$2400/week

That's right: some law students are making $2400/week!! this summer interning for big firms in NYC. It says so right here (scroll down to August 4), but since I don't see permalinks or archives I'm just gonna quote the story because it's a good story and worth saving for posterity:

Smooth Criminal

Friday was the last day of work for the summer associates here. They're like summer interns but they don't do any work. They get paid $2400 a week (not a typo) and get taken out to fancy dinners and fancy lunches. It's how law firms recruit you before buying your soul.

Friday night I got into the elevator with one of the summer associates. We were both leaving for the night. He had a folder in his arms so I leaned over and looked in jokingly, asking if he was stealing office supplies on his last day.

Sure enough, there were 5 or 6 legal pads, 4 post-it note pads still wrapped, and a box of pens.

Now, it's not that my firm can't afford it. It's just that this guy was making $2400 a week and still found it necessary to steal some fucking pens.

And his stupidity was astounding. NOBODY steals office supplies on their last day- you're supposed to steal them the day before your last day so nobody notices. I can't work with an attorney that dumb.

So now I have to decide whether to go and report this asshole to the recruiting people. But I think that I should take care of this problem like a true attorney: don't snitch on him but make his life a living hell when he eventually comes to work for this firm.

So see, you can be an absolute idiot and still almost pay all your law school bills just by working for three months in the summer. Um, are there strings attached?

Posted 05:51 PM | Comments (2) | law school

SelectSmart Fun

If you're a little overwhelmed by the number of candidates running for President in 2004, try the SelectSmart Presidential Selector. Just answer a few questions and the selector will try to tell you which candidate has views most similar to yours. It even ranks, on a percentage basis, how much you agree (or disagree) with all the other candidates in the race.

My own results weren't wildly unexpected. Selectsmart says my top ten candidates would be:

1. Green Party Candidate   (100%)
2. Kucinich, Cong. Dennis, OH - Democrat   (93%)
3. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat   (90%)
4. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol IL - Democrat   (83%)
5. Kerry, Senator John, MA - Democrat   (83%)
6. Edwards, Senator John, NC - Democrat   (75%)
7. Socialist Candidate   (75%)
8. Leahy, Patrick Senator, Vermont - Democrat   (75%)
9. Gephardt, Cong. Dick, MO - Democrat   (74%)
10. Lieberman Senator Joe CT - Democrat   (73%)

I'm surprised to see Lieberman rank higher than Sharpton, but whatever. And since the Green party hasn't even fielded a candidate (that I know of), and since neither a Green candidate nor Kucinich has a realistic chance of winning, it looks like my top choice is Dean, which is what I was thinking anyway. He's not ideal, but hey, if this SelectSmart thing is right, he's at least 90% ideal (for me), which is pretty darned good.

What does your top candidates list look like?

Posted 08:42 AM | Comments (1) | election 2004

Dude, You're Getting into Hell

If you buy a Dell, do you enter computer hell? Of course not, at least not about 75% of the time. The other 25%, well, you're taking your chances. At least that's what it sounds like from Andrew Orlowski's description of "the finance capitalists' model of what a technology company should be." [Link via Scripting News] In a story about a possible (rumor-only) partnership between Apple and Sun, Orlowski writes:

Wall Street has a very clear idea of [what a technology company should be], make no mistake: the hardware is created by Intel, the software is created by Microsoft, the support calls are fielded by ambitious Indians who've been trained to speak English with an Alabama accent, and the 28 per cent return rates that Dell fields for its laptops are well, best not to be mentioned at all, ever.

I guess that means approximately 100 GW Law students will be returning their spanking new, law-school-mandated computers in the next few months. Gotta love that GW computer policy. I mean, it's great that the law school puts the welfare and convenience of its students first.

Posted 07:45 AM | law school mac geek

Anonymity III: We'll miss you, O & N!

