Suddenly, This All Makes Sense

This is my second column to appear in the Record. I'll put up a link when the online edition comes out. You can get the original online here/

I’ve only just gotten here, but I’ve already got this law school thing figured out.

They told me law school would be hard. They told me that material would be dense, the teaching methods opaque, and the participation mandatory. They told me I’d be struck dumb when called upon to answer even simple questions. They told me I’d have no idea what was going on.

Here in my third week, a lot of the above has been accurate. Not that things have been as bad as you might think. I don’t usually have a very good idea what’s going on in my life in general, so law school was unexceptional in that respect. I was used to being oblivious, so cold-calling was never traumatic. The worst a professor can do is make you look like a fool, and I long ago made peace with me foolishness. By now I’m used to having discussions head off in directions I don’t anticipate and events follow internal logics I can’t fathom. This happens to me slightly more often in foreign countries with different customs and languages I can’t understand, but really not all that much less in America.

So imagine my astonishment when, mere weeks into my tenure, the experience suddenly and miraculously fell into place. I was in the Ames courtroom, dividing my attention between the moot court session I’d come to see and the refreshments table under constriction right in front of me. I tore myself away from the promise of crunchy vegetables and creamy cheeses to recognize that damn, this guy from Oregon was really good. At once, enlightenment flashed through my brain. Arcane rituals and senseless incantations had sudden sense and meaning. The shimmering filaments of a grand edifice arced across what had been a dark and murky sky, revealing a grand design breathtaking in its scope and beauty. It was like being struck by a Zen master, but with less bruising. Everything made sense.

Law school is weird because judges are jerks.

How could it not be so? Here was this earnest Oregonian, earnestly defending the sanctity and the compassion of his homeland, and the quintet facing him weren’t polite or even merely skeptical; they were being mean. He could barely make it through a sentence without terse interruption. Counsel, they would stab, doesn’t your argument contradict this lengthy list of cherished precedents? Counsel, aren’t you contradicting yourself to argue as you do? Counsel, we are confused by this train of thought, could it be that you are full of it? Counsel, wouldn’t you agree that you are in fact a moron?
But Bob Atkinson bravely disagreed. He hung in there and stood his ground, and refused to let his argument be derailed. He deftly turned aside every challenge, patiently reasoning his way around and over every pit and trap the judges could lay. He was magnificent. Even a Zorro or D’Artagnan couldn’t have challenged five opponents at once, and no pack of movie villains ever had the determination or coordination of this nefarious judicial panel. I was entranced. It was then that I came to understand.

Clearly if any person was to stand against a judge, they would need preparation. And only the highly developed vagaries of law school could truly prepare one to meet this judicial menace. Cold-calling wouldn’t merely terrify us into doing the required reading, it would sharpen our reflexes and toughen our spirits. Studying casebooks full of unrelated opinions would teach us to improvise, able to get by on the barest rhetorical essentials. The sheer weight of those tomes would lend us endurance and fortitude. Feeding us a steady and unvarying diet of pizza and keeping us stocked with a constant supply of alcohol would give us the hearty spirits to laugh in the face of adversity.

Even the parts of school that appeared to belittle or infantilize us were in fact part of our rigorous regimen. Requiring us to sit in assigned seats would instill an unshakable sense of duty by giving us a post we could not abandon. Making us tote around little name tags like children in the first week of the third grade would teach us humility, so that a judge could never defeat us by exploiting our hubris. One especially wise professor of mine denies us bathroom breaks. I now see that this isn’t just an outrageous encroachment on my autonomy, but that it will teach me discipline, and control of my body and my unconscious. No doubt later in the semester I will gain mastery over my heartbeat, my emotions, and my fears.

This sudden enlightenment has changed my entire perspective, and now I can dedicate myself again to the study of law, but with renewed faith and vigor. Everything that once gave me pause now only strengthens my resolve. In the fullness of time, I will no doubt come to understand the even hidden purpose behind First Year Legal Research and Writing.

I'll Be In My Trailer

Go watch this amazing and hilarious remix trailer for The Shining.

Big thanks to Amber of Prettier Than Napoleon for the tip. I think her post is a sly reference to this hilarious anti-trailer for the Seinfeld documentary Comedian.

I Heart Television

Today's strip at PvP is all too true. The only one of those show I didn't watch this week is Smallville, and that list doesn't even mention must-sees like The O.C., Laguna Beach and Sweet Sixteen.

