War Weary

The more time I spend in Crim, the more sympathetic I become to calls for drug ledalization. And not just beacuse I have to read so many cases about it.

Practice Safe Shooting

Amber has a thought-provoking post comparing conventional attitudes towards sex and firearms.

Outre Couture

So I just got a splashy e-mail from the recruiting list. Why is Thomas Pink holding a cocktail reception? They are not a law firm.

DRAGON

This is in my inbox this morning:

Today i bought a lab coat which i will be using for chem 36 and whatever chem lab i end up workin in. I was curious if anyone with mad art skillz would be willing to draw a badass dragon on my coat for $10-15 (name your price). Email me if you can do this.

Badassly yours,

[my friend]

How great is that?

Vici

Finished my oral argument last night. The title here is misleading since they didn't actually name winners, but it's a victory just to be done. In truth, my team kicked ass.

I agree with CM, too: I really enjoy this stuff. Even when it's the ungraded portion of a pass-fail writing class (where my teacher has told us "You will get a low pass over my dead body") and the stakes are absolutely zero, it's thrilling to be up there making your case. I am way too competitive for mediation.

Finally, whoever invented the suit is a genius. I saw myself in the mirror as I was heading off to the arguments and immediately thought, "Hey, that guy looks like he knows what he's doing!" It's uncanny.

Blinkering Juries

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Blink (and also this blog here), gave a talk on campus yesterday, packing the hall to capacity. He went over Blink's main themes, focusing especially on the fragility of expert judgments and how adding more information to a decision-making process can paradoxically reduce its accuracy. He told the stories from the book about symphonies immediately starting to hire women when screens were placed between the auditioning committee and the candidates and ER doctors better diagnosing chest pain when only allowed to consider four simple factors. The upshot of the argument is that people's judgments, even finely tuned expert judgments, are washed out by hidden biases that the experts themselves are not even aware of.

Applying these insights and pointing to wildly divergent sentencing rates between defendants of different race, Gladwell argued that we should experiment with stopping juries in criminal trials from knowing certain facts about the defendant. At its crudest this would entail putting defendants behind a screen and at the most extreme a form of trial by transcript. Gladwell argued this isn't as crazy as it sounds, as social psychology research has shown that laypeople are flat out terrible at telling if someone is lying by looking at them, so maybe juries wouldn't even be losing any potentially relevant information.

Gladwell figured that we'd know if this worked by watching if the gap in conviction rates across races closed. I tried to ask a question about how we'd make sure we were becoming more accurate and not simply more random. After all, coin flips to determine guilt would wipe out race as a factor but hardly be an improvement in terms of justice. I didn't phrase it very well at the time, but afterwards some friends and I tried to brainstorm about how you'd run an experiment without having to convince a state legislature to go first.

You'd have to do something like videotape tons of trials and keep track of them, then add to your data set only those where the defendant was definitively proved guilty or innocent by evidence that emerged after the first trial. Show the tapes to a control group jury and see if they accurately convict the people that were later proved guilty and acquit the innocent, then show doctored tapes that obscure the defendants or mask their voices to experimental groups and see if they did any better. If would take a lot of time and a lot of videotape and a lot of people (one trial run requires 12 subjects!) but it could be done.

Rendering Unto Caesar

I just did my taxes. I owe the bums $76. That's like over a hundred and fifty tacos at J-Box. Dude.

Patriots Day

This business is news to me. This just showed up in my inbox:

Hey guys,

Tomorrow is Patriot's Day. For those of you who don't know, Pat's Day is a Mass. tradition celebrating the day the Revolutionary War started - you know, what with the shots heard round the world in Lexington and Concord and Paul Revere riding his horse all over the place, or some nonsense like that. What I know for sure is that, today, the holiday involves drinking on a Monday morning, the Sox playing a game at 11 am, and thousands of crazies doing some sort of "fun run" they like to call the "Boston Marathon." In a nutshell: anybody who's anybody in Boston is going to be hanging out near Kenmore all day tomorrow, drinking, watching the game, and cheering on the runners - and I think a group of us should join them.

So, if you'd like to (1) go into Boston, (2) drink beer, (3) watch the marathoners cross the finish line, and (4) grab some burgers, all in time to be back at Harvard for 24, drop me an email. My plan is to leave Harvard at 3, go to Kenmore, drink until the runners start looking fat, grab dinner, and come home. But the plan will fail if we don't have a quorum, so do email me if you wanna come.

And just remember: If you don't celebrate Patriot's Day because you're too busy studying, the terrorists have won.

That sounds like a good holiday, but now I'm terribly conflicted. I have to go to Law of Democracy class tomorrow, or the terrorists win. But now I also have to go drink beer and watch the marathon, or they still win! Damn, that was cunning of them.

