Boo!

Happy Halloween!

Posted 09:13 PM | Comments (1) | election 2004

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

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 05:59 AM | Comments (1) | law school

JDARC? No.

I keep getting these messages from something called the JD Academic Research Council (JDARC), which describes itself as:

an Internet research community of law students who agree to the confidential assessment of their Internet usage habits. By aggregating the data that we collect in an anonymous fashion, we are able to help companies understand the needs and interests of law students - while maintaining your privacy.

In exchange for information about "internet usage habits," JDARC promises to pay me $10 for registering, $5 for staying through January, and $5 more for staying through May.

I'm sorry, but, no thanks. First, why would I want to help "companies understand the needs and interests of law students"? Do I really want to provide them with more and better ways to convince me I need and want more stuff or services? No. If there's anything I I'm sure I don't need it's better marketing targeted at me. And second, do they really think my time is worth so little? Sure, I've registered at lots of internet sites for free, but those sites didn't insult my intelligence and imply I'm a money-grubbing dolt by offering me a paltry payment in the first place. Without exploring it very far, it seems clear to me that JDARC offers zero value to law students, so it has to offer the illusion of value by offering tiny cash payments.

No thanks. Jerks.

Adding insult to injury, the JDARC website shuns the Safari browser; it won't even load a home page unless you're using IE or Netscape. (I assume a variant of Mozilla would work, but I'm not inclined to try to find out.) Double no-thanks. Doublejerks.

What I want to know is: Did GW sell JDARC my email address?

Posted 05:24 AM | Comments (5) | law school