PopoZao

Britney Spears' husband was too busy training for this sumer's Word's Biggest Douchebag contest (airing in Augst on Fox) to perform his hit single PopoZao for the Conan O'Brian show, so they got that dude from Inside the Actor's Studio to recite it instead. Video of the results.

Time Management

I watched 15 episodes of Season 1 of 24 yesterday. Is that wrong?

1L Interview Debrief

This was my experience - I have no idea how typical it might be. If yours was markedly different, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. The things that surprised me most were the length, only twenty minutes, and that I was in control most of the time. They only asked me a few short questions about my resume and then turned things over to me - I was glad I had thought of lots to ask ahead of time.

I got an e-mail from Summer Employer saying to get in touch with them and set up a time for an interview on Monday. I do that. Summer job hunting 1L year involves carpet-bombing the area you want to work with resume/cover letter mailings and all law firm names sound more or less the same, so by this point I don't remember a thing about these people. I spend about an hour reading everything I can find on their website, especially the bio of the lawyer who I'll be interviewing with. I try to come up with three or four questions I can ask the interviewer. I actually really like what I see, and decide that worst case scenario, I want to use the oportunity to learn more about the firm for next year. I think of what about the firm sounds good to me, and how to get more details about those things.

I hike through the snow to the hotel, and when I get there the concierge gives me a room number. I go up and knowck on the door and they let me in - there's the firm lawyer and a 2L who will be summering with them too. The student is in a blouse and a conservative skirt, the lawyer is in jeans and a sweater. I feel way overdressed wearing my gray suit and a bright tie, but they don't say anything. Erring on the side of too much formality doesn't seem to be that bad.

They only ask about three minor things on my resume. They want to know what the Sixth Man Club (basically just student season ticket holders for Stanford basketball) is, and I talk a bit (and a bit dismissively) about hoops. They ask about my opinion pieces in the Record, and I explain that I'm going more for "humor columnist" than "opinion columnist." They want to know if I use my own name - I do. They want to make sure that I'm not Fenno - I'm not. They ask about my time in Germany and I talk for a bit about Berlin and Potsdam, and I kvetch about those deconstructionist papers I had to write in German for my Sports and Culture class there. I'm just playing for laughs, but the lawyers sounds impressed and says I would havbeen useful in some case they just finished were all the docs were in German, so I guess he was impressed.

So it's only been about five minutes when and they say that they're done and do I have any questions for them. I'm glad I prepared some. This is the first firm I've talked to so I'm really treating it as an information gathering trip, but it would have been really awkward to just sit there and not have anything to ask. I ask both interviewers when they decided on their practice areas and on what grounds. I asked the lawyer why he went to Summer Employer from another firm. I asked about turnover and how it affected their training program, since every firm claims to have a great training program. They claimed a West-Coast sensibility (music to my ears), and I asked whether that was still the case in the New York office. Their answers sound good to me.

Before I go the lawyer asks what elective I'm taking. I say "Law of Democracy" and he chuckles and says, "Yeah, our current administration could do with some of that." Because I'm interviewing for a job the lawyer is a pretty intimidating authority figure, so I don't even get the mild anti-Bush joke right away. I had just assumed "conservative" wihtout thinking through that a self-described trial lawyer from New York city who wears jeans to a job interview is probably a liberal. Still, I recover. Luckily, the 2L was Professor Democracy's research assistant last semester and gushes about how great he is. We wrap up - it's been just over twenty mintutes, and I head home.

When I get back I have a voicemail that they thought I was "fantastic" and want to give me a job. I call home first, then ring the number they gave me and accept. Turns out I know almost everyone else they interviewed that day, and talking to them I learn that I was the last interviewee (I had a red-eye that landed at 5 a.m. that morning and had asked for the latest slot available) and after I left they made their decisions and sent out calls right away.

Again, this is my sample size of one here, so I have no idea how much is typical or which of the things I did were good or bad. The only thing I'm sure of is I'm glad I spent some time beforehand coming up with questions I wanted answers to.

