Trick: It went so well with Halloween, I couldn't wait until it's up! Lawpsided will be sponsoring The Sexiest Supreme Court Justice Survey. Now that's scary!
Treat: Since you have to wait, go play the Fantasy Supreme Court League Contest. It will get the brain juices flowing just in time for the monsters! Well, maybe it's not a treat. Unless you're a monster.
Trick: The RNC portrays Daschle as a bizarre little candy dispenser to wee little ghosts. I think the RNC can do you-know-what, but it's still damned funny.
Treat: A Public Service Announcement - don't let this happen to you!
Trick: Marshmallow Peeps (not just for Easter anymore) are really harbingers of doom.
Treat: Weird Files is (or should!) be back online today!
Trick: Did you forget a costume? Never fear! Forbes has been so kind as to provide us with full-size printer-friendly cut-out masks of our favorite corporate criminals: Bernie, Ken, Dennis, Martha, and Sammy!
Treat: I can't figure if this guy is brilliant or insane.
Trick: Ooops! Let's just say this one's maybe a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
Treat: Ronald McDonald source of dark, tormenting hell.
Just completely bizarre: piggy piggy.
Yes, I know my definitions of trick and treat could be construed as morally ambiguous. Just go with it.
Today I ran into a small cluster of 1Ls. I overheard just a small snippet of the conversation: "well, the reasonable law student" and then some idiotic blather about studying.
Can't you guys think of more exciting things to talk about? Studying does not have to be an all-consuming pursuit, although it might seem like it at times!
Fox has declared girls club guilty of utter silliness. Didn't I tell you so? Okay, so I didn't predict its sudden demise. But it had it coming! (Thanks, Bryant)!
TPH at Math Class for Poets has some piercing observations about anonymity in the blawg world.
I must admit that there is a definite psychological benefit to identifying one's self with one's own writing and there have been a few times in the past couple months where I wanted to say, "Hey! I wrote that!" I can't tell you if the quality or content of my writing would be measurably different had I chosen to attach my name to it, but I can say I feel remarkably free to write about whatever I choose. My choice of a pseudonym was motivated in part by internet privacy concerns and, yes, motivated in part by concerns about my future career.
Yet, I don't feel any psychological dissociation as a result of my pseudonymity. As far as I'm concerned, I'm me! I don't make any mental shifts when I sit down to write. I've really just set out to articulate my thoughts, collect them, observe the shifts in my thinking, and rant and rail along the way (because it's fun!). Of course I've refrained from writing or commenting on a few topics that might give me away, or framed them differently than I might have writing under my own name.
Whether pseudonymously or not, most bloggers (especially those with professional careers to think about) are going to filter one way or another. This just happens to be the mode I've selected. It doesn't mean I've completely foreclosed the possibility of staking claim to my writing here (I suppose a psychologist might say that's a need to reintegrate my fragmented conciousness or whatever), but at this point, I didn't think was appropriate or necessary for me to plaster my name all about. Nor did I think it was necessary as a contextual matter. For the most part, law students' experiences are largely similar; it makes it extraordinarily simple to comment on life in law school and the transition to professional.
Go here for the perfect summary of the premier of David E. Kelley's girls club. Yes, it really was that silly. Like, totally!
My friends and I shared a good laugh about this new "reality-based" legal tv series. It was so ridiculous the Wall Street Journal assembled a panel (paid subscription required, 2002 WL-WSJ 3409550 on Westlaw) of single female lawyers to review the show. Working out in the gym! In broad daylight! Three associates sharing the most magnificently enormous apartment in one of the most expensive cities (San Francisco) in the country! Second-year (I'm guessing) associates running their own trials! It was just too much!
And the fainting gynecologist gag really didn't fit the tone of the show. The whole thing seemed cobbled together from Kelley's previous work. Most are quite good as far as TV goes, but don't forget about Snoops, Kelley's last stab at a show focusing on a troublesome trio of women.* A little bit of law firm, a little bit of criminal justice, and a whole lot of sex (as usual).
In truth, the reality of working in a big firm (Kelley's interpretation of a "big" firm was more like swanky medium-size) is too scary for cable tv, but maybe just right for HBO! Except it would be really, really boring.
