Soup Sale

More Design

For some reason, Culinary Club flyers bring out the Don Draper in me (well, the crappy DD, that is).

Tees

http://www.umoutlaws.org/2009/09/t-shirts.html

Lay Out

I have indesign again:

Law and Economics

In addition to this being my first year of law school it's also been the year of economic insanity, which is pretty clear. No conclusions yet, of course, about what it all means, both for us future lawyers and for us human beings, but it's certainly intriguing (or nervewracking, I suppose).

My father always wanted me to study economics in college ("Just one course!") and while I haven't gone though life wishing I had taken it, it has been a little bit shocking to realize recently this year how little I actually do know. Forget TARP or mortgage-backed securities; I doubt I could even handle a balance sheet or a stock portfolio.

So in classic auto-didact fashion I've been relying on Paul Krugman and Planet Money all year to teach me what I don't know. Now I have a pretty good idea what a toxic asset is (and why they're bad), what the hell securitization means, and why nationalization is the best thing ever (I'm sorry, is my socialism coming out again?).

It's a little bit sad that economics isn't required to graduate from secondary school - maybe it should be, to fit in with the U.S. and European history that most of us take as teenagers. At the very least we might have better credit scores, no?

Unsound

This article from the NYTimes about convicted murderers becoming doctors in Sweden made me think about the "character and fitness" part of the bar exam, which apparently exists - not that I know anything about it.

Class schedules for next year have been posted! I think I'm going to take Evidence, Trademarks, Communications Law, and Enterprise Organization (introductory business law) in the fall, and Cyberlaw, Copyright, Patent Law, and Sex Equality in the spring. We'll see, though. There are enough classes for me to take that I could do four years of school - not that that's an appealing amount of work...

Past Participle

A year ago today, I found out I had gotten into U of M Law.

Very weird.

Mess Mess

Currently on the dining table/chairs:

Two bags

A book of poetry

Two novels

A coat

Four books on the FDA

A scarf

A hat

Eight issues of the New Yorker

A cake stand (the only thing that should be on there)

A laptop case

Two Supreme Court cases on copyright law

A book on commodities

Three hornbooks

Most of a novel, in manuscript

Month-to-Month

It's kind of scary that nearly a month of school has passed. It feels like it's been forever, on one hand, but on the other it also will be half done pretty soon, and that's what's unsettling. I've barely recovered from last term as it is.

Thwarted

I was going to do all of my FDA Law reading for this week today, but our professor hasn't given us the full syllabus yet so I don't even know what to read for Tuesday, much less for Wednesday and Thursday.

Instead, I have decided to take a nap.

What's Left?

I have a reputation.

To be fair it's partially my fault. Between advocating for increased regulation in Property and coming up with statements like "John Roberts is being willfully naive" and "Clarence Thomas assumes his experience is equally applicable to all African-Americans" in Constitutional Law (not to mention complaining that justices who ignore laws with racially discriminatory impacts are closing their eyes to the problem), I didn't really stay anonymous. But I've become paranoid that my classmates think I'm strident, inflexible, or unwilling to hear opposing opinions. I hope the first two aren't the case; I'm certain the last isn't. 

I think that part of the reason I tend to express my politics strongly is that the study of law has made me deeply cynical, perhaps even despairing, about the problems of inequality in American culture and how the law has been used to perpetuate such inequalities. This is hardly a new theory, but it's not reassuring to realize, nor does it fill me with good feeling regarding what I'm studying.

Is it bad, then, that my "reputation" is apparently somewhere along the lines of "Won't let a conservative viewpoint go unchallenged"? I think my conclusion, for the moment, is that I'm willing to wait and let my classmates find out exactly what I think and why by discussing things in a more informal and intimate setting than the classroom; if those who don't still think I'm some intractable socialist, that sounds ok to me.

On a sadder note, I took one of my earrings out. Although it's better in the cold weather because my earrings don't burn as much.

Which Way?

So, the semester is over. We had our last final yesterday and vacation has officially started - school resumes on January 14.

I'm not thrilled about how exams went - I almost certainly could have done better, and waiting for grades for another month will probably drive me mad - but they're over, at least. Now I'll just have to find something else to spend time doing. Probably job applications. And maybe books and movies. And - my trip to NYC of course.

New Terms

Shockingly, it's already time to start thinking about next semester and classes. We get an elective, so I put in for Cyberlaw, which sounds interesting and relevant, since I want to do internet law. But we have to pick alternates too, so I could get put into anything from Voting Rights to Sex Equality to Constitutionalism in South Africa. Not that I can imagine having another class on top of all this...