Molotov

Over at De Novo, PG some other ideas about what to do at these things. I think I can offer some more. Last night, the introduction of some semipro alcoholics from the inimitable Section Six and a bomb-throwing Socialist turned a panel/reception that had been merely boring into an unmitigated social disaster. Firm recruiters and partners launched vicious recriminations through broad, fake smiles, and more than one student launched a full-on battle of wits. But even as profanities flew, everyone maintined at least pretenses of politeness. I've never seen so many angry people smile so much. Naturally, I thought it was all fantastic.

Oh no! I'm allergic to terrorists AND bees

If you don't read fafblog, you should. Today's Q&A about wiretapping is a little slice of genius. A bite:

Q. Things sure have changed since the innocent days of mutually assured destruction! But is it legal for the president to ignore the law?

A. Maybe not according to plain ol stupid ol regular law, but we're at war! You don't go to war with regular laws, which are made outta red tape and bureaucracy and Neville Chamberlain. You go to war with great big strapping War Laws made outta tanks and cold hard steel and the American Fightin Man and WAR, KABOOOOOOM!

Liveblogging CrimLaw

We haven't got to use laptops in class before. The patter of fingers on keyboards sounds like a light summer rain.

The Stakes

From the introduction to my Criminal Law casebook:

While it is possible to envision a [criminal justice] system wholly governed by deontological premises or one that relies solely on utilitarian policies, neither of these positions dominates the existing system to the exclusion of the other. Rather the system makes a series of significant, if uneasy, compromises between them. As you would expect, moreover, the purposes of punishment are historically contingent in the sense that different justifications are emphasized at different times. While retributive impulses may wane and instrumental goals wax, or vice-versa, the system nonetheless remains committed to a mixture of justificatory principles.

Of course, the criminal process itself does not negotiate these compromises by means of an abstract philosophical dispute. To the contrary, the process does its work by punishing real people in specific cases. Some people go to jail, others are forced to pay fines, while still others are put to death. For that reason, it is useful to have factrual contexts in mind when exploring why our culture commits its resources to punishing criminals.

You wanted the intellectual battles of philosophy, but with more real world consequences? It doesn't get more real than that.

The Firm Reception

Starting yesterday, law firms out to make names for themselves began holding receptions at area bars, trying to lure 1Ls in to a den of waiting lawyers. Their motives are fairly straightforward - they want to make a good impression on us so that our best and brightest will leap at the chance to bill long hours for them come graduation. They have no hope of remembering which perky young students seemed promising in a loud, dark, booze-soaked hotel lounge, but there's an outside chance some of us will remember what a bithcin' party they threw. Or something. Student motives are more varied.

The most direct are angling for positions. They'll chat up whatever unfortunate attorney crosses their path, all smiles and false laughs. Business cards collected translate into names dropped in future cover letters. Bill from the Portland office probably won't remember you two years down the line, but for the ruthless, every little bit helps.

Some are there to test the waters. I saw a pair who will spend this summer in US Attorney's offices casting furtive sidelong glances at the roving pack of recruiters, trying to obliquely size up what private sector life would be like. Others nudge and prod for inter-firm gossip and snark, trying to get a handle on who's hot and who's not this legal season. Still others treat it as a training exercise, where they can fine-tune the art of massaging bloated egos.

But most students' agenda is much simpler. They just want to get drunk. You'll see them hop from huddle to huddle, carefully avoiding eye contact with the firm staff. They're the ones who will widen their eyes and silently mouth "keep him talking" as you solicit an intrusive partner's opinion on that Kozinski opinion that's really just great. You'll find them huddled around the bar, positioned by the most heavily trafficked appetizer routes, talking to each other in loud voices. A few brave firm types will interject themselves on brief but heroic sorties, while their less charismatic or bold coworkers pick off stragglers like hunters on the Savannah. Meanwhile 1Ls gulp down colorful liquids from artful stemware, trying to kick the ol' BAC into double digits before last call. In all fairness, it's this latter group of students who seem to have the most fun.

