Improbable Heartthrob

Yesterday, a friend looking over my shoulder coomented that this blog "Makes women fall in love with [me]."

I know. I think it sounds crazy too. But I suppose it takes all kinds.

Maybe I should send the link out more.

Christmas Come Early

So this is what winning feels like. Feels good, doesn't it, guys? We should do this more often.

Quote of the Day

"Polls are now closed in California, also known as Cali, if you're kind of a douchebag."
-Jon Stewart

Is It Still Too Early To Rub It In?

As I walked by, the atmosphere at the Federalists' election night party seemed decidedly subdued.

1-0

Clinical work may be better that I originally gave it credit for. I went to actual court and argued an actual motion on Tuesday. I won! And clearly my fame has spread - the other side didn't even show up. THey must have feared my masterful stammering.

We were moving to dismiss their appeal because the other side filed it late. As the minutes wore on my supervisor and I really started to hope they'd turn up, just so we could make great jokes about how they were late to their hearing about filing a late appeal. How appropriate!

But we never got to make that joke, so now I'm relaying it to you. I am now telling hypothetical jokes.

It's been that kind of week.

All Politics is Retail

Figuring I'd show some love for a fellow trial lawyer, I joined the John Edwards 2008 group on Facebook. BY then end of the day, whoever he's got on the campaign team doing internet outreach had sent me a little message from the Senator's profile saying thanks for my support. That sort of thing only takes second to do (heck, it could even be automated - I could tell you how) but it makes me feel connected. Being fully aware of the dynamic doesn't seem at all to decrease its effectiveness. The little touches still count.

Friday Tuesday Cat Blogging

A message from my feline summer roommates:

Ernest Cline is Airwolf

My brother just pointed me to these spoken-word gems by Ernest Cline, who could be Dane Cook's geekier older brother. Listening is better than reading, but if you need prompting, here's a snippet from Nerd Porn Auteur:

I want porno movies that are made with guys like me in mind. Guys who know that the sexiest thing in the world is a woman who is smarter than you are. You can have the whole cheerleading squad, I want the girl in the tweed skirt and the horn-rimmed glasses. Betty Binabowski the valedictorian. Oh yes. First I wanna copy her trig homework, then I wanna make mad, passionate love to her, for hours and hours until she reluctantly asks if we can stop, because she doesn't want to miss Battlestar Galactica.

Best Noun Phrase I've Seen Today

"sawed-off station wagon"

300

Million Americans, that is.

Congrats.

I Too Am Having Difficulty Coming Up With A Costume

Toothpaste for Dinner

Set Your Neighbor's House on Fire

Married to the Sea is cool.

More Apparel Design

The IM Flag Football league provided uniforms this year, a welcome upgrade from last season. But for my team, the Blue Thunder Squids, the design they used was insufficiently legendary. I was compelled to make improvements. After extensive concept sketching in Con Law, I made a stencil out of posterboard and spray-painted on my own graphic. With any luck, by our next game I'll have the whole team sporting these:


The stencil, pre-thunderbolt:

Winning the Break-Up

I just rejected my first callback - it was less empowering than one might have expected.

I Love the Smell of Patriarchy in the Morning

Sunday afternoon flag football games are the high point of my week. Last week we played a glorious match in pouring rain on a swamp of a field, and came home covered head-to-toe in mud. Everyone should be able to live like that. So I enthusiastically support the Women's Law Association going out of its way to recruit women's teams to play in the league.

Today, however, we are playing at team styling themselves "The Herricanes." When the other side so explicitly identifies themselves with a gender, I find myself involuntarily doing the same. Go men! Crush those girls! Strangely, our middle linebacker tells me she feels the same way. Which is good, because me need some big tackles out of her this week.

The Revamped 1L Year at HLS

Official announcement with details here.

I hear they're finally pushing 1L grades back before winter break. I may have come here 2 years too soon.

Out With the Old?

HLS faculty unanimously approved sweeping changes to the first-year curriculum in a closed-door meeting yesterday afternoon.

... the century-old first-year curriculum covering traditional common law topics‚contracts, torts, property, civil procedure, and criminal law‚will be constricted, and courses on policy (“Legislation and Regulation”) and international law (“International Law and Problems and Theories”) will be added.

