Crazy Time

Last week the rubber began hitting the road and my racecar of law school started zooming down the track. At times, I felt like it was leaving without me. First, there was the midterm I went on and on about, follwed by a visit to DC Superior Court to observe both a civil and a criminal proceeding.

The civil proceeding—a wrongful termination suit against the DC Dept. of Corrections—involved lots of people wearing suits and was mind-numbingly boring. The criminal proceeding—a misdemeanor charge of crack possession—was much more interesting. The defendant basically claimed that the police planted the crack in his pocket, and he had witnesses to corroborate that testimony. The police claimed the defendant was simply lying. Implausible as his story seemed, I was actually believing the defendant until the judge opened his drug test records and they showed he was actually high on cocaine the day he was busted. The defendant's credibility went out the window when the judge asked both him and his attorney if he could swear he hadn't used cocaine yesterday, and he wouldn't do it. But imagine this: The defendant was 43 years old and had no prior record for anything. Why would a person start using crack at 43 years old? Aside from that, I was surprised to see that one of the greatest difficulties about that criminal proceeding was the communication gap between the defendant and witnesses on one side, and between the judge and attorneys on the other. It appeared that neither the defendant nor any of the witnesses had completed high school, while the judge and attorneys obviously had years and years of high-quality formal education. This left meant they almost spoke completely different versions of English. The biggest problem seemed to be that the "uneducated" side used lots of pronouns w/out making clear connections to their referents ("which 'guy' do you mean?"). Meanwhile, it was sometimes unclear whether the "uneducated" side really understood the "educated" side's questions. One thing that would have helped bridge the gap would have been a whiteboard or something to allow both sides to draw the situation they were trying to describe (people on a street corner) in order to increase the likelihood that they were understanding each other. Big takeaway (condensed into a simple point): Our legal system rewards education, but our educational system fails too many people.

Around midweek I attended the final round of GW's Mock Trial comeptition, which was interesting and very well done, but time-consuming. I had to leave before I learned whether the lawyer-defendant was guilty of murder. Mid-week also saw the introduction of En Banc, which I haven't been able to properly follow or post to because of time constraints.

The end of the week featured a mini-meltdown in Torts involving a probably unreasonable amount of anger at ProfTorts for presenting the Coase Theorem as value-neutral. Sure, in the abstract any theory is value neutral, I suppose, but it's disingenuous for a law professor who is obviously very smart and who could probably not avoid being at least somewhat familiar with the critiques of an idea to present that idea without at least giving some consideration to those critiques. Does it matter if 100 more students internalize the idea as "theoretically good" without even considering its possible pitfalls? Perhaps not. But I'm disappointed to be attending a school that creates the possibility in the first place.

Finally, and thankfully unrelated to law school (I just needed a breather), the week was capped by a Friday night trip to the Apple Store in Clarendon, VA, to pick up a copy of Panther, the new version of Mac OS X. Expose is very cool.

I blinked and the weekend was gone: I went to a 1L job search talk Saturday morning (which I hope to say more about later), helped someone move move most of the rest of the day, played a few hands of poker Saturday night, twiddled with a memo about asylum most of yesterday, and bang, here we are on Monday morning and the memo isn't ready and I've hardly done any of the reading for the week. Time; there simply isn't enough of it.

Someone asked me last week how law school compares to grad school in English and the answer is they both seem difficult, but in very different ways. I'll save the explanation of that for another day.

Happy Monday, everyone.

Posted October 27, 2003 05:59 AM | law school