Tonight's gig was at a bar called Noir. I made a horrible mistake and ordered a drink called the LA Confidential - one of my favorite movies, but a wretched libation. Still got to feel like Sam Spade as a beautiful blonde walked me home and told me the inside skinny on all the tough-guy firms in San Diego - a city that knows how to keep its secrets.

Homebrew Funny

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out NeoTokyo's homemade flickr comics. This one is by far my favorite.

I've been wanting to do something like that myself. Only, you know, with drawings.

Oh Dear. It seems that I'm "It."

Meme from the ever-popular Magic Cookie:

Four Jobs You've Had In Your Life
1. Australian Battered Potato fryer
2. assembly line worker
3. computer programmer
4. LSAT teacher

Four Movies You Could Watch Over And Over
1. The Big Lebowski
2. Office Space
3. Casablanca
4. The Untouchables

Four Places You've Lived
1. San Diego
2. Palo Alto
3. Berlin
4. Boston

Four TV Shows You Love To Watch
1. 24
2. Boston Legal
3. Grey's Anatomy
4. The Daily Show

Four Places You've Been on Vacation
1. Australia
2. Prague
3. London
4. Whistler

Four Websites You Visit Daily
1. Slate
2. BoingBoing
3. The Volokh Conspiracy
4. Dinosaur Comics

Four Of Your Favorite Foods
1. carne asada
2. sesame chicken
3. bacon
4. warm bread

Four Places You'd Rather Be
1. California
2. in bed
3. on the beach
4. space!

Four Albums You Can't Live Without like
1. Ben Harper Live in Berlin
2. Grateful Dead - Dick's Picks vol. 21
3. The Grey Album
4. Willie Nelson - Revolutions of Time

Four People To Tag With This Meme
All my lazy friends!
1. Parker
2. Mike
3. Erem
4. Raghav

I Got A Job!

Yay!

My Chemical Morpheus

I can never sleep on airplanes, so I was a bit worried about coming back to Boston on a red eye that landed at 5 am on the day classes started. So at the suggestion of several friends, I took a couple Tylenol PM right before take off. It woroked pretty well, and I was able to nap fitfully throughout the flight, instead of simply sitting bolt upright staring into the dark. But boy do you ever have crazy dreams on that stuff! At one point I was running on the walls like like a kung fu actor with wirework, chased by a ravenous pack of differential equations.

Strutting and Fretting

Everyone in the house got together for a home-cooked feat tonight. We spent the afternoon shopping for groceries, and came home to warm up by watching basketball, eating chicken wings, and shaking up fancy margaritas. After a 70-64 nailbiter, with Haryasz scoring career-high points for the second game in a row, we set to the kitchen. There was pan-seared ahi, sauteed asparagus, couscous, and an Australian white with a sweet fruity nose. A guest wanted to know whether the housemates did this every week, and though they laughed that it was only the first time, everyone seemed to feel that if they didn't, they should.

Then someone gets up from the table to answer a phone call, and when he comes back, it's to tell us his grandmother has had a probably-fatal heart attack. The jolting change in tone drops everyone into confused silence. He gets up to take a walk, and while he's gone another roomate tells us all for the first time about how he saw his father shot to death in a mafia hit. Another tells us how a relative was murdered and the killers got off, and how his father was stopped at the last minute from taking his own vengeance in the back of a bus. I'm dumbfounded sitting around the table; these are all smart, funny, well-adjusted young frineds of mine, with bright careers ahead of them and seemingly all the advantages available. Each one the picture of youth and promise. Even dealing with death in my family, I've never had mortality thrust so suddenly in my face, with such a sharp contrast to what came before it.

So it's Saturday night. Go out and live it up. Now.

So, What's Law School Like?

I've been through a semester and taken my first finals, and now I've had enough vacation time to get some perspective on the experience, so I want to stash a kind of retrospective here. I hear first semester of your 1L is supposed to be the roughest part, and that it's all suppoed to be downhill from here. We'll see.