Awesome

In my inbox just now:

Instead of meeting at our regular class time and place, our class will attend the following event:

The Practice of Judging: Compartative Perspectives

Location: Ames Courtroom, Austin Hall

You are invited to a panel discussion on "The Practice of Judging: Comparative Perspectives" with Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Antonin Scalia, The Right Honourable The Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, and The Right Honourable The Lord Scott of Foscote. The panel will be moderated by Elena Kagan. September 28, 2005, 11:00-12:15 in the Ames Courtroom, Austin Hall. All are welcome.

This is a required class activity, in lieu of our regular class meeting. The room will probably fill up, so it will be a good idea to arrive early to find a good seat.

To provide you with some background on comparative courts and judging, I'm preparing a required reading assignment. It will be available this afternoon -- both for pick-up and on iCommons. Tom Potter will e-mail you when it is ready.

It is unusual to have an opportunity to interact with Supreme Court justices. Doing the reading on comparative judicial review may help you think about questions you could ask the justices, if you have an opportunity to do that.

I look forward to seeing you at what is sure to be an interesting program!

Best wishes,
Prof. [Civil Procedure]

Fresh Blood! Perspectives!

Ah! This post by frequent citations reminds me that I found a NEW BLOG by a classmate!

[Edit] Did I say say "a" new blog? That's not right! There's another one too!

[Edit 2] Did I say two? Better make it three.

It also reminds me that I have to clean up my links. Ugh. Get back to you when this blasted Legal Writing assignment is done. Hopefully, before 10 am tomorrow.

We Have No Funny

There was supposed to be a meeting tonight for 1Ls who want to work on the Parody. I'd heard it was like something my undergrad did called Gaities and figured I'd drop by to see what the deal was. I guess they had hoped a bunch of us would come with stories about each other and ideas for sketches. But no. There was only me. The producer was the only other person there, so I talked to her for a bit. Then I went home to watch Arrested Development.

Pearly

After a long day of mediation training (more on that later) I tried to conserve brain cycles last night be watching "Survivor". What I want to know is, why are all the Survivors' teeth so white? Aren't they supposed to be stranded in the middle of Africa?

Also, we saw Waterboy, which is hilarious.

So Much for Sobriety

So I lasted four days. What are you going to do, sue me?

The First Temptation

Went to a Journal of Law and Technology (JOLT) open house last night to listen to the opening notes of the big firm siren song. All the presenters seemed enthusiastic about the intellectual challenge, the interaction with innovators, the constantly changing knowledge base. I want those things! And I want to trust these people.

But I'm pretty sure I shouldn't.

I talked to ambimb at the beginning of the year and told him that my biggest fear about law school was that I'd be socialized by the big corporate environment and wind up wasting my life working 80 hours a week in a job I hated, just because someone threw six figures at me and i couldn't find something I really wanted to wake up and do every day.

The problem is, as much as Seth loves it public defending, or any other criminal work, doesn't feel like me. What if the kinds of things I want to do are the exclusive province of Soul Grinding Legal Factory, LLP?

Demographics

Of the ten candidates running for three slots on the ACS board reserved for 1Ls, only three were women. All ten were white. Hmm.

Bob Atkinson is a Baller

This afternoon I saw Bob, Assistant Attorney General for Oregon, argue in a moot court to prepare for his oral arguments before the Supreme Court. As you might guess form the title, I was pretty impressed. You have to be insanely good just to hold your ground up there. The exchanges went like this:

"It is Oregon's position that -"
"Counsel, isn't it true that your arguments are complete bullshit?"
"No, your honor. We argue that -"
"Counsel, you're not very smart, are you?"
"I disagree, you honor. I -"
"Moron."
"We believe that pursuant to rule 703 in the -"
"Counsel, wouldn't you agree that you're ugly, too?"

Soul Man

My section had a movie night and somehow we watched the "ridiculously unfunny" SOul Man. This violated my stated No Law School Inspired Media rule, but there was free pizza.

Regret

I'm not sure how I got home last night. My memories are only fragmentary, but I still remember saying a few truly awful things, which only makes me more nervous about what I can't recall. I don't know what it is about school here, but I haven't drank in moderation since I came - I'm either stone sober or fall-down drunk. That's really not okay. I'm worried.

I'm writing this down here so I'll remeber, and hold myself to these words. No alcohol for a month. We can talk about this again on October 18, and we'll see if it's just the start of school, or if i should just give up drinking all together.

Dead Tree Media

I have a column in the law school newspaper. It is for the career issue, but is emphatically not about careers in law. I think this my first ever publication, so that's fun.