America's Next Top Law Student

Our con law professor has been taking students out to lunch throughout the semester; our group of five went today. High point: talking about Top Model and the megalomania of Tyra. Or, the rhetorical style of Supreme Court justices. Take your pick.

Light Reading

One of the downsides of school is the fact that there really can't be very much in my life besides school, with all the work that has to get done. I can't, for example, sit down on the couch and read a book - because at this point there are at least three other things I should be doing with that time. And because I'm in school and without any sort of income, I can't do as many interesting things as I could while working. I can't decide on a whim to spend $500 to fly to London, for example. Of course, I've been lucky over the last few years to actually have some disposable income so it's not exactly fair to feel unfulfilled, especially given our current economic situation. But adjustments can be tricky.

Day of the Rest

At one point I was hoping that Saturday would be my non-law school day.

How silly of me - or perhaps even arrogant. It's not like I got in this to escape.

No Way Out

There was a session today for people who are interested in becoming admissions volunteers (of which I am one), which of course made me think back on the strange road that brought me to law school. 

I was pretty confused about what I wanted to do for graduate school, perhaps in part because I never had the conviction that I think one needs for a Ph.D. and because I had no experience in the law at all. So either option seemed both appealing and incomprehensible. Looking back it would have been hard for me to do the doctorate or to progress efficiently beyond it because I think I lack that intuitive, all-seeing nature of the humanities professor, but it's impossible to say that for certain.

I do remember that when I got the big envelope from this law school, I immediately thought Well shit, now it's all been decided for me. I'm still not sure why I thought that first - possibly so that if I felt unhappy about the decision, I could claim that it was out of my hands. A more charitable interpretation might be that it was just my cynical brain reworking a gut reaction that I just had to go to law school. But I'm a little too jaded to see it that way.

I was talking to one of my classmates yesterday about law school and the reasons of doing it, probably because we both have ambivalence about the entire endeavor. I remarked that since my sister dropped out of law school after her first year and much of my family position is based on my intellectual superiority to her (a fact I'm not proud of at all), it was impossible for me to ever drop out of law school - if only to maintain my role in the family. That's not a good reason, of course; nor is it the only one. And it's not as though I feel that I would love to drop out, except that I'm barred from that because of my weird family hangups. I'm actually pretty happy in school so far, I think.

The issue, I suppose, is that the fact that I was going to some sort of post-graduate program felt predestined (because of my parents' perspective); the fact that I was going to end up in law school over English also felt predestined (because of my pragmatism, among other things); and the fact that I am going to finish law school feels predestined (because of my fucked-up family perspective). The only thing that doesn't feel pre-destined is my relative success as a lawyer - and that's because that is all up to me and I can't blame it on anyone else if it ends up not playing out as I envision. So, as with all the decisions I just mentioned, it's my own damn fault regarding what does or doesn't happen. As I must always remind myself: I chose this. 

I knew that already so I'm not really sure why it took me six paragraphs to come to that point, but whatever. 

Outsider Art

Today U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy gave a short lecture/Q&A at the Law School. I went mostly because I thought I "should" - it was a Friday morning, we just finished our first full week of class, I was tired, etc. - but it was definitely worth it. He's obviously brilliant but he was also quite a good speaker, and funny. I won't say he was inspirational since that's a little too Dead Poets Society for my taste but he was really eloquent about his work and the law as a whole. It's nice to get some non-abstraction.

Soft Socratic

There was a post on the NYTimes Ideas blog about the purported primary method of instruction at law school - the so-called Socratic method - in which professors choose students at random to answer questions. The post says that professors actually lecture much more than people think and that the Socratic method isn't as much of a pedagogical tool as one might think. 

I think that's pretty accurate. One of my classes isn't a lecture so that doesn't count; of the other three, only one of the teachers could at all be characterized as intensely Socratic - by which I mean the professor is very interested in engaging with a student and forcing the student to follow a logical progression. But this professor isn't at all hostile or sadistic and self-characterized this style as "soft Socratic" - whatever that means.

Of the last two, one said explicitly that class participation doesn't count for the final grade and thus no one really worries about getting called on, and the other is nice enough to lead a struggling student to the trough and/or pass the question along to volunteers.

All this is really to say that while the Socratic method was one of the things I worried most about prior to starting school, it's not really on my mind much anymore, mostly because there's either an escape route or I don't mind being embarrassed if I don't know an answer. That doesn't mean that I don't obsess of my performance when I do get called on/volunteer, especially if I have to talk for an extended period. The self-analysis never ends.

in sum

Torts: When Bad Things Happen to Negligent People