Full article in The Crimson.

I know students have been grumbling about this for a long time, but I never really expected anything to change, and especially not suddenly or unanimously.

Cool.

What if Nietzsche Wrote The Family Circus?

The results would look something like this.

Greatly Exaggerated

Mikey demands updates, though the withered husk of his own atrophied blog was long ago carried off by bitter winds. So be it.

Class is the same as it ever was. Evidence is too early in the morning (8:45). Con Law is interesting and well-taught, but the professor pauses for rhetorical effect an order of magnitude more often than is called for. Quality would be greatly improved by recording the lectures and watching them at double speed, or at least time-and-a-half. All the rest of my classes are somehow tied to work at the clinical office.

Clinical work is, from an objective standpoint, more than a little insane. Explicitly modeled on the "Watch one, do one, teach one," model of clinical instruction in medical residency, it essentially flings us headfirst into court to (mal)practice on indigent clients. I can't decide what's more horrifying, that they entrust people's futures to entirely green students with no real world experience and only minutes to prepare, or that this still tends to generate wildly better outcomes from the system than poor folks could secure on their own. Sometimes the law seems intentionally designed to stomp underfoot people foolish or irresponsible enough to find themselves at its mercy. Especially terrible are the clerks at the Massachusetts court. They love us because they sympathize somewhat with our causes, and more importantly because we suck up to them shamelessly, but they are the most repugnant petty bureaucrats I have ever encountered. "You have to be nice to us," they gleefully cackled on our first-day courthouse tour, "or we might lose some important paper. We can make your life real hard." I should know better than to be surprised, but it's still breathtaking to see firsthand how clerks doing the most menial clerical work for a government agency become tinpot dictators when you give them de facto power to (quite literally) ruin people's lives. So we smile and laugh and rub their dirty little egos and accept it as a part of doing business.

From a student's perspective, clinical practice isn't all that it's cracked up to be. You get a lousy exchange rate - one credit unit for every five hours. That's like pro-rating it as though a full 12-unit academic schedule was a 60-hour week, which is flat out crazy. And of course the commute to the center where we work is over an hour each way by subway. When you get there, the work is immediate, gritty, and mundane. A plurality of my working time is spent playing phone tag with unreliable clients. We do get to do some exciting things, but the opportunity costs are enormous. It's almost as bad as Law Review would be.

So my private-sector leanings have been confirmed. Corporations may be ruthless and amoral, but they're quasi-rational and at least you know where to find them. Speaking of which, we're into the second week of OCI, which is like speed dating for legal careers. After day 1 (four interviews) I was over the whole process. No more terror, and no more joy. The worst kind of interview is when they just ask you if you have any questions for them, answer them tersely, and wait for you to come up with more. Even if you're prepared to carry the conversation for twenty minutes (never mind 4-6 such conversations in a day, with class interspersed), it's not even a reliable way to get information about a firm. How am I going to be able to tell if they're telling the truth? Some of these people have been taking and defending depositions longer than I have been alive. I actually went meta and explained this dynamic to one interviewer, which in retrospect may have been a bit of a strategic blunder.

Timing

I have been crazy busy this week. I'll tell you about that later. But what makes me think of it is that while I was out today my computer downloaded a new version of iTunes, and now it downloads my (too full) calendar onto my iPod. I'm taking that thing with me everywhere now.

Proportionate Response

The best part is the way the lecture continues uninterrupted.

Link from Lawyers, Guns, and Money/

*&^%ing Federalism

Professor Evidence just now:

Not only do the Federal Rules of Evidence control in civil trials in Federal court, but most states - 42 of them - have more or less copied the Federal Rules for their own state courts. Unfortunately for all of you, four of the eight states that have not done so are California, New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois. So probably three quarters of you will wind up working somewhere where this isn't the case. That's too bad.

[Post-spellcheck addition] I just spelled "Massachusetts" right on the first try, for possibly the first time ever.