My editor tells me that this, my inaugural publication, is the jobs issue. That's something of a problem. I just got here, showed up all bright-faced and blissfully ignorant, and I don't know anything about anything. I still live in wincing fear of "non-traditional" students with their professional lives and civic accomplishments, to say nothing of the casual, offhand mastery of the 2- and 3Ls. I can't say anything useful to these people; my proudest moments in the workplace came when I was a carnie.

Now, it was only for brief while -- more of a stint than a career -- but I definitely spent a long string of hot summer days hard at work at the county fair. I was, I can say with some pride, a carnie. I slaved to prepare the signature dish at the venerable Australian Battered Potatoes booth. In fact, the Australian Battered Potato was the only dish we served, no doubt to preserve brand identity in the cluttered county fair concessions market. The customer could only opt for a slathering of ranch dressing or nacho cheese sauce, or in extreme cases both at once.

Cousin to the Bloomin' Onion, your Australian Battered Potato is a kind of mutant french fry, the sort of thing you'd find in a puddle of glowing ooze among talking turtles and their rat-man sensei. A single piece is bigger than your hand, a flap of potato cut lengthwise to resemble an orthopedic insole and then deep fried to quadruple its thickness. Pre-sauce, it could be tempura fit for ten-foot samurai or an oil and starch scale model of a pockmarked asteroid. Preparing merely a few for consumption might have been a job for one skilled cook, but our stand was situated up front and on the main thoroughfare, which ran directly from the creakily whirling steel of the Fun Zone to the entrance and the open-armed welcome of the statue of Don Diego, spray painted gold for the occasion. Great herds of people rolled by, and we moved product by the plateful, as fast as hurried hands could shovel out steaming heaps of potato and gather up wilted fives and ones in damp bushels. We had a team. We had a process.

Only a small team out front wrangled with the throng, taking orders and distributing plates. This freed up the inside of our cramped trailer as the factory floor, where the real work was done. My turf. It was hot and loud inside; the cramped room we proudly toiled in was full of boiling oil and hard metal surfaces, of hustling bodies and shouted conversations. The space was full of potato: you drank it in with every breath, and your skin slurped it up from the air. But things were best when it was busy, when we were taking a hundred orders an hour and the team hummed with energy. When orders were scarce, we felt dejected and unloved, our talents wasted on an indifferent world.

On bad days you'd be a slicer, feeding whole potatoes into a battering machine that spit out flaps of potato with the slap slap slap of bare feet on wet sand. Acidic juices would sting your fingers, eating through flimsy latex gloves that were crumbling apart by the lunch break. Pigpen to the slicer's Charlie Brown was the flourer, giving each slice a powdery dusting so that batter will stick. He would end his shift caked in a flaky clay of flour and sweat, an apparition out of Shakespeare. These were jobs for sturdy, dependable types, with stout hears and steady minds. He who does it well may take pride. But the true masters of the operation worked the fryers.

There were two cooks working back-to-back, each toiling above two deep pools of bubbling, frothing oil. Soybean, I think. The fryer slapped potato slices through a bucket of batter and fed a steady stream of them to the boiling maws before him, pausing only to scoop out finished pieces with a heavy wire basket. It took nerve and a deft hand to do this well -- potato slices haphazardly slung into the vats, splashing scalding oil all over the trailer and its crew, forcing the cooks to lay them out in a smooth casting motion, all but caressing the oil's surface. Then the slices glided in as smooth as Olympic divers and piled up as quickly as painters' brushstrokes. Such mastery did not come easily, and I have faded scars where ugly blisters once testified to my hard-won skill.

Once fetched from the fryer, newly-crispy slices were doused with salt and drowned in the appropriate sauce. The customer's heavy-duty paper plate had to be supported by two hands lest it buckle under the sheer mass of the assembled foodstuffs. There was enough starch and grease to kill a small mammal, a one-step recipe for artery cheese. But the crew has been made stronger, and it knows it can eat with impunity. It is metal, unstoppable, a machine. It has lived the potato, and mastered it.

Trevor Austin encourages you to share your employment stories with him at taustin@law.harvard.edu. He is currently a 1L, and in a previous life was a rhinoceros.

First, Let's Kill All the Tariffs?

Can W really be serious about his proposal to eliminate all tariffs and subsidies? Because that would be kind of great. Super, even.

Hat tip: Donklephant.

