Orientation

After two fairly full days of welcome speeches, tours, and standing in line to fork over money for books and to get pictures taken for multiple IDs, I'm beginning to feel fairly well oriented. A quick rundown of the highlights includes:

The Dean's Welcome Speech: Yeah, it was the usual hot air about how great we all were and how great GW is and how happy GW is to have us and how happy we should be that GW let us in, yadda yadda yadda. Interesting facts: GW turned down more students than applied to any other law school except one; 26 people applied for each available seat. CNN's "Crossfire" (which CNN films at GW) wouldn't give the law school all the tickets it wanted to the show because Crossfire claims GW students only clap for guests on the left. My class includes a professional quarterback from the Canadian Football League and someone who formerly worked as an executive secretary to Donald Rumsfeld and as a social secretary to George Bush.

But while those are interesting facts, the best part of the Dean's welcome was what he said about the opportunities and responsibilities of a law degree, which might be best summarized by this statement:

There's nothing ignoble about serving business interests, but I want you to think of serving the public interest as one of your central obligations.

The Dean concluded with a surprising, two-part "homework" assignment. First, we should visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum—start at the beginning and read only the legal edicst posted on the wall. "You'll see, brick by brick, how lawyers and judges participated in the creation of that system." The lesson is that lawyers are capable of doing extraordinary evil.

The second part of the Dean's assignment is to read or see the movie of To Kill A Mockingbird. He explained that there were two scenes in particular toward the end of the book that he hoped would serve as "guiding beacons" for our careers in law. The first is when a character is found stabbed to death, and while others try to claim it was an accidental death, Atticus Finch explains he won't accept that because he wants to be able to look his kids in the eye. The second is at the end of the book's major trial; although Atticus loses, he's given everything he could to save the life of a black man wrongly accused of rape, and as he leaves the courtroom the community stands in respect of what he's done. The Dean's takeaway lessons from these two scenes were:

You need to be able to look in people's eyes, and people will stand when you do the right thing.

Ok, maybe they're a little sentimental (aka: cheesy), but those sound like pretty good guiding beacons to me.

Another Dean (there are many) followed the Dean, and gave us many additional pieces of wisdom from "great thinkers," the best of which were:

Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards. — Soren Kierkegaard

and

To be uncertain is uncomfortable; to be certain is ridiculous. —Chinese proverb

Mandatory Financial Aid Session: This was great fun—two hours of really bad powerpoint slides. The gist of it was you should have no more than three credit cards, check your credit record and make sure it's clean, and everything you spend now is borrowed against future income. "That $3 latte you buy today really costs $100." That's putting things in perspective.

Locker rentals: We get to share! How fun! Yes, this is very high school, but it's not even that because the lockers aren't big enough for one person's books and coat and computer and whatnot, let alone the stuff of two people. What are they thinking?

Library tour: Twenty minutes of talk about which computers to use for what, where and how to print and copy things, how to get our laptops connected to the internet, etc. Oh, and there's some books over there.

Lessons in Case Briefing: Helpful, thanks. It doesn't seem to be a big mystery, but we'll see.

Academic Integrity talk: Fifteen minutes of "don't lie, cheat, or steal, because, well, it's bad." And if you lied on your application materials, you better fess up now 'cause it'll only be worse for you later if you don't. Check.

Faculty panel discussion on International Human Rights Issues: This was terrific. Professor Steinhardt opened with this message: Myths that human rights law is unenforceable or "not real" are "based on a pathological misunderstanding of the world." What followed was a crash course in the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, which gave federal district courts jurisdiction over civil actions by aliens for torts committed "in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." Steinhardt explained that since the Filartiga case, much has changed in the way the Alien Tort Claims Act has been used to enforce human rights. Plaintiffs are naming additional defendants, including sitting and former heads of state, those in positions of command and responsibility, multinational corporations when they're enmeshed with governments in ways that require human rights violations for profit (Unical, Talisman), and U.S. state and municipal officials. Plaintiffs are also alleging new types of torts (transboundary abductions, war crimes, genocide, slavery and slave-like practices, terrorism, prolonged arbitrary detention and disappearance), and the types of plaintiffs have changed—there have even been successful human rights class actions. Unfortunately, both Professor Steinhardt and his colleaque, Professor Murphy, seemed to agree that the real difficulty in improving human rights around the world is the almost "visceral resistance to international law." Gee, I wonder where that comes from....

Crossfire: Although the law school wasn't able to get as many tickets as it wanted, it did get some and I was able to be in the audience for yesterday's show. I'd never seen Crossfire before and after only a minute or two I understood why: It's a complete waste. For those of you who haven't seen it, let me explain: The show pits partisans on the right and left against each other to "debate" important issues; however, since the show only lasts 15-20 minutes (lots of commercial breaks), these partisans only have enough time to lob soundbite bombs at each other. There's no real debate, and important issues—like what the U.S. should do about the mess it's made in Iraq—get reduced to simplistic yes/no, black/white binaries like, this:

Tell us, was it worth going to war in Iraq in the first place? Press one if you believe it was worth it; the benefits of getting rid of Saddam outweigh the costs. Press two for, no, the United States should not have gone to war there.

It sure would be neat if we could reduce this to a yes/no equation, but we can't. Crossfire seems to do this with every question (the guests repeatedly attempted to pin each other down with simplistic questions like this), which makes it utterly useless, as far as I'm concerned. Why do people watch this show?

Computing: Trying to use a Mac at PC-only GW remains the biggest hurdle to a smooth transition into this student's life in the law. As detailed elsewhere, GW is trying to standardize on Cisco's LEAP encryption system for its wireless network, which I thought would be fine because Apple's Airport supports LEAP. But GW also uses the WatchGuard Authentication system and I think that might be preventing me from connecting. My computer gets on the network ok, but I can't seem to access the Internet. And even if I can get online, there's still the question of printing. GW uses the Pharos print management system, It looks Mac-friendly, but GW may not have set it up to be. I haven't checked with GW's support folks about any of this, but after the response I got when I asked about using a Mac before, I'm not optimistic.

Note: If you're a GW law student who has used or is using a Mac at GW.... help!

That's it. Orientation ends today with breakfast with student groups, a student-led "survival skills" seminar, and a similar faculty-led "survival" session that I think is going to be more comic relief than substantive advice. If I hear any good jokes, I'll let you know.

Finally, let me come out of my self-absorbed shell for a second to say: Best of luck to everyone else starting law school in the coming weeks!

Posted 07:27 AM | Comments (3) | law school