law schools, are struggling with balancing the useful aspects of technology with their distractive attributes. Some have turned off the internet, others have banned students from taking their finals on laptops. I should also mention that my background in software engineering as well as my completely illegible handwriting (no wonder grandma wanted me to be a doctor!) Put me firmly in the "don't take away my laptop" side of the debate. I do admit that with wireless internet in every classroom and games available on every laptop, the temptation to "zone out" and not pay attention is great. However, banning laptops will not make people pay attention – I have a stack of high-school notebooks full of doodles I can submit as evidence. Besides, some people do well in school despite consistently setting new high-scores in minesweeper while in class – I have no idea how they do it, but they do. I find the distraction argument equally unavailing (sorry, I work for a judge – I have to put this into everything I write now). If you find yourself so easily distracted by what someone else is doing in class, then may I humbly suggest the front row. In fact, perhaps this is a solution – reserve the front row for those who do not want to be distracted by laptops, and ban laptop use in that front row. Similarly, another less draconian measure would be to turn off the wireless signal inside classrooms – no facebook, gmail, or whatever else the kids are into these days. There is another wrinkle, as well. Some people simply cannot take the volume of notes needed by hand. The ADA would protect those students, and they would surely be allowed to use laptops in class. However, law school is a stressful enough place without being ostracized by your professor's technology policy. And what of those of us who have no medical reason (other than incredibly illegible handwriting)? Would we be able to get waivers as well? Where does the line get drawn? We strive to make a legal education available to anyone who wants one – so why ban technology that might enable additional people to practice law? I shudder to think what I would have to do if I couldn't use my laptop. Transcribing my in-class notes when I get home is only half the solution, since I would also need my notes from the cases I read at home to be available in paper form (for in-class reference). So, I'd actually be copying my in-class notes from paper to computer and my at-home notes from computer to paper. Can someone please explain to me how this added effort is supposed to help me in my legal education? Now, I don't want to alarm anyone. There is no NUSL policy against laptops, and there does not appear to be one in the works. Professors set their own rules for the classes they teach. This instance is the first I've heard of anyone banning laptop use outright. The reason this particular decision troubles me so much is because it was done to a 1L class – where you do not get to pick your section, and thus your professor. Had it been an upper-level class, those, like me, who prefer to use laptops, could choose not to take the class – or at least go into the endeavor knowing that laptops are banned. In the end, if laptop use is important to you, my advice is simple: do your homework. Find out whether schools you are thinking of attending have a laptop policy, and whether that policy is being reviewed. Talk to students, check the web for news coverage – try to gauge the atmosphere. Finally, and most importantly, be prepared to deal with it if you find yourself on the wrong side of a laptop-ban decision. This seems to be an oft-debated topic, and no policy seems set in stone. http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/02/the_revolution_will_not_be_tel.html http://blogs.targetx.com/neuslaw/Leon/2009/02/the_revolution_will_not_be_tel.html Academics Student Life Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:11:00 -0500