Underground Movements

There were only fifteen minutes left in Contracts, so I was alternating between anxiously watching the clock and staring out the window. Suddenly, I saw a dull flash outside, and waited completely still for twenty seconds before hearing the thunder's unmistakable rumble. By the time class was over, campus was under a full-on rain storm. Dressed for another 80-degree day, I took the tunnels home. I may not walk outside again for months.

Seth Abramson

just happened to be a speaker at a panel on living with our loan-forgiveness program. He works as a public defender in New Hampshire, and is every bit as passionate about it in person as this blog post would lead you to believe. All of these public interest lawyers they have come and talk to us are pretty damn inspiring. I fully plan on following some earlier advice, focusing on finding a job I can love and letting the rest work itself out, and it's increasingly looking like doing public interest work is the way to do that.

Prof CivPro Lays it Down

PCP: "So the due process clause of the fifth ammendment only applied to actions by the federal government. State governments could do what they liked."

Gunner (blurts out): "But didn't the fourteenth ammendment extend those protections to cover the states too?"

PCP: *glare* "Do you want to come up here and teach?"

Vonnegut on Stewart

"You're tremendously popular with all the right people."

Everyone watching TV with me kept reverently silent for the entire interview.

I imagine when they put stuff online, including Vonnegut's latest, "A List of Liberal Crap I Don't Want to Hear Anymore," it will go here

Your Senator May Be Reading This

Well not this, obviously, but some blog. I only saw about 30 seconds of the confirmation hearings today, and it just happened to be where Roberts was asked about a post on the Volokh Conspiracy. I know if I was Jim Lindgren, I'd be a lot more stoked than he seems to be.

Why I Am Not A Textualist

A lot of the rules that determine who has standing when were just made up by the courts at one point or another. These seem more like guidelines, and can be contravened if the Legislature says so or if a given court feels like it. But apparently there are some kinds of standing issues that Congress has no power to change, because they are grounded in the constitutional authority of Article III. Scalia argues for the majority in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife that Congress can't empower just anybody to sue if they won't have a legitimate "case" or "controversy."

Of course, Article III isn't very specific on this point. How did we decide what counts as an allowable "case" or "controversy?" That's right. The court made it up. Only earlier.

Professor Civil Procedure had been shooting down gunners all morning and just snapped at Unfortunate Student who brought this up in class, but near as I can tell the best reason for why some standing issues count as constitutional and some are merely procedural is: "Because that's how we've been doing it, and it's been working out okay. It doesn't have to make sense."

Limits

We just got cable in our dorm lounge, which is about 13 feet away from my door. Watch now as my productivity asymptotically approaches zero.

Reinforcements

A student from New Orleans who was a 2L at Loyola moved in to my hall yesterday. Real friendly and laid-back guy, seems remarkably unconcerned that his hometown is underwater. First thing he wanted to know from us was whether LSU beat Arizona State.

Meet The Press

A reporter from the Yale Daily News just called me up out of the blue to ask how I felt about my school having (or being about to have) 5 justices on the supreme court.

"No one cares."
"No one cares?"
"Well, the administration will joke about it sometimes, but the students certainly don't."
"Oh."
"How did you get this number, anyway?"

Reunions

All of a sudden I have this vibrant non-law-school social net.

I saw CM and Josh yesterday, and we talked for a bit about public interest work and changing one's anonymity policy from "token attempts" to "screw it."

Later I met up with a friend from high school (poor fool is taking a practice LSAT right this minute), and ran into someone from my dorm last year on the way there. When I got home, I had e-mails from two other old classmates telling me they're in the neighborhood too. And I'm going to spend most of today trying to track down a certain native Bostonian before she has to head back out to California for school.

I was really worried when I got here that I would lose touch with all my old friends and get sucked into a tiny little law school bubble, so I'm going to take these developments as signs of my uncanny sanity in the face of that threat.

Real Men Study Law

or so said Jack Roberts, father of current nominee to be Chief Justive of the Supreme Court. Full commentary on this, "one of the unlikeliest four-word sentences in the English language" over at Bruce Reed's excellent Slate column, The Has-Been.

I for one need a t-shirt of that.

Stamina

Tonight, as we reflect on a long first day back at the dorm:

A: "Is it bad that I'm already looking forward to the weekend?"
B: "It's Tuesday."
A: "..."
B: "And we had yesterday off."
A: "..."
B: "I feel the same way."