Can't Stop the Signal

This has been a rough move. Our apartment is great, but I didn't have a bed until yesterday, my furniture won't be here until Wednesday, and I'm currently riding someone else's wireless just to be connected. The delivery crew for the mattress store gave me a window from 7-11, so I woke up early on our hardwood floors to be ready for them, only to wait around until they showed up at 12:30. IKEA's "next day delivery if you buy before three pm" is actually next week delivery.

The upside is I have achieved new heights of spiritual awareness. My inner serenity is now entirely imperturbable - I am less a still pond than a lake of glass. Today when the cursed Swedes piled on fresh indignities after a five-hour devotional procession through their overcrowded, understocked azure cathedral I did not want to run over a single child with my cart. This is a profound growth, and I am still only beginning to treasure it in fullness.

Incoming!

If Orbitz is to be trusted, I should be on the ground in Beantown at 11:06. I might even see you guys at the Kong. 2L year is never gonna know what hit it.

Retention

Last night at dinner my gracious host asked me a legal question. She'd heard on the news about a man who had been living in the canyons near our neighborhood for eighteen years and had just been kicked out. After eighteen years, she asked, isn't there something that protects him from that sort of thing? And I actually knew the answer. I said generally there's a rule that if he lived there long enough and treated the land as his own it became his, but that the doctrine doesn't apply to government-owned land, and since I assume the canyons are some kind of park or preserve then no. For the first time, instead of hemming and hawing about research and overlapping jurisdictions, I actually had the answer to a layperson's legal question! I had not only learned something, but I could remember it later! I had this law shit figured out.

But it took me an hour to remember the words "adverse possession."

History

This is why I love Dinosaur Comics.

If you havent been doing your REQUIRED READING (see sidebar at right) and you haven't seen DC before, don't worry about what the characters are doing in the pictures. It uses static art, so just worry about what the characters are saying. And then go read the archives.

And That's Not Like a Euphemism or Anything

Best of Craigslist: To the guy I gave a skull to.

Man I love San Francisco.

Against Planning: A Vindication

For example, have you ever wondered why you often make commitments that you deeply regret when the moment to fulfill them arrives? We all do this, of course. We agree to babysit the nephews and nieces next month, and we look forward to that obligation even as we jot it in our diary. Then, when it actually comes time to buy the Happy Meals, set up the Barbie playset, hide the bong, ignore the fact that the NBA playoffs are on at one o'clock, we wonder what we were thinking when we said yes. Well, here's what we were thinking: When we said yes we were thinking about babysitting in terms of why instead of how, in terms of causes and consequences instead of execution, and we failed to consider the fact that the detail-free babysitting we were imagining would not be the detail-laden babysitting we would ultimately experience.

From the really excellent Stumbling on Happiness, pp. 105-6.

Sinister Advantages

When I was a kid, my parents gave me a book called The Natural Superiority of the Left Hander. Critics will say that my ego has suffered, or at least been insufferable, ever since. But there may have been something to it.

Snakes! Zombies!

It's probably too late for you to see Snakes on a Plane properly. When I went, in what I assume was an unrelated if entirely appropriate incident, there was a zombie flash mob at the Metreon. Garishly made up youngsters staggered about groaning, their jaws slack and their eyes excitedly scanning the room to see if anyone noticed what a great vacant stare they were affecting.

Roast

I was a big Star Trek fan growing up, but the original was a bit before my time. He's great on Boston Legal though. This Comedy Central roast is trying a bit too hard. This motivational poster someone sent me last week, though, is great.

Shut The Hell Up

I've been sitting around researching places to interview with in the fall, and in the background there's a marathon of Law and Order: Criminal Intent. I used to love this show, because the chief inspector's interrogations are thoroughly brilliant. He always gets the bad guys to give themselves away. But now, after a semester of Crim, the show is almost unwatchable. I keep shouting at the suspects. "Just be quiet! No answering questions! Listen to your damn lawyer!"

They never listen.

George Bush Reads The Stranger

August 12: I begin to suspect that God is merely a way of coping with our fundamentally absurd condition, an act of bad faith, a desperate attempt to deny our own responsibility for creating meaning in a disenchanted world by locating it outside ourselves, in a fabricated transcendent will we then refuse to recognize as our own creation -- bastard offspring we confusedly call "father". I relate my epiphany to Karl with the excitement of a man beginning life anew. He says the message is unlikely to resonate with the base.

Diary by Julian Sanchez

Snakes on a Phone

Have Samuel L. Hackson make a personalized phone call to your friends.

Because I Know How Popular Food-Blogging is at Neo Tokyo Times

Roommate (down to one! so sad!) and I are throwing dinner togehter on no notice, so we wind up making Yuppie Chili Dogs. Hot dogs from the counter at the organic grocery store down the street, fancy-pants chili, drunken goat cheese, all wrapped up in fresh San Francisco sourdough. I feel dirty. But they were so good.

Dude

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran and Generally Crazy Fucker has a blog.

Little Miss Sunshine

Go see this movie. It's very good. Steve Carell is funny, and if you're a law student there's a scene involving a police stop that's worth the price of admission alone.

Tea Partay

When I first read The Great Gatsby in tenth grade English class in suburban San Diego, I did not get it at all. Re-reading it part way through 1L year, I did. In other news, this video is pretty funny.

Parasitism

Two friends from college, now a management consultant and a commodities trader, came by to visit earlier this week, and after catching an A's game we met up at my house. Before long we were embroiled in a furious game of Beirut with another guest.

Trader: So Guest, what do you do in the city?
Guest: I do neurobiology research.
Trader: Oh really?
Guest: At a lab down in Stanford.
Me: Wow. Cool.
Consultant: Yeah, you actually do something useful.
Trader: Huh?
Me: You actually contribute to society. We sure don't.
Consultant: Ha-ha. Yeah.
Trader: Hey, I contribute.
Me: No you don't. What do you contribute?
Trader: Sure I do. I contribute liquidity.
Me: Psht. Liquidity.
Consultant: Hell, I contribute Innovative Business Strategies.
Me: Taking Advantage of Untapped Efficiencies?
Consultant: Creating Synergies, Facilitating Free Exchange, Filling Unmet Demand.
Me: Sure, and I Provide A Non-Violent Framework For Adversarial Dispute Resolution.
Trader: Rule of Law. That stuff's important.
Consultant: Important so other people can contribute.
Trader: Even if we don't.
Me: Face it guys, we're all just transaction costs.
...
Guest: So, were you planning on shooting at some point, or what?

Legal Word of the Day: Keistered

Finally, the defendants argue that the court erred in excluding from evidence certain photographs and a display board depicting representative samples of contraband recovered from within the confines of the Washington State Penitentiary and that allegedly were capable of being secreted in an inmate's anal cavity. The defendants concede now, as they did at trial, that the offered items were not necessarily found 'keistered' in any inmate's rectum. They contend, however, that the mere fact that these items are capable of being keistered, as supported by the testimony of their colon rectal specialist, makes them relevant and admissible.

Wetmore v. Gardner, 735 F.Supp 974, 983 (E.D.Wash. 1990).

Victory Donuts

Death March Smeath March. At the end of the second day, the allegedly hard one with an 11 mile stretch and a 3000 foot climb, five other intrepid souls and I figured we were feeling fine, and we should press on the last eight miles and finish in two days instead of three. We got rained on a lot, which was bad, and got lost for a bit, which was worse, but the feeling when we finished was worth everything. I had smuggled through a pack of chocolate covered Donettes from Walgreens, which tasted like victory, only better.

We watched Talladega Nights the next day, mostly because everyone else still on the hike couldn't have seen it yet. You know how competitive litigators can be. And it is awesome. Go see it.

Big Sky

We leave tomorrow morning for the annual firm hike, a three-day trek referred to affectionately by the associates as "The Death March." I was skeptical at first that it could be that hard - these are a bunch of lawyers after all. But then I found out that Founding Partner, the driving force behind the operation, does Ironman competitions. Oh crap. Plus, there are bears. But that doesn't mean I picked the easier of the two routes our group will take. As I keep explaining to in my best Mayor Quimby voice to anyone foolish enough to stray within earshot, ""We do naht do these things because thay ah easy, but rathah because thay ah hahd." Anyway, I've got to get up at 4 tomorrow to fly to Billings, Montana.

So, like, wish me luck.

Nameology

Me: *hands over credit card*
Clerk: Wow, you're got a really great name. Trevor Austin.
Me: Oh, thanks.
Clerk: It sounds like a movie star's name.
Partner: Yeah, is that even your real name? Or is it your porn name?
Me: Actually, close. It's my litigation name.
Partner: Yeah, that's the same kind of thing.
Clerk: *stares*

Karaoke!

Say what you will about the US Attorneys (and my public defender roommate does), but their summers sure know how to party. I spent most of today wishing I was dead. So you know that was a good time. Or can at least infer.

Giants v. Pirates

What does it say about America that our national passtime is a game you can't play in the rain?

Commitment Philia

One of my current roommates made law review. This is great for him, but it's spurring some painful reconsideration of his schedule.
"What am I going to do, guys? I already have over twenty-five hours of commitments a week, plus class."
"Well, you get rid of some of those other commitments. What are they?"
"Well there's my work with the Defenders, and I just got elected General Secretary of the campus Dems, and I'm the new Executive Editor of the Human Rights Journal ..."
"Okay, well you should definitely drop that other journal."
"But I love the way 'Executive Editor of HRJ' looks on my resume."
"You'll love the way 'Harvard Law Review' looks more."
"Can't I do both?"
"No, you can not do both. At best, you will do a very bad job at both of them, and be miserable while doing it."
"But I love HRJ! And I love Defenders too. And doing research for Prof. S! I want to be able to do them all."
"Well, I want to be able to stop time like Zach Morris. And lift cars with my superhuman strength And ride a magic pony."
"Are you making fun of me?"
"Yes."

All Good Things

My roommates for the fall found us an apartment yesterday. This made me really depressed. It finally brought home that I'll be going back to Boston in September. Now, I like law school and my friends there, and the people I'll be living with are really great. But I fucking hate Boston.

Actual Wisdom

Tejinder is a pretty grounded dude. All of his advice to incoming students is solid. Better, even, than mine.

Treasure!

Schooled is a group blog by a bunch of incoming 1Ls, "from various states, countries, and Tiers. Impressive, eh?"

I'm not sure how they're doing it, but I suspect that there are internets involved.

Meta-Advice For Incoming Law Students

So you want to know what law school is going to be like. And if you're here, you must be reading blogs to get some of that information. Q at Passionate Discourse has some advice for incoming students, and CM of Magic Cookie has an equally thoughtful response. PBB has some ideas, and links to some more.

I don't have any sage wisdom for you, except to try to have fun while you're in school, because you only live once and should try to have fun while you're here. But I do have some general advice about the stuff you may read in books or on the internet: be aware of selection bias.

A lot of blogs and (especially) books about law school are written by people who are not happy with the law, because people unhappy with the law are much more likely to write about it. There are a lot of people in law school who really wanted to be writers all along. That may not be you. Maybe the law really is for you. Maybe you'll really like it. That's okay. You're allowed to enjoy yourself.

With A Vengeance

Ha! I'm back!

I went away for a while, but you should have known you'd never be rid of me forever. School is starting back up all too soon. Got a new look for the new year. I wanted to bring all the posts I squandered on TCW on to this site, but it turns out there's no elegant way to do that, so you're stuck with the mess below.

Ann Coulter is a Deadhead

Honestly, words fail me.

Golden Gatecrashers

We wound up at a house party last night held in a four-story post-industrial bachelor pad that must have metastisized off of Los Angeles at some point and bubbled up to the top of a hill in Pacific Heights. The downstairs living room, appropirated as a dance hall, had a pool running down its length with a thirty-foot movie screen set into the wall above. We never got concrete information about whose hospitatlity we were abusing. Having slipped past a preoccuppied bouncer with the square shoulders and distant looks of People Who Know Where They Are Going, we had to collect information discretely. Rumors circulated that this used to be mayor Gavin Newsom's house, that the summer sublet was costing its inhabitatns fifteen thousand dollars a month, and that pulling on one of the wall sconces triggered a secret door. When pressed, we would claim nebulous connections to "Steve" and mutter about a gallery opening. Thrilling, but being well-dressed and packed in among hundreds of other guests, we were never in any serious danger of ejection. Later, I was drafted to carry a keg by someone in a hat who seemed to be in charge. It could well have been Steve.

If I was Canadian

this survey tells me I would be an autonomous post-materialist. The description sounds pretty accurate, and it correctly identified Steve Jobs as an icon. So that was kind of impressive.

Market Segmentation

The other day on the way to work I saw a homeless man pushing a shopping cart with a large, hand-scrawled sign on the front that read, "Liberalism is a mental disorder."

My first reaction was that this was a curious strategy in bluer-than-Massachusetts-blood San Francisco, where the vast majority of people he runs into will be liberals. Maybe the idea is to corner the conservatives-who-give-to-bums niche with a distinctive appeal? Maybe it's just to provoke a reaction and draw passers-by into conversation. Maybe it's a sincere reflection of political belief, begging strategy be damned.

Then it hit me - this man was literally asking for handouts.

Maybe the sign was ironic. It would work on so many levels.

Why Isn't India Good At Soccer?

Large population, former British colony (they invented the modern rules), has other sporting traditions from them (Cricket, e.g.). But my roommate tells me that Vikash Dhorasoo is the first player of Indian descent to play in a world cup. Even if that's not accurate, shouldn't you expect to see more Indian players internationally?

The Romero Effect

In high school a friend of mine told me he had been keeping a diary for a few months. "Looking back, I sound really unhappy."
"That's weird, you always look like you're having fun."
"I know. I don't feel unhappy."
"Maybe it's just that when you're out having a good time, you don't bother writing in your diary. Then you only write when there's nothing else to do, and you're bummed out."
"You know, you could be right."

Anyway, last week was great. My parents came to town and took me out to incredible dinners, I went to a free concert in Golden Gate Park, I watched a ton of well-played soccer and participated in lots of poorly-played beer pong. Good times.

Auspicious Beginnings

Today was my first day at Summer Employer. I got in the wrong elevator on my way up this morning, and was flying past the fifteenth floor by the time I realized there was no button to press to take me to my office. On the way home, I got on the bus going the wrong direction, and rode for ten minutes just to get back to the stop I'd got on at. Fortunately, everything outside of such transportation went pretty well.

Party At Our Place

By the way, these Hint of Lime Tostitos? WAY more than a hint.

527s

Why do they even make jeans that aren't relaxed fit? I tried on a "regular" pair of Levi's and couldn't even sit down in them. And it's not like I'm trying to cram trunklike legs into there either - I'm built like a damn stop sign over here. How do people ever get the things on?

Also, if you run the Levi's store in Union square, in the commercial center of a major American city, you have no business running out of pants in my size. You're the jeans store. That's all you sell. You are, or should be, where I go when I want jeans and want to be sure you will have my kind. I am not happy you did not have pants for me. I need pants. I know this is San Francisco, but I can't just go around pantless.

Okay, glad you're with me on that.

Substitution

At Walgreens, they keep the Claritin tablets in one of those locked display cases "to keep [their] prices low." I didn't want to track down and summon one of their "team members," so i looked for a generic brand. Sure enough, there's Wal-itin right next to it on the shelf, same active ingredients and no protective case.

Those sly bastards. I'd be angry if I wasn't so damn impressed. Plus, it was almost half the cost, and so far works just as well.

Stealth Help

I was wandering around today, as part of my ongoing mission to stomp on every square of pavement in this town, when I stopped back home to find the front door open. Music was coming from inside. I crept up the steps to find a startled-looking Hispanic woman carrying laundry through the living room. How dare she! That was my mess. I'd already been feeling guilty about it, guilty enough to half-heartedly make my bed in the morning, and that was when I thought it was just mine. Now that somebody else was going to clean it up, I felt really bad.

Because apparently, we have a cleaning lady. One who not only vacuums and tidies up, but who washes my sheets too. Didn't hear about that from the roommates. This is crazy - I'm a twenty-three year old with a maid. Who does that? Already I can feel my self-reliance diminish as I allow one essential life skill to be handled by professionals. I don't want to be one of those people who aren't good for anything but signing the checks!

Still, it is nice to have clean floors. And she flipped over the cheap reversible throw rug I got at IKEA, and it really does look better this way.

Guarded Optimism

It's nice to see a rundown on Kos of ten reasons why Bilbray is toast in the runoff election in my hometown congressional district, but I'm not quite ready to believe the hype. After all, there is one big reason to expect that Cunningham's seat will go to another Republican.

Misled

So far the city has not lived up to the reputation alluded to in my title. It's been clear, calm, and in the seventies. I spent today hiking around and into downtown, and I came back sunburned.

I fear the climate is trying to lull me into a false sense of security. I think it's working.

Assholes 1, Blueberry Farmers 0

Tucker Max wins a defamation suit.

After viewing the tuckermax.com message boards, which are read by people using screen names like "Jerkoff," "DrunkenDJ," and "footinmouth," the intended audience could not mistake the site for the New York Times. In short, it palpably is not serious.

Link from Glenn Reynolds.

Das Boot

I went to REI today and bought new hiking boots. In fact, more than boots, I got an entire Foot System, which apparently includes two layers of sock. I love REI because the staff are friendly, knowedgeable, and proudly unhip. I somberly traded notes with the boot guy on layering, waterproofing, and other un-fashions. "What matters about boots is how they feel on your feet - don't worry what they look like." He recommends longer hiking socks because they can wick more water away from your feet and stopping immediately at the first signs of a blister. "Don't worry about what anybody else is doing - you sit down and take care of it right away."

Going hiking is Serious Business. There are mountains involved. It is done by Serious People, and Serious People are too Serious about hiking to worry that they look square. Squares are sturdy. You build things out of squares. Being square is good.

A good pair of boots isn't really good until it's been properly broken in, so this afternoon I wore them when I walked the dog, tromping like a German tourist.

Re-Acclimated

Back home in San Diego!

I spent all of yesterday sitting around the house, wondering why it was so damn hot everywhere. After months in the frozen wastes of the Northeast, my blood had congealed into a viscous sludge that jealously held on to every joule of heat. Exacerbating the situation, I had gotten used to wearing shoes every day, eschewing the traditional footwear of my native people.

Now I've got my sandals back on, and I feel much better already. I hear that you can thin the blood too, either by taking aspirin or drinking alcohol. I never did like pills.

Fin

So my 1L year is over. Here's the part where I would write a thoughtful retrospective and share with you all the hard-earned wisdom I've gained since September. Looking back in my archives at how I felt going in, there's plainly a lot to say. But I don't feel like compiling it right now. No telling when or if I will.

Everyone working on law review, I pity you. Everyone else can find prints of my soulful "Make Love Not Law Review" design at cafepress.

I'm done here for the summer. I'm writing a different blog, The Coldest Winter, until the fall. I may start back up here after that, or maybe somewhere else. I'll let you know.

Dear Writers and Producers of Grey's Anatomy

I hope you're happy with that shit you pulled last night. Your wildly implausible yet irresistibly compelling storylines are making it very hard to concentrate on the Property exam I am meant to be taking. Thanks a lot.

Trevor

P.S. See you tonight at 9 for the conclusion!

Sabotage

You know what's awesome? Ask A Ninja. Happy Studying.

A Theory of Justice

My Super Sweet Sixteen has reinvigorated my belief in estate taxes.

Blodgett

It's just like me to wait until I'm only here six more days before I finally take the extra five minutes to walk to the Olympic sized pool instead of the MAC. It was totally worth it.

Also? I'm only here six more days. My first year of law school is all but over. That's crazy.

Comments!

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Favored

Andy asks that I link to his new, non-secret blog. The old one was so secret that I never saw it, only hearing whispered rumors of its existence. The new one is decidedly less secret. Andy lives two doors down from me, so it would be awkward if I were to say no.

If a little learning is a dangerous thing, how much do we need to know before we are safe?

I Am Old

I just got an invitation to a friend's engagement party. Holy crap.

Burnout

There's something about reading several hundred pages of voting rights cases that makes me long for a good old fashioned monarchy.

Also, the results from the course lottery are back. The all-knowing Algorithm, in its ineffable wisdom, gave me Con Law, Corporations, Admin, and Fed Courts all in the same semester. I think there's a drop mechanism. There had better be.

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.