Anyway, I like it here. You get to struggle with big, lofty ideas and at the same time worry about how they work in detail on the ground, with real consequences for real people. And your classmates care about these things to, and they're a sharp and engaged bunch who have interesting things to say. So all that's good. It's kind of what I was looking for.

I really wasn't sure what to expect coming out here. I deliberately insulated myself from books and movies about law school, so that I would come in without a biased (probably biased towards the negative) perspective. To this day, I haven't seen The Paper Chase or read 1L. In the first week we met with a student advisor who asked if we had any questions about briefing cases. I raised my hand to ask, "What does it mean to brief cases?" I still don't know how briefing is supposed to be different than regular note taking. And I don't really do much of either.

Law school is a lot like other kinds of school. They give you stuff to read, you talk about it in class, and there's a test or a paper at the end. There are some quirks because they're trying to teach you several different things all at the same time, but the basic model is the same. And though last semester was a good deal more challenging than my average quarter in college, it wasn't nearly as hard as my worst two. I never went into that shell-shocked survival mode where you don't have time for anything but working and sleeping. It was tough, but I always felt I could handle it.

What makes things hard (and why I think everone reports it gets easier) is at first you're not just learning a set of legal rules. If all you had to do was learn the rules, reading cases all day wouldn't make any sense, because it is a terribly inefficient way to get to them. When you hear someone complain that professors "hide the ball," that's what they're talking about. Now you do have to learn some core doctrines, and unfortunately that's mostly what you'll be tested on, but that's not the whole story.

What the case method is really designed to to is teach you to derive rules on your own from judicial opinions. Out there in the wild world judges don't like to announce what rule they have in mind, or they may not have a specific rule in mind at all. And even if they did, there are simply too many ways for things to go wrong to specify all the rules out in advance. I imagine that for most cases that get argued there isn't a clear rule set down somewhere, and the lawyers and the judge have to infer it based on old cases. So law schools want to teach you how to figure out what the law is when there isn't a Glannon's you can go look up, and the only way to do that is to figure out how to read cases.

I think that's what the Socratic method is supposed to do too - not force you to think on your feet but to force you through that derivations process. Good socratic teaching ought to be heavy on the hypotheticals, to force students to explore all the implications of their reasoning. Good Socratic dialogue is a tool to get past confirmation bias. I enjoy that kind of back-and-forth, and I think the key to keeping your cool is to be unafraid to make mistakes. I've said some ridiculous things when the prof cold-called me, but I knew that I was there to learn, not to know the answers already.

Of course this is a tricky business and only skilled professors can really pull it off. If they waste all their time grilling students about factual details that didn't affect the ruling, well, I don't know what to say. I imgaine a lot of the time the Socratic method is done simply out of inertia, and without any understanding about what it was intended to accomplish. On the upside, most law professors speak fluent, unaccented English, so you can at least make out what's going on. Bad methods may be better than bad speech.

The main problem is the school doesn't explicitly tell you about these other goals. But that's what I'm here for, right? They also tend to do a poor job of testing for them. The incentives in law school can be way out of whack, but that's a whole 'nother post at this point. Posting past exams mitigates it somewhat, as students actually know what they'll have to do in the end.

Bleg: 24

I was out of town for the weekend and missed the opening episodes of 24. Does anyone out there know legal way to see those episodes? It doesn't look like it's on iTunes or Google Video. Anyone back on campus have them TiVOed?

Out

Tomorrow Opinionistas, the internet's own self-styled canary in the law firm coal mine, will go public with her real name, having already resigned her NY firm job. From an entirely selfish perspective, that's too bad, because whether true or representative or not her updates were always fantastically entertaining.

And I'm on vacation, so the the selfish one is the only perspective I feel like considering right now.

Gonzales v. Oregon Told-You-So

The Supreme Court decided Gonzales v. Oregon today in favor of Oregon and its assisted suicide law. In a case more about federalsim and executive power, the Court ruled that the Attorney General doesn't have the power to issue "interpretive rules" that can override a state government's decisions about what is a legtimate medicasl use for a drug. Congratulations to Oregon 's Bob Atkinson, whose performance at a moot court in Ames inspired some of my better work.