Civil Procedure

Best exchange of the class:

Professor CivPro: "But who makes the rules? This isn't a monarchy, we don't have a king, so who's the sovereign?"
Wisecracking Student: "Dubya?"
*nervous laughter as crestfallen Prof looks down at desk*
General Mumbling: "We The People?"
Prof CP: "Oh thank God. I thought I was going to cry."

Initiative

Two farsighted students in my section started taking up Katrina donations right when school started, and got our section leader (Professor Torts) to match contributions up to $1,000 dollar-for-dollar. The law school has also pledged to match any contributions by students or staff, making for a 4x multiplier that really gets even students to open their wallets. They made an announcement this morning at the end of Civil Procedure that they had collected just over $600 from students so far and wanted to reach a thousand by the end of the day. Professor Civ Pro announced she'd follow Professor Torts' lead, and I think they had a full box by lunchtime.

This is what they're talking about when they tell you your classmates are the most amazing part of the experience.

Naming Policy?

What do you guys think I should do about writing about professors?

I post under my own name and generally make no effort to hide my identity, so I'm always working under the assumption that whoever I write about will be reading this and know who I am (and that I'm writing about them). But I'm still not sure whether to go ahead and use professors' names - it makes things more transparent and possibly more useful to readers, but still feels a little funny. I like the Professor Subject convention.

I ask because I sat next to Professor Criminal Law at dinner and over the course of discussing how we researched schools he mentioned that he scrupulously avoids student blogs because he doesn't want to know what students may be writing about him.

Makin' it Happen

Tonight Professor Contracts made us arm wrestle. It was the Dean's welcome dinner for my section, and Professor Contracts spoke to us for a bit. We're going to play a game, he says, and has us move around the table to sit next to someone about our size. Get ready to arm wrestle - you get one point each time the back of the other person's hand touches the table, and the point of the game is to maximize the number of points you get. No talking, eyes closed.

So of course the trick here is to reciprocate, since you don't care how many points your "opponent" gets and you just want to burn through as many cycles as possible. I can't tell my partner about this plan, but I throw the first round and luckily am strong enough to quickly overpower him on the second and fourth, and they we're off to the races. When the exercise is over a couple of other pairs have had the same idea, and we all each have double-digit points, when almost everyone in the room has between zero and two. Moral of the story, intones Professor Contracts, is cooperate, don't compete. So I thought that was really cool.

Sleep

After a full week of sub-six hour days, I finally crashed and didn't wake up until this afternoon. And I don't even have a ton of work yet - it's mostly just a blur of introductions. Once again, I have been made painfully aware of just how bad I am at learning names. Just when it starts to hit you that 570 really is a lot of people, all the 2 and 3Ls start showing up, too. I ran into Bad Glacier in a volleyball game at one barbecue, and we trounced the opposition.

Safe and Sound

A close friend of mine was a 1L at Tulane and I still haven't been able to get a hold of him, but tonight I was finally able to talk to someone who has. He's okay; he made it out to Virginia before New Orleans went underwater. Still doesn't know what he'll do about school now, but I hope that will work out. Right now, I'm just thankful he's all right.

Big City Life

Today in my inbox:

CRIME ALERT
Armed Robberies
Cambridge Street, Cambridge

On Friday, September 2, 2005, at approximately 2:15 AM a male graduate student
reported to the Harvard University Police Department that he was robbed twice
while walking down Cambridge Street from Inman Square towards campus. As he
walked near Cambridge Hospital, he was struck in the head from behind and
knocked to the ground. When he looked up he was surrounded by four males who
demanded his cell phone, I-POD, and wallet. The victim complied and the
suspects walked away. As the victim continued walking on Cambridge Street
toward campus he was approached by a male who asked for a cigarette. The
victim gave the male a cigarette and continued on. The male then approached
the victim from behind and placed a knife to the victim’s throat and demanded
his money. The victim informed the suspect that he did not have any money as
he was just robbed. The suspect searched the victim and, finding no valuables,
let him go. The victim then proceeded to the Science Center where he reported
the robberies to both the Harvard University Police Department and the
Cambridge Police Department.

Jesus. I walked down to Inman square for dinner yesterday.

First Impressions

Today was the first day of orientation. It's going well so far, mostly touring the campus and picking up papers and buying books. Had a brief class with Professor Torts, who's my section leader. He called on people randomly but it didn't seem like a big deal. We discussed the McDonalds obesity case, so tonight's welcome to law school movie will be Super Size Me. Haven't seen that before, though honestly I'm just grateful it's not Legally Blond.

Arrival

So I got here alive. All set up now. Met some nice folks. I'll get all orientation-schmigelated tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes.