Blitzed

It's Saturday, which means week one, semester 2, of law school is technically over. Yet, now is when the work begins. The first week was a whirlwind of new classes and readings, writing and research assignments, meetings, and reminders of all the things I simply don't have time for. After a semester, I feel much more sure about what I need to do to be prepared for finals. Good thing there's no chance I'll get the time to do much of it. Case briefing? Yeah, right. Outlining? Yeah right. The briefing is hardly necessary (at least not in the way I used to do it), but frequent post-class summaries of what we've covered in the past few days would be a great way to build an outline. Maybe I'll shave off a couple of hours sleep time and squeeze that in.

And don't mention applying for jobs. What? When? How? Whatever.

On the positive side, ProfProperty is proving to be a fun guy w/a great take on things. In fact, for two days running he's taken potshots at last semester's ProfTorts (my ideological nemesis) and the Chicago School of law and economics, which is certainly starting off on the right (or left, as it may be) foot. I'm loving ConLaw and, well, Contracts and CivPro... Yeah.

Also on the positive side, the GW/Georgetown Public Interest/Government Interview Program is coming up Feb 7. You can see from last year's list of participating employers that it's a pretty big deal, and therefore I have high hopes it will provide a great way to get a summer job. The other day, in preparation for the program, GW invited seven recent GW graduates who now work in public interest law to come tell us about their experiences and what they look for in interns/employees. As far as what they're looking for, they all said much the same things:

1. Demonstrated commitment to public interest work. They're looking for concrete evidence on a resume, not necessarily in their own particular area of work, but in some position or volunteer experience that shows you're not just looking for a brief fling with the "little people."
2. Related, but different: A real interest in the organization you're interviewing with. Research the organization so you can show that interest intelligently.
3. Good writing skills, which you can best demonstrate on your cover letter.
4. A memorable and entertaining interview. Especially in a big "career fair" atmosphere, it's important to impress your interviewer in some way so they'll remember you. Try to have a conversation with your interviewer. Make the interviewer's day interesting. A sense of humor is often good. Be interested in and be interesting to him or her. The best way to do this is to research the organization ahead of time and practice your interview skills.

In addition to those interviewing tips, they gave some great general advice for people interested in public interest work, including:

• Commit your life to using the law for social change. Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comforted.
• In law school, volunteer instead of working on a journal.
• Be aware that you might trade the stresses of working in a firm (stesses mentioned included overwork and a huge lack of satisfaction in the work you do) for the stresses of being broke. All agreed they weren't rich, but all agreed they wouldn't trade their lives for any other. How many firm lawyers can say that?

All of this was music to my ears. Finally there were people at GW speaking my language! Plus, the room was filled with students who had come to listen to the speakers, which was a great reminder that not everyone at GW is there just to make as much money as they possibly can.

So that's all good, once I get time to actually fill out all the paperwork to participate in the interview program. Standing in the way of that goal is a good-sized research project about someone charged w/use of a gun in connection w/selling drugs and the applicable standard for a post-trial motion to acquit. And reading. And planning an auction. Yeah.

If posts are less than frequent for a while, the above is why.

p.s.: Apologies to Glorfindel of Gondolin, whom I mistakenly suggested was female. Glorfindel is male. Thanks to Heidi for the clarification.

Posted 10:06 AM | Comments (2) | law school

Blogability

Do you use a Mac to blog? Would you like to make your blogging life infinitely better? Then don't wait, get your copy of ecto now! ecto is the evolution of what was formerly known as Kung-Log, which was already a great blogging client, now made even better. Since I started using Kung-Log about a year ago (give or take), I've probably actually logged into my Moveable Type installation less than once a month. ecto even allows you to upload files and images, and it converts images to jpgs and allows you to reduce their quality to optimal web-size. Categories, multiple blogs, multiple identities, comment and formatting options—ecto is all that and a bag of chips. Try it, you'll like it!

But while ecto is all that, it doesn't yet allow you to control comment spam. Yesterday, ai was the lucky recipient of a massive comment spam attack—about 100 crappy cliche comments all linking to porn and shady online pharmaceutical sites. Getting rid of all that wasn't fun, but next time I think I'll have much less to deal with because ai is now equipped with MT-Blacklist from Jay Allen. MT-Blacklist seems to build on MT's ability to block comments from specific IP addresses by making it easy for MT users to share their lists of blocked sites. Take that, spammers! ;-)

One more thing: If you have any extra time on your hands and you use MT, you're sure to have hours of fun with the MT Plug-In Directory. I used to have time to play around with things like this. Right about now I'm wondering: Will I ever have that time again?

Posted 09:33 AM | meta-blogging

Good Start

"There is never a deed so foul that something couldn't be said for the guy; that's why there are lawyers." —Melvin Belli

For Christmas my mother bought me a "Lawyers Jokes Quotes and Anecdotes 2004 Calendar," from which I took the above quotation. Excerpts from the calendar may become a regular feature. We'll see.

But this quote is appropriate for the moment, since I've been thinking a bit about what it would be like to be a criminal defense attorney. Another Christmas gift (I had an incredible Christmas), this one from L, was How Can You Defend Those People? by James S. Kunen. The book details his experience as a public defender in DC for 2.5 years in the late 1970s. So far, it's quite compelling and makes me think I'd fit as a PD better than I would in many other types of practice. One thing I certainly seem to have in common with Kunen is a lack of respect for law school. Here's how Kunen describes it:

School is school. You sit in chairs that are attached to the floor. You write down what the teacher says (or borrow the notes of someone who did). When the time comes, you memorize it and spit it back out. . . . Law school is not, contrary to the mystification heaped around it by people who have done time there, difficult. Boring would be a better word, but not tremendously or profoundly boring, just boring in the ordinary, everyday sense, which leaves room for the occasional peak of interest by which the valleys of torpor are defined (25).