The law student blogging community is saying a sad farewell to Open and Notorious, which is ceasing (or has ceased) publication. [Link via FalconRed] Apparently, there were people who didn't appreciate o and n's attempt to give a candid (and often humorously scathing) picture of several students' experience of law school. According to "learned foot," one of the site's authors:

we're all about free expression, but we care about our careers more. it's not worth it. let's just leave it at that.

This may have been building for some time; the o and n crew took down their archives some time ago and they don't seem to even offer permalinks to individual posts (which is clever, because the structure of those permalinks would allow people to find additional archives, if any remain online).

As a parting gift, "Learned Foot" offers some excellent advice to law students everywhere:

to the rising 1L's. i hope you took the following message home with you: you can be a mediocre student at a mediocre school and still rock the living shit out of your law school experience. you can get the coveted internship. you can get the "bling bling" job - or the job you want. none of us made law review. none of us were even in the top third. we don't go to harvard, stanford, columbia, or the like. and we're doing just fine. some even fabulously. don't allow yourselves to be shackled by the words of the drone army (e.g. "if you don't make law review, you might as well quit." "if you're not in the top 20% you might as well just kiss your career goodbye.") perhaps i should tell you a story of a friend of a friend who got a 2.6 her first year of law school at a second tier school ranked lower than ours. through clever networking and a lot of persistence, she ended up with a better job than most of the people on law review. how did she do it? her answer: "it only depends on how much rockage you have." don't give up, be personable, follow your leads, go for what you want. it's possible, and you don't need law review to get there. besides, it's the clever and persistent ones who think outside the box who are hungry and won't take "no" for an answer who make it as good lawyers. food for thought.

Yes indeedy, it's all about the rockage. And maybe we can take away one more lesson from Open and Notorious: If you're going to blog law school, decide in advance whether you want to plan to be in it for the long haul, or the short term. If you're in it for the long haul (meaning you hope to be able to maintain your blog through law school and perhaps beyond), you'll have to be more careful about what you say. This doesn't mean you can't tell it like it is, but it does mean you have to be prepared to stand by what you say if anyone—including a professor, an administrator, another student, or a prospective employer or other colleague—decides to ask you about it.

If you're in it for the short term (meaning you don't care too much if you have to abandon your blog at some point in the future), you can say whatever the hell you want. Still, if people learn of your identity, you might, as Ricky Ricardo was so fond of saying to Lucy, have some 'splaining to do.

In some ways Open and Notorious seems to have lived up to it's name perfectly. They were open—about what they thought, if not about who they were. And because of their "openness" they became notorious. Unfortunately, that notoriety has forced them to become permanently closed.

Is it better to burn out than fade away?

Ah, nevermind. Just remember: "it only depends on how much rockage you have."

Posted 02:03 PM | Comments (1) | law school meta-blogging

DGLS and Anyonymity II

Dylan Goes to Law School is another new-to-me blawg by a soon-to-be 1-L. Dylan nails the whole anonymity question: Basically, trying to remain totally anonymous (and worrying about whether you're succeeding) is just too much trouble. Meanwhile, if the casual observer doesn't know you are you, that's no big deal either. I've been waffling on whether it's inconsistent of me to continue posting as "ambimb" if I'm going to claim I'm not concerned about anonymity, but as Dr. X. wisely pointed out in an email, there's

a distinction between advertising that it's you (or even acknowledging that it's you) and hiding from your views when asked.

Thanks Dr. X. I quite obviously couldn't have said it better myself.

Posted 01:42 PM | Comments (2) | law school

Joke for John

I think JobforJohn would like this joke from the latest installment of Get Your War On:

1: Knock knock. 2: Who's there? 1: Jobs and Growth. 2: Oh, shut the fsck up! I mean, really! 1: Jobs and Growth of a sneaking sense of betrayal!

Posted 01:10 PM | general politics life generally

Takin' it to the Streets

In today's installment of Democracy in action, please see JobforJohn.com:

Last Thursday, July 24th I was "downsized" from my job of 3 years at a software company.

