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Case Reading is Fun!
In a personal injury suit in which Erma Veith's car "veered across the center of the road into the lane in which plaintiff was traveling":
…The evidence established that Mrs. Veith, while returning home after taking her husband to work, saw a white light on the back of a car ahead of her. She followed this light for three or four blocks. Mrs. Veith did not remember anything else except landing in a field, lying in the side of the road and people talking. She recalled awaking in the hospital.
The psychiatrist testified Mrs. Veith told him she was driving on a road when she believed that God was taking ahold of the steering wheel and was directing her car. She saw the truck coming and stepped on the gas in order to become airborne because she knew she could fly because Batman does it. To her surprise she was not airborne before striking the truck but after the impact she was flying…
See Breunig v. American Family Insurance Co., 173 N.W.2d 619 (Wis. 1970). The court did grant that Mrs. Veith's hallucinations might vitiate her negligence if she could show that she'd had no warning that she was going to suffer a hallucinatory episode while driving. However, the jury thought Mrs. Veith should have known of the risk and refrained from driving. Imagine that.
Posted 09:04 PM | Comments (5) | law school
Less than a week
The Matrix: Revolutions arrives next Wednesday, November 5, at 9 a.m. Are you counting the days, hours, minutes, or seconds? I'm just wondering when and how I'll be able to see it. Wednesdays are the worst. If you want a bit of the pre-release coverage, USA Today offers a brief interview w/the major players, and a quick and facile FAQ.
I'm sure there's lots more out there, but I've got to go read CivPro. Yesterday we read American Nurses' Association v. State of Illinois, which suggests that employers are free to discriminate on the basis of gender so long as the majority of other employers are also doing it. Nice. And there's the frustrating thing about CivPro: We often read cases that are interesting because of their subject matter, but since we're only focused on procedural questions, we have to leave all the fascinating legal questions for another day (or another class). It's like walking into a candy store and buying nothing but empty wrappers (or something like that—help me out with a good analogy, would you?)
Posted 07:08 AM | Comments (1) | law school
First Feedback
Caution: This post may contain higher than normal doses of whining.
We got our first memo back the other day and it was a bit humbling. As a former English/writing teacher, I feel a bit of pressure to do well in the legal writing aspect of law school. But more important, I, like so many others, would love to work for a journal, and in my third year I'd like to be a writing TA for the introductory LR&W sections (GW calls them "Dean's Fellows"). Of course, those goals would seem more realistic if I did well in my own legal writing assignments, and the first memo turned out, well, just ok. My writing is fine—no unnecessary passive voice, no filler, my memo is concise and precise. The problem: I didn't follow the right format.
The lesson is that in legal writing (or at least in my LR&W class), form is just as, if not more important than, function. You can communicate all your points clearly and concisely, but if you don't do it in the expected format, you'll do poorly. And that means following the format to the finest detail; virtually no deviation will go unpunished.
My instinctual reaction to that is resentment; I always taught my students that their primary goal should be to communicate clearly, and that form should follow function. However, I also taught them that good writing is all about pleasing the 800-lb gorilla, and if the gorilla wants your writing to take a certain form, you're not going to communicate clearly unless you follow that form. Too bad that lesson is sometimes hard to swallow.
I lost points for big things: My headings did not follow traditional outline format and I organized my discussion by level of authority rather than by legal issue. It made more sense to me to do it that way because several of the cases spoke to multiple issues. Oh well, I learned: Organize by issue.
I also lost points on some little things. My writing adjunct told us that our explanation should consist of paragraphs that begin with topic sentences that do not cite authority, but my writing TA didn't get that message and took points off for topic sentences with no citations. We were also supposed to use double-spaced, 12-pt, Times New Roman. I did, but since I use a Mac and Macs set type differently than does Windoze (and also maybe because there are multiple versions of Times New Roman produced by multiple font houses), my TA thought I'd cheated on font size and spacing to stay w/in the page limit. Strike another black mark on the long list of reasons the Microsoft computing hegemony is so so wrong.
But the font thing gets worse: When I explained the font size difference to my TA so she'd know for the next memo that I really am following the rules, she cautioned me that the judges of next spring's journals competition won't care about any explanations—if you don't set your type in 12-point Times New Roman (double-spaced) on a Windoze box (probably using MS Word), they will severely penalize your writing sample.
Hmph. That's good to know. Perhaps I should contact the people running the competition and ask them to be specific; if they're going to require people set their type on a Windoze machine they should say so, and if they're going to require competitors to use a specific word processor for setting that type, they should be clear about that, also. But that's the trouble with the Microsoft monopoly—the people running the journals competition probably won't feel a need to specify these things because they will assume everyone is going to use Windoze and Word. Yet they will penalize people who don't use Windoze and Word.
So not only does the Windoze monopoly potentially jeopardize national security, but it may also jeopardize my chances of writing onto a legal journal. Yay!
Posted 06:56 AM | Comments (5) | law school