I'm not sure about the boring part. It's hard to nail down what it is I feel sitting in class with a hundred students, watching the time tick by and knowing that there's absolutely no way we're going to talk about more than one (if even that) of the interesting questions I thought were raised by the previous night's reading. It's boring, but it's also frustrating, disappointing, discouraging, even aggravating because it seems destined to end up doing a disservice to society by producing lawyers who think well in terms of the formal and technical aspects of law, but not necessarily so well in terms of people and reality. Kunen has something to say about that as well, noting that the reading in law school covers every kind of human behavior, but does so in a horribly detached way:

No one seems to suffer in all these tales of woe, the pain having disappeared with the people who felt it. One gets the impression that human life is like nothing so much as an unending Saturday morning cartoon—woops! pow! oof! (26)

I'll get you, you wascally wabbit!

But really, the failures of law school and the law are almost infinite. One of my goals for this semester is to watch for the brighter moments and make the most of them, and after the first two days of class, I remain very hopeful that ConLaw will provide plenty of bright spots. It certainly started off well. Here's how ProfConLaw introduced the course:

The guardians of our liberties are lawyers. There's always been some kind of crisis (right now it's terrorism) and liberties are placed under pressure. The reason liberties withstand this pressure is because of lawyers. Learning constitutional law is almost a duty, an obligation you take up when you become a lawyer.

It's an obligation I'm glad to take up. Can you think of a better epitaph than "Guardian of Liberty"? Yeah, probably, but you could do worse.

Outside the mystified halls of law school, tonight is 2004's first Meetup for Dean, and as Jim Moore says, if you haven't done it already, there's no better time to pick a campaign and get involved. If you don't, the choice will be made for you, and why would you want that?

Also, don't miss the 15 final contenders in the Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest. They're all very impressive and I can't wait to see any one of them on national tv, but my favorites are probably "In My Country," "Polygraph," and "Gone in 30 Seconds." And, of course, the absolute minimalist, Mac-loving best: "Desktop"! (All links are to "high bandwidth" versions; lower bandwidth versions are available at the Bush in 30 Seconds page.)

Posted 06:52 AM | Comments (3) | election 2004 law school

Amazon: the Wal-Mart of Books?

A bit of a tangent: After reading a post and comments at Glorfindel of Gondolin about why she doesn't link to Amazon.com when she refers to books and other kinds of things Amazon sells, I'm experimenting with alternatives myself. One thing I've seen people do rather than link to Amazon is to link to a google search for the title, which allows those interested to easily get more info about the book or whatever, but gives them the choice of whether to go to Amazon or some other source for that info.

I'm not really sure how I could give up Amazon for a lot of things, and I'm extremely ambivalent about whether doing so is really necessary. Is Amazon the Wal-Mart of online stores?

In the "yes" column, Amazon probably dominates a lot of online sales categories, and this is almost certainly hurting lots of smaller players and local businesses—it has absolutely decreased the sales of many local bookstores. These are bad things.

In the "I don't know" column, does Amazon pay workers poorly and mistreat them? Does Amazon give its employees quality benefits? I doubt Amazon is unionized, and I'm almost certain that Powell's Books is.

In the "it may already be too late" column, so many independent booksellers have already been forced out of business by competition from Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon, that probably the majority of those left standing have a loyal customer base that's not going to be affected by online links to competitors.

Let me know if you have any thoughts on this...

Posted 06:34 AM | Comments (4) | life generally meta-blogging

MacWorld '04

Today Steve Jobs delivered the keynote address at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, introducing the iPod mini and GarageBand. The new little iPod is cute, but it needs to be at least $100 cheaper to be a success. I was also hoping for a flash-based iPod with a user-replaceable battery, but I guess those things were too much to hope for. GarageBand, on the other hand, looks like loads of fun. Grab a USB keyboard and mix your masterpiece on your Mac! The possibilities are endless. What would high school have been like if we'd had toys like these?

Posted 06:38 PM | Comments (1) | mac geek

Happy 2004!

Whoop! Here it is. Ready or not, 2004 (and for me, the second semester of law school) is upon us. I know, I know, it's actually been upon us for several days now, but I've been out of town and far away from blogability. In fact, I was so far out of the news and information loop, I didn't even realize I was supposed to be on heightened alert. The past two weeks were filled with ping-pong, pinochle, and poker, ice fishing, ice skating, snowmobiling, driving, getting stuck in the snow, getting unstuck, wrapping presents, unwrapping presents, playing a newly discovered card game called Wizard, and eating lots and lots of very good food. Best of all, I spent the whole time with friends and family and hardly thought about law school at all. :-)

But now it all begins again—law school, that is. GW Law School will begin this semester on a sad note, mourning the unexplained death of a one-L whose body was found floating in the Potomac the morning after finals ended last semester. It looks like "foul play" was involved, but regardless of how it happened, it's a tragic loss. Welcome to the nation's capital, everyone!

Of course, we'll all have to move beyond that, and this semester should be packed, not only with classes, but also with the summer job search (which I've yet to begin) and the planning and execution of an EJF Auction. Of course, the classes are supposed to be the priority. This semester they'll include two carryovers from last semester—Contracts and CivPro—and two new contenders: Constitutional Law I and Property. I'm looking forward to ConLaw because, well, I'm more big-picture than fine detail, and questions of Constitutional law are more often big issues. Property I'm just not going to speculate on; I've heard bad things, but then, I can say that about every class/subject. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt; innocent until proven guilty and all that.

Good luck to everyone. May we all have a great 2004. (Only 10 short months until Bush loses in a landslide and gets a one-way ticket back to Crawford, TX!)

Posted 06:33 AM | law school life generally