*It took an incredible amount of willpower from me to not use my alliterative powers here. Had I so chosen, I could have also written tramp, trollop, or tart. But that wouldn't be nice.
You might have noticed today that the CGI problem I had spread like an evil cancer and took down my entire site! Now I have a brand spanking new server. Yay! Back to blogging!
UPDATE: Apparently I am not alone in my blogging difficulties. Instapundit is out and blogger.com was hacked over the weekend. It's a massive conspiracy, I tell you! Mark my words, the end is nigh!
Oh, sorry. I forgot momentarily I wasn't a conspiracy theorist.
I have occasionally gotten some weird websites in my referrer logs, but I noticed recently that someone has been referring to me with weird porn URLs. I think I've found the source.
I clicked on this page from my referrer logs to find out there is a company that will insert your blog URL into the referral logs of other blogs for a fee of $1500CDN. It's called viral marketing (a more acceptable example is the tagline at the bottom of emails sent through free email services).
Not only does it make it harder to see where your visitors are coming from, it also mucks up Blogdex. There are much better ways to get traffic. Like, say, writing interesting and timely posts.
A couple of months ago, I commented on the extraordinarily high price of Legal Affairs magazine. I am happy to report they are now offering discounted subscriptions to students and recent graduates for $29.95 for six issues.
I'm a complete magazine junkie, so this makes me very happy.
The server's CGI somehow got misconfigured and I couldn't write! Happily, I have returned. I will soon send upon you a deluge of postings sure to whet your whistle, as soon as I'm done whetting mine.
If you aren't quite clear on that: I'll be back for more fun tomorrow after my friends and I do a little "bar review!"
The first time the Fox News reporter said tonight that Alabama was close to the Maryland border, I thought either I misheard her or she was speaking too quickly and she got confused. Or at least I hoped that was the case. Unfortunately, she repeated the same statement an hour later!
Alabama is close to Maryland like Massachusetts is close to South Carolina.
While both Alabama and Maryland are south of the Mason-Dixon line, I don't believe that suffices to make them geographically "close." I have this theory that northerners believe the southern United States are as squashed together as the northern United States and hence, all southern states must be close together.
Silly parochial city-dwellers! Where I come from, we were required to learn where all the states are to pass the second grade.
This is just dirty! Sullivan & Worcester* canned 5 associates this week and 6 of the 11 first-years slated to start work there in just two weeks. The firm had already shoved back the new associates start date. I'm not sure if they thought they were doing these new lawyers a favor by grasping onto straws, but as a former first-year laments on the Greedy Boston board, the firm didn't tell them they were no longer invited until after the fall recruiting season ended. Searching this late was already pretty tough. The firms that actually had spots for new attorneys with no experience have likely already met their hiring needs.
It almost makes me respect the firms that canned people last month!
* Boston pronunciation lesson o' the day: For those of you not in the know, Worcester is not pronounced "war-chester" or "worsh-ter." Think "wuss-ter." (Really, no pun intended!) Native Bostonians would say "WOO-ster." Like rooster. The people who live in Worcester would say "WOO-stah." It kind of has an "i" sound to it too, like "wistah." The linguistic challenges of living in this city!
Andrew has elucidated his thoughts on the super utopian open research scheme. Plus my super-duper comments!
Link to more related stuff on Bag & Baggage.
What really happens behind the scenes! (Link via Lewis & Clark's Law Library News Site)
Matt at retrorocket could really be on to something!
Contracts was my favorite class last year, shoes are my favorite fashion accessory. Hmm.
I only skimmed this, but the graphic assistance is funny enough to pass along to everyone else.
Andrew Raff is being equally geeky as Mike! Andrew envisions a future where courts publish their opinions in open format (!).
I don't want to burst anyone's bubble -- they're great ideas! But I predict there won't be any critical mass happening on that front in the courts anytime soon (and probably not within our lifetimes). People may have grown up using computers, but there are still many many people who don't understand anything but basic application use (and can't even take advantage of the advanced features of those applications). Computer knowledge needs to be driven to comparatively astronomically high levels before judges -- even those that grew up on computers -- will see the need for such a system, especially considering the time, expense, and potential problems with switching over, even if the implementation of the system is transparent.
There are all sorts of problems if you wanted to take this sort of solution and launch it on a large-scale. What would Westlaw & Lexis do? After all, they've built their businesses around the idea that these free, public materials are relatively hard to access. If open source software pops up and eats away at those services until the margins shrivel, what happens (to us, not them!)?
We get everything for free (except, of course, for the massive databases of secondary materials), but we lose something that a lot of people don't think about -- massive centralized repositories of case law. Maybe that doesn't outweigh the benefit of free or new searching, but it's something to consider. What happens when one state's server goes offline (or gets hacked)? What happens if the building catches on fire and that state didn't want to spend the money on off-site backups (or just couldn't spend the money on providing online access to the cases for a year? see Massachusetts for serious budget crunches in the judicial system)? There are a lot of valid reasons why free isn't necessarily better.
Plus, who is providing the links between cases? Case law is too complex, nuanced, or cryptic to rely on grammar analytics to figure out what a case is saying, or to distinguish between holdings and dicta. Legal research services pay the head note writers not to summarize the cases, but to figure out where they fit in the relational database. 10,000 monkeys can write Shakespeare and that many law students surely can figure out where the cases in the extremely limited sample a casebook provides fit in such a database. But what about the cases that don't get a headline until they provide the basis for groundbreaking law 50 years later? Don't forget to note that the decisions provided in your casebook are edited, often differently depending on the editors. Who decides what's important? Remember, even relational linkage algorithms (like Google) don't always work correctly.
I think that a much better use of the technology would be within the existing legal research services. It has a far better chance of being implemented (and standardized!) that way. Don't think I'm trying to discourage this kind of idea. Focus it, figure out where it fits now and determine what kind of policy you're trying to set with that kind of system and then you can work on grandoise schemes of world domination making the world a better place through open legal research!
This just brings a whole new dimension to disgusting.
Craziness, by the New York Lawyer:
Defendant bites off piece of court officer's ear in courtroom melee!
Which happened the day after a judge helped disarm a ticked-off defendant that snatched the court officer's gun.
Plus, last month, New York Biglaw associates got to feel important for once!
There's a reason I like Boston!
As you all might be aware, I have a wee predilection for weird things. Imagine my delight when I stumbled onto this completely inexplicable site. You'll have to check it out for yourself, but don't forget to visit How Much is Inside.
Ford is asking its corporate attorneys in the UK to slash their bills! The auto giant has "requested" its legal advisers to come up with alternative ways of billing them, like success-based billing. I don't know if this entirely makes sense --in the English legal system, the loser pays the fees of the prevailing party. Of course there are incidental costs that are larger than the actual award, but the proposal seems a bit off. Start at home, boys! There's no better time like the present to reform American legal billing practices. No firm could afford to lose an auto manufacturer as a client.
Link provided via Ernie!
Mike at Method to the Madness can't seem to escape his geeky roots. (w00t!)
Personally, I think Mike should head down to his local fine drinking establishment and knock back a few, but all freshly geeks-turned-law-students must come to terms with that in their own special way :)
The Intellectual Passivist passes on the news that Washington University in St. Louis rejected the Pro-Life students' group there because they "did not have an 'anti-death penalty' position in its constitution."
The SBA maintains that the group's focus is too narrow, unlike the Golf Club's.
I would argue that the non-inclusion of an anti-death penalty statement would broaden the club's appeal, encompassing both subsets of the anti-abortion folks: those who advocate the death penalty (a few Supreme Court justices come to mind on this one) and those who don't. It's really not such a radical idea.
What's really going on is just linguistic gymnastics: it looks as if the SBA trying to get them to change their name from "pro-life" to "anti-abortion." This reaches new pinnacles of asininity; if they wanted to call themselves "The Knights of the Purple Zulu," that'd be okay by me. I'd even be okay with them advocating euthanasia and opposing abortion. They should have the right to organize themselves any way they please. And certainly the intellectual debate (even though I wouldn't agree with it personally) has got to be better than the numerous other silly groups peppering law campuses everywhere.
* Oh, come on! It's a joke!
Eugene Volokh (of the Conspiracy) has written a fantastic primer on writing student notes and research papers.
There is, of course, the perennially recommended Stalking the Golden Topic (1996 Utah L. Rev. 917), but that article is primarily geared to those who are stuck at the first step.
Volokh's guide helps you work through refining your topic and structuring and building your analysis. I have found it an invaluable resource in my own work, and you will too, now you know that it exists! I found it while searching for something entirely different. Go figure.
BU law students are riled up* about Chancellor (and acting President) John Silber's order to disband the Gay-Straight Alliance at BU Academy, BU's high school. Silber -- who's been shooting his mouth off in the Boston Globe and other area news sources for a few months now -- defended his move in a speech to the University entitled "Tolerance and its Consequences," in which he took a pro-discrimination stance.
Silber responded to the law students' complaint by charging they could not form coherent arguments. They, in turn, wrote back to clarify a few points Silber attacked.
Silber is a reactionary and doesn't quite think through the consequences of his remarks, or, at least, doesn't give a whit. Quite frankly, I've never seen anything like this come from a University President, especially of such a large school. It can hardly pass for leadership, regardless of what you might think about the appropriateness of his actions.
Unbelievably, the Board of Trustees forced his predecessor out in order to allow Silber to tackle the school's money problems. One would think he might be a little more responsive to the law students when they intimate they will withhold funds as alumni. It's been done at other schools with serious downward pressure on the fund-raising arms of those universities. At a school like BU (respectable, but not top-tier), law students easily have the highest earning potential of all students. Silber can hold his views, but it seems pure folly to alienate such a large group of potential donors on purpose.
* For the record, while the OED (1989) does give "discrimination" the definition of "The action of discriminating; the perceiving, noting, or making a distinction or difference between things," it also notes a definition of "The making of distinctions prejudicial to people of a different race or colour from oneself." I'd wager that newer editions have an updated definition.
Today's the big day! Check out Copyfight for news and updates specific to the case. I know better than to reproduce the same links in a spate of duplicativeness.
You can check out the briefs at Eldred.cc. If you don't know how to read a brief, refer thyself to LawMeme's Law School in a Nutshell, Parts I, II, & III. Lucky you, Eldred v. Ashcroft is used as an example!
Unfortunately, nobody should get their hopes up on audio of the proceedings -- the marvelous nine don't release their stuff to the National Archives until the next term. You'll have to rely on the press for your accounts (unless someone has a fantastic memory and wants to share). The Court does not allow members of the public to take notes. In fact, if the question were to arise, I might even go so far as to suggest the Court might support a media/non-media distinction in the First Amendment context (despite the Constitutional text).
Transcripts should be available on the Supreme Court website in about 15 days and also on Lexis [USTRAN library] & Westlaw [SCT-ORALARG database]. If you're completely nuts, you can buy a copy for five bucks a page before the transcript is released to the public from Alderson Reporting, the exclusive transcriber.
Yes, it has come and gone yet nothing much has changed, except Rehnquist accidentally announced Frank Lorson's retirement as his own. (Good one, Renky!)
You can read about all of this and more at SCOTUSblog. Woohoo!
I'm not sure whether I should be either mildly horrified or humored at my typical college student reaction to the ever-increasing piles of laundry dotting my abode. If I just buy more socks, nobody will know.
"They wanted to go for the brass ring and really live the good life. What they don't seem to get is that the key to living the good life is to avoid that brass ring like the fucking plague." The Onion just always gets it right, even though it's all made up.
Check out this funny jab at Hale & Dorr.
Garrett has a great little feature: Law Student Bloggers, Week in Review. Plus, he calls me fabulous, which is always nice, although I do believe my anonymity may be driving him a little batty.
I do hope the Week in Review becomes a regular feature over in Garrett's neck of the woods, but irregular is better than nothing! (We're law students, people!)
In the dust of Harvard's similar decision (and under similar threat), Yale has announced it will allow military recruiters on-campus. The Yalies (ever clever, they) responded in protest resplendent in interview suits and camoflauge gags tied about their heads.
What's curious is that YLS's dean took a very aggressive stance, speaking to the crowd and proclaiming the law school was "being held hostage" by the DOJ. I like him already!
Today I had the opportunity to listen to Prince's entire 3-disc hits/b-side collection while reading cases for tomorrow (let me tell you, that is a seriously lengthy collection!). I was inspired by this case.
I could take the time to muse on Prince's wild ride with the music industry, but sleep would be better. There's always that one week that if you just march your way through it the rest is easy. This is that week!
Just one more day.