Build A Nuke, Hug A Tree

The co-founder of Greenpeace has a dogma-defying Op-Ed in the Washington Post advocating the dramatic expansion of nuclear power, for environmental reasons.

It Doesn't Have To Be This Way

Sometimes I get a sneaking suspicion that some people are making this law stuff harder than is strictly necessary.

In adoptiong rules that allowed enforcement of implied reciprocal negative servitudes, the courts supplemented, but did not repeal, either the law of real covenants or the law of easements. This leaves us today with a confused muddle.

Joseph William Singer, Introduction to Property §6.1 at 233 (2d ed. 2005).

Make Love Not Law Review

Someone on the Parody cast had a shirt from another school that played off the classic protest slogan, reading "Make Love Not Law Review." I looked for where I could get one of my own, but was disappointed with what was available on the internets. So, inspired by a couple originals, I made my own. If you're at HLS and want one drop me an e-mail with your size, since they cost less when you order in bulk. If you're somewhere else, feel free to use the design. Share and share alike.



Black and white version available here.

Let It Not Be Said That We Reject The Trivial

I don't know why I think this is funny, but I do. Via ShangriLaw, And The Lord Sent Ten [Shoe] Plagues Unto Egypt.

Uh, happy Passover.

Nerves

"I don't know about the oral arguments this week. I'm kinda nervous."
"You mean the mock arguments? The practice ones?"
"Yeah."
"That are practice for the real oral argument, which is ungraded."
"Uh, yes."
"An ungraded part of a pass-fail class."
"Yes. Nervous."

Ballsy Constitutional Argument of the Week

In Daggett v. Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices, 205 F.3d 445 (1st Cir. 2000), the plaintiff-appellants sued to strike down Maine's election laws that provided for generous public financing of political campaigns. After raising $5 donations from enough residents of the state, candidates could receive as much money as anyone spent in the last election if they agreed not to take any money from private parties. The plaintiffs argued that those restrictions weren't voluntary, but unconstitutionally coercive because the public funding scheme was too good a deal. Oh no! This deal is too good! I'd be crazy not to take it! They must be forcing me!

The lower court judgment for the defendants was affirmed.

Upgrades

At some point I'm going to have to get one of these fancy new notebooks just so I can run Windows on it because EVERY DAMN FINANCIAL AID PAGE DEMANDS A MICROSOFT BROWSER!

RAAARGH!

Not Because They Are Easy, But Because They Are Hard

There is a new show on MTV where a crack team of young men tours the country in a minibus trying to break as many world records as they can. It is called Call to Greatness, and you must watch it. The very first record they try to break is for most times kicking oneself in the head in a minute.

Fins -> Legs

Scientists find 'missing link' between marine, terrestrial animals.

Analysis and "vulgar materialist" gloating available at Pharyngula.

Goosed

Watch Jon Stweart and the Daily Show take on their longtime favorite "maverick" John McCain over his attempts to appeal to the the conservative primary voters from "crazy base land." He asks, "Has John McCain's Straight Talk Express been re-routed through Bullshit Town?"

Sprung

Those are the sand volleyball courts outside the student union. They're being snowed on.

Twenty Questions

This online 20 Questions game is remarkably good. It guessed "toothpick" and "haircut" pretty quickly, though I was able to stump it with "easement."

Go watch this crazy montage of Isuzu commercials from the '80s. This is way before you could make this stuff up with computers, there are people actually driving those things!

Stankowski on Satori

The anonymous associate who posts BigLaw diaries over at Legal Underground has an interesting entry up about how a certain emotional awakening changed (for the better) his whole relationship with the firm. It honestly sounds to me like some of the stories of sudden awakening I read for a class on Zen theology. Now I'm going to wander around murmuring a version of Linji's phrase to myself:

"If you meet the Buddha partner on the road, kill him!"

Status Reports

With the semester begging to draw to a close and spring break all but over, I figured this would be a good time finally check my grades. Go back and see how I did last semester and what it might tell me about how to prepare this time around. I'm almost disappointed to report that there were no surprises on my transcript. I wound up in the middle of the distribution, with the variations I expected. I did better in the classes I liked more, scoring highest in Torts and lowest in Civil Procedure (and looking at the course evaluations, I can see I was far from alone in my opinion of the professor). Overall that's probably a good pattern for my mental health - do what you enjoy, because you'll be better at it.

So in all I'm happy (I'm much more comfortable with "contextual mediocrity" than Amber seems to be, especially since I'm in a fairly heady context), my suspicions have been confirmed and I won't have to wildly correct course next month. And I'm glad I waited this long to check my grades, because it forced some long-term perspective into the situation, and let me neatly dodge the horse-race neuroses at the beginning of the semester.

Too bad about those George Mason boys - I was really pulling for them. But it's great to see a PAC-10 team in the final. And boy but did UCLA dismantle LSU out there.