Leon, 3L

And the Boston Red Sox are World Champions! That just never gets old.

In 2004 we forever said goodbye to chants of "1918! 1918!"
In 2007 we forever said goodbye to "talk to me in 86 years when you win your next one!"

Oh, and by the by, in case you haven't noticed, the Patriots are undefeated and winning their games by almost four touchdowns. It's not a bad time to be a sports fan in Boston.

Life is full of compromises. Law school is full of impossible compromises. Do you get all your reading done for class, or do you get enough sleep so you can better participate? Do you go to the really interesting lecture given by professor Enrich about arguing a case at the Supreme Court, or do you prepare for a quiz in Civil Procedure? Do you go the ACLU-sponsored David Cole lecture, or to the inexplicably time-conflicting Federalist society-sponsored presentation on the power of Congress over the Constitution?

Sometimes, the answer lies in something you actually learned. Take for example the concept of balancing considerations. The societal good that is exhibited by a certain action may mitigate the risk associated with it. I got to apply this concept this past weekend, as the risk of not getting enough sleep and falling hopelessly behind in all my reading was weighed against the societal good of my presence at a bar near Fenway for the last two games of the World Series. Societal good won, my voice lost, and I am still catching up on that reading, but it was, of course, totally worth it.

Of course, I did get cold-called in my Torts class, the morning after the clinching game (I swear, some professors just have a sixth sense for who to pick on and when), but I am told that my answers did not make people envision me piloting the Hindenburg, so I'm chalking this one up as a draw.

At the risk of reversing the gravitational pull of the planet by making it stop spinning: I owe an apology to the state of New Jersey. I am going to go ahead and let that sink in for a second...

When last I mentioned that fine locale (known to some as the armpit of the country), I may have suggested that the state collectively owed me a new windshield. As some of you might remember, my windshield had a close personal encounter with a rock the size of Jason Giambi’s head. While this did not result in an immediate crack, I used my finely-tuned analytical skills, and a little something the lawyers like to call precedent, to deduce that the chip left behind would surely spread. I am positive it would have if I hadn’t written about it, but because I did -- the windshield remains completely crack-free. One could see this as a sign from above telling me that my analytical skills leave something to be desired, but I prefer to be positive and think that this is yet another time in my life when the laws of physics have failed to work in the way I expected them to (gravity being the first of many disagreements I had with those). At any rate, I apologize to the state of New Jersey... it does not owe me a windshield.

As you may have seen from Ira’s blog -- today was indeed NUSL’s Alumni Connections event. I think the most important thing to take away from an event like that is how many different areas of law were represented by graduates of this law school. From solo practitioners to government agencies to corporations big and small to big law firms and boutique firms concentrating in intellectual property, there was someone there to represent any area of law you can think of. It helps to remind those of us not necessarily interested in public-interest law that there are others like us, even at this school. It also allows us to pick the brains of those who came before us. From what courses to take to what co-ops help you in the long run to what the responsibilities of a general counsel to a start-up really entail -- the answers are out there, provided you have the questions.

While I vehemently disagree that it is all about who you know (I have to, as an engineer, I was born without the ability to small-talk), I can certainly agree that getting advice from people who are passionate about what they do and knowledgeable on how to get there is invaluable. Having been both the "schmoozer" and the "schmoozee" at events such as this, I offer only one piece of advice: be yourself. Ask questions you really want the answers to. Don’t approach it from a "how can this person help me later" standpoint, instead, approach it from a "what can I learn from this person" standpoint.

So, overall, my sincere thanks go out to the people that put this event together. Not only was it a resounding success in its own right, but it was a welcome break from the three C’s (Constitutional Law, Criminal Justice and Contracts) and that other course the name of which I do not even want to mention.

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.

There are two weeks left to my summer internship, after which I will have just under two weeks before classes start. Having enjoyed the summer "job" immensely, I am not sure exactly how I am going to get myself into "ready to be in class" mode in under a month, but that is a problem for another day.

My non-work hours this past week were spent getting ready for our OCI process. OCI stands for On Campus Interviews (or at least I think it does), and is the process through which we apply for summer associate positions. Summer associateships are highly-coveted positions with mostly large-firms that not only help you see what working for a firm is like, but also can lead to post-graduate employment with the firm. So, the pressure to "not bonk" is definitely there. The biggest challenge, so far, has been attempting to convey my previous work experience in a way that doesn't put non-techies into a coma. This coma business is unfortunate, since most of the people kind enough to proof-read my resume for me are not techies, and have been dropping like flies.

The next step is something called "the bidding process", where we apply (on-line) to the firms we want to work for. Then, my understanding is, you sit, hope and pray to the deity of your choice that the firms are interested in having you work for them and call you in for the preliminary on-campus interview. If you do well there, you get a follow-up interview, which hopefully leads to an offer, and then world peace. Well, perhaps not that last part.

All firms are interested in your resume and your course and co-op evaluations. Some also would like a cover-letter which explains your interest in the firm. It's a pretty straight-forward process, and as someone with almost ten years of work experience, I should be kind of old-hat for me. Yet, it feels different and somewhat strange. I am chalking it up to being in a new field and moving on.

In other news, a tornado ripped through New Hampshire this past Thursday. We're certainly not in Kansas anymore, folks.

Sometimes you can just tell that something is not a good idea. However, where some of us see ridiculousness, others see opportunity. So, ladies and gentlemen, I present... (drum roll, please) all-you-can-eat hockey tickets! Paramedics with defibrillators are standing by.

You do have to feel bad for the Bruins. They are located in a town which is crazy about sports and are at the same time owned by a guy who couldn't care less (by the way, please note the use of couldn't in that expression, I know the cool new way of saying this is "could care less", but that makes no sense, because it means he could actually care less. The point is that he could not. Between that, "irregardless" and the "their/there/they're" mess, we have covered the top three ways that people abuse the English language that get under my skin -- and aren't you glad we did?). The owner of a sports team needs to be a fan first and a businessman second. Teams that win championships consistently generally spend a significant amount of money on payroll, and thus are not nearly as profitable as teams that generate a lot of interest, but do not have the same high salaries. Jeremy Jacobs figured this formula out years ago, and so the Bruins are consistently good enough to get in the playoffs and play well enough to generate buzz (which hopefully carries over into next season) and generate revenue, but are always a piece or two short from a championship team, because the owner refuses to spend money. In the sixth-largest TV market in the country. In a part of the country where hockey is a natural sport, enjoyed by many in outdoor rinks for five months out of the year (unlike Florida, where ice is something you put in your drink, not something you skate on). Well, as those of you who have read this space over the last year know, I refuse to let myself be drawn into this. Jeremy Jacobs will not be getting any of my money, regardless (not irregardless) of how much free food I'm offered.

While on the subject of sports -- the entire sports universe is a mess, isn't it? The Red Sox are one loss away from being eliminated by a team we all lovingly called the "Double-A's" as recently as a year ago. The Patriots have lost their starting quarterback and are behind the Buffalo Bills in their division. Though, it is important to note that if the Pats are not going to win the division (or the Superbowl), then I'd want the Bills to do it. Buffalo fans are some of the most knowledgeable, dedicated fans on the planet. That, and let's be honest -- Buffalo needs this. What else do they have to look forward to up there?

In school-related news, there are events planned throughout this week to commemorate the school of law's 40th anniversary. The events culminate in a capstone reception at the new Federal Courthouse on Saturday. Now, this is a curious numbering system, since Northeastern's School of Law was actually the founding school of this university (in 1898). The school was then shut down in 1956 and re-opened in its current form in 1968 (hence the 40 year anniversary, I suppose). Why we celebrate the 40 and not the 110 years... I will never know, but I guess the number of years is not terribly important -- what is much more interesting is that this Saturday I will find myself voluntarily donning a suit to participate in multiple social interactions with other suit-wearing human beings, and none of it can be called an interview. That's definitely something to look forward to. Maybe I can convince someone there to buy the Bruins...

I keep glancing over at the clock. Dr. Pavlov would be so proud, as I have conditioned myself to look at the clock whenever I am sitting in front of the computer but not doing any work. In this instance, it is a completely useless reflex, since I already accomplished everything I had scheduled for today: call Verizon and find out what the heck they did with my phone order from last Friday (answer: they shipped it, finally). After eleven weeks of reading, studying and preparing for exams, I had made the conscious effort to set the productivity bar for this week between finals and co-op relatively low. Yesterday, for example, I touched up a nick on my living room wall. My remaining goal for the week is as follows: I have to buy one of those coat things that one wears over a suit when it is cold out. I have been reluctant to purchase such a piece of clothing (all of my current winter gear either says Karbon or NorthFace on it and is generally skiing-related). Having given up my Peter-Pan like dreams of never growing up, however, I can see why such a piece of clothing might be useful to me in the coming months, especially if I decide to take the train down to Providence for my co-op (as opposed to driving).

The rest of the time will be spent reconnecting with friends (law school and otherwise) who have been ignored for way too long this quarter -- first due to all the interviews from OCI, then due to all the finals prep. In fact, one of the biggest downsides to the NUSL quarter system is that half of your friends end up on "the other" rotation, which makes it very difficult to coordinate social schedules, especially if these friends go on co-op out of state. On the other hand, I understand that having all the students at the school on co-op at the same time is not workable. I guess the solution is to be careful who you become friends with during those first few weeks of law school and only make friends with people who plan to stay on your rotation (this time I am sure I am kidding).

In other news, I see that the new law school website is now up, and that it (in a very curious decision) features my mugshot (complete with a link to this blog) which is certain to increase traffic (and scare small children) to these blogs. In an attempt to welcome any new readers, I give you an updated version of the disclaimer from my first post:

Disclaimer: I hold no answers. I still possess no inside knowledge. I have no idea why anyone should or should not go to law school. I do not know the key to surviving law school, though I do know that it is possible to survive the first half of it. And I certainly do not know the meaning of life, but I am convinced now, more than ever, that we are meant to enjoy it. Now that I have sufficiently lowered the expectations, it is probably safe to proceed.

On that note, I leave you to go tend to the explosion of pumpkin pie which has covered my kitchen and lovely wife in orange goo and has presented an opportunity for today to be even more productive (and fun) than I had anticipated!

Have a happy Thanksgiving everybody!

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.

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.

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!