My Own

A couple days into post-finals decompression, I spent most of today lounging around luxuriating in mindless MTV programming. The standout program is easily a creepy little gem called My Own. First, the producers find some lucky kid with a terribly unhealthy obsession with a singer. Then they audition a stable of contestants who try to win a date with the pining fan by doing their best to mimic the look and sound of the original artist, striving with all their might to mold themselves into a satisfying simacrulum. It's really creepy.

East Palo Alto

Driving to my college roommates' house:

"So this doesn't look like that bad of a neighborhood."
"Trust me. It's pretty ghetto."
"Really?"
"Well somebody killed a cop here last weekend."
"No shit? Where?"
"Two blocks from our place."
"Uh, great."

75-61

"Stanford is finally starting to look like the winning team everybody thought the Cardinal would be."

Fin

Hey, so I survived. Both exams and the obligatory after-exams celebrations.

First thing I'm doing is high-tailing it out of here - I'm spending as few days in Boston in January as possible, historically warm though it may be. I'll be in San Jose by this evening.

A Marathon, Not A Sprint

Prediction: Scoring on today's Civil Procedure exam will favor students who paced themelves, or who have extraordinary stamina and mental toughness. I don't know about you, but I hit the Wall somtime after luch yesterday, and now I'm just hoping to limp across the finish line.

No Rest For The Wicked

I'm in the middle of slogging through his 8-hour, 3500-word take home final, so I don't have time to read Profesor Torts' theory on why Supreme Court Judges become more liberal on the bench, but maybe you do.

Fully Integrated

I try to add a link every time I stuble across a new blog that I like to read, if only so I have a record for myself somewhere. But my little sidebar doesn't begin to approach the scale of the frighteningly-comprehensive Kiwi Law Links.

Which reminds me: I've been reading Law & Alcoholism - A Theory of Jurishprudensh for months behind your back.

So there's all the content you've been missing out on all this time. Happy studying!

One Down

It wasn't too bad, really. Pretty much what I expected. Of course I owe any success to my beard and merciless attire, but we won't know how much that was until March.

Partial Credit

The in-class part of contracts is done, now there's just the take-home essay due at 4:30 to do. Hardest part so far: writing things out by hand. I'm going to need some finger conditioning before I'm ready for next week's three-hour handwritten CivPro exam.

Eye Of The Hurricane

I am an island of calm at the center of the storm. Nothing you can throw at me will shake me. Let's go, contracts.

Robot Ears For Boléro

Via BoingBoing, the story of a deaf man's quest to hear his favorite music again.

Stankowski Finds the Lost Lawyer

One of the books my reading group read was Anthony Kronman's The Lost Lawyer. In it, he bemoans a shift in the character of the legal profession away from solitary practitioners with strong ties to their clients and the surrounding community to todays increasingly impersonal and mercenary corporate environment. He doesn't see much hope for change, either, recommending that law students looking to really live the good old days go to into practice by themselves in small-town America.

Sometime Legal Underground correspondent Stan Stankowski seems to agree with Kronman.

Chuck Norris Doesn't Sleep. He Waits.

The Washington Post discovers the Chuck Norris meme. I first heard of this when some hallmates found a facebook group, "Vin Diesel Isn't Lactose Intolerant, He Just Refuses To Put Up With Lactose's Shit."

My favorite not mentioned in the article is, "There is not a chin under Chuck Norris's beard, but another fist."

Hat tip: Marginal Revolution.

Rose Bowl

Helluva game. Reggie Bush has got to be kicking himself right now, though.

Finals Week Perks

If you're like me and you spent all day yesterday dragging your worldly posessions across a continent and through three airports, promises of free massages at a Health Services study break are more than enough to make you forget abouyt how little contracts law you know.

And of coursethe Texas and California clubs will get togehter to watch our rivalry decided by proxy in the Rose Bowl later on. I hear they'll have Buffalo wings. If it weren't for the tests, this week would be pretty awesome.