Later the same day I heard that President Bush's economic team would be doing a bus tour through Wisconsin and Minnesota this week touting Bush's tax cut and its prosperous economic effects.

"What a bunch of BS. I'd like to give their PR tour a dose of reality," is what I thought. So I packed up the minivan and decided to follow their bus around the countryside and talk to whoever would listen about the real facts--that this economy stinks, and Bush's tax cuts are making it worse.

Go John, go!

Posted 12:36 PM | Comments (1) | general politics

The Anonymity Question

Jeremy Blachman has some good thoughts on anonymity vs. full disclosure for law students who blog. This is percolating elsewhere, as well. For example, Undeniable Dilemma is a new-to-me blog by another soon-to-be-One-L who wonders, why all the secrecy?. What I wonder is if an undeniable dilemma is anything like an ambivalent imbroglio... I'll have to read more to find out.

The more I think about it, the more difficult it is for me to understand how anonymity can even be a real question for bloggers. Does anyone really think they can keep their identity secret? It seems to me that the only way to do so would be to make your posts so abstract and general as to be nearly empty of real content, and if you did that, what's the point of having a blog in the first place? ai is about as anonymous as it can get, which is to say, not very. My thinking is that casual readers don't really care about who I am; knowing my name or my measurements or my place of birth (which I think I've blogged about before) or whatever would not really be meaningful to the average reader. Therefore, none of that information is on this site (although I'm sure it's discoverable to those who really wish to find it). But anyone who knows me in "real" life (aka, meatspace) can easily put two and two together to connect me with ai, and that's fine. I've always tried to stick to the maxim that I'll only write things that I wouldn't mind saying in public, or to the people directly concerned. If I'd be embarrassed or ashamed if people connected me with the things I say, I shouldn't say them at all.Those are the rules I'll continue to try to live by, so if you happen to see me at GW this fall, please say hello—I'll be the guy with the iBook.*

Elsewhere in law school discussion, Unlearned Hand thoughts on the ongoing debate about computers in the law classroom have generated healthy comment thread.

And on the subject of computers in the classroom, I think this blog is evidence that American University's Washington College of Law is pretty Mac-friendly—its author is the Mac specialist in the law school's computer lab. Rank better mean *something,* is all I can say.

* Full Disclosure: Due to GW's draconian computer policy (i.e.: "Buy the Dell laptop we recommend or you just may burn in hell forever and flunk out of law school in the first week."), I imagine I'll be one of the few using an iBook at all. However, I won't have it everyday; since GW uses Windows-only software for its legal writing course and for exams, I'll be carrying an old Dell on days when I know I'll be needing to run that software.

Posted 01:32 PM | Comments (8) | law school meta-blogging

A different kind of Trifecta

Howard Dean gets a big publicity boost this week—he's on the cover of the three major news magazines, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. I haven't had a chance to read any of the stories yet, but if it's true that there's no such thing as "bad press," this coverage should give Dean another boost.

(If you missed the whole Trifecta "joke," you can read more about it here and here, or just Google for "trifecta Bush".)

Posted 12:40 PM | election 2004

National Gallery of Art Cafeteria: Observations

Observation 1: There's something not quite right about a 6-8 year-old boy wearing a suit and tie. The rightness is even more questionable when he's sitting with a man (his father?) who seems to be wearing an identical suit and tie. Suits and ties are just wrong. Suits and ties on 6-8 year-old boys should be criminal.

Observation 2: The waterfall that looks like it's always about to stream right through the window is very very cool. The reflective, stainless steel ceiling and lights in the back portion of the cafeteria is very very uncool. What were they thinking?

Observation 3: A Handspring Visor Deluxe combined with a Targus Stowaway Keyboard is a much more chic and, um, novel way to write a novel than is a slightly worn Apple iBook. Damn! Out-teched again!

Question: Which came first: The glass pyramids at the entrance to the Louvre in Paris, or the very similar (if much smaller) glass pyramids in the courtyard between the east and west wings of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.?

Posted 04:59 PM | Comments (1) | life generally