Retreat

Thanks to everyone for all the comments (and emails) recently; collectively, you're helping to write an article whose goal is to help explain to the uninitiated why law students blog and what good might come of it for both writers and readers. This post explains more; all thoughts still very welcome and appreciated. If you email, please let me know if you'd prefer your thoughts not be quoted in the article. If you post a comment, it's already public, so I'll assume you don't mind if it's published elsewhere. If this assumption is incorrect, please let me know that, as well.

Meanwhile, ai will be quiet (from my end, anyway) for a couple of days while I "retreat" to the Maryland woods with my fellow summer interns and the attorneys we're working with. Much reading (for me, probably Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood, upon L's strong recommendation) card-playing, and swimming is promised.

Have a great weekend!

Posted 08:47 AM | Comments (1) | meta-blogging

Bel Canto: Opera Will Save Us

In the ongoing project to catch up on long-overdue reading, last weekend I finished Bel Canto after two weeks of trying. My progress through the book was slowed in the second week by the fact that I began commuting to work by bike rather than by train, removing 1-2 hours of reading time from my workdays. However, I found the book to be very slow and not very compelling until about page 275 (of approx. 325 pages). That's my quick review: Very slow and overwrought for the first 3/4 or more, followed by 30-50 pages of rising action, all of which comes to a chain-yanking conclusion in the final 5 pages. In other words, after reading this book, I felt a little used. I read 275 pages of overwrought description only to be kicked in the stomach and patted on the head in the end?

(If you haven't read the book but would like to, don't read on—spoilers ahead.)

Plot summary: Group of international business and governmental elites gathers at the home of the Vice President of an unnamed "developing" nation to celebrate the birthday of the CEO of a multinational Japanese electronics corporation by listening to a private performance of Roxanne Coss, one of the world's most famous and accomplished opera sopranos. At the end of the performance, the house is invaded by approximately 20 "terrorists" who have come to kidnap the president of this developing nation, only to find the president couldn't make it to the party because he didn't want to miss his favorite television soap opera. (Apparently, the president has never heard of a VCR.) Instead of kidnapping the president, the "terrorists" decide to hold the whole room hostage; they soon relent and set free all the women, sick and old men, and house workers (the "terrorists" claim their goal is to liberate "the workers"; the 3rd-person narrator wonders what they mean by "liberate" and "workers," but never returns to these questions—this is one of the book's great flaws).

Skip ahead two weeks and the "terrorists" and hostages have settled into routines and begun to make friends with each other. They sit around, waiting for something to happen, and have lots of time to think about whatever the author, Ann Patchett, wants to put into their heads. This could be interesting, but mostly isn't since the thoughts Patchett chooses to catalog are mostly trivialities along the lines of, "gee, I really do care about my wife" (from an elite european hostage). Some of the thoughts are slightly more interesting. For example, the Vice President of the developing nation is a hostage and we learn that he grew up in something like poverty and never dreamt he'd ever live in a house that had a machine in the kitchen dedicated solely to making ice. He also becomes obsessed with maintaining this house and begins taking over the cooking and cleaning and gardening that he'd previously paid servants to do for him. The Vice President's discovery of all the work his servants had done for him—all the labor he'd taken for granted that had made his life so nice—is a highlight of the book. If more characters had had epiphanies like this, the book would have been much more impressive. But even the Vice President doesn't do much with his newfound knowledge; he doesn't even express thanks (that I recall) for the labor his servants have always done, but instead becomes obsessed with doing it himself in order to maintain his material possessions in the best possible manner. So instead of readers getting a character who develops some consciousness of the economic inequalities of his world, we get a character who obsessed and controlled by his material possessions. Yawn.

After 4.5 months (and a couple hundred pages) of this, a few characters have fallen in love and everyone is captivated by the singing of the famous Soprano. This singing—opera, of all things—is what seems to bring everyone together; it's what set the scene in motion (the reason everyone was in this house in the first place), and what makes everyone look forward to their next day as a hostage or "terrorist" in this little drama. In this way the book is highly romantic, preaching an ideal of Western European culture as a sort of universal language that can soften even the hardened hearts of "terrorists." This music makes language irrelevant—the fact that the songs the soprano sings are in languages neither she nor her listeners understand does not matter because the music touches them all and never fails to put them into a dreamy state of bliss. The book verges on magical realism in this regard, but it doesn't quite go that far. Perhaps it should have.

The relationships between the hostages and the "terrorists" seem to raise some sort of argument about how we're all just people and no matter how deep our political differences, we can all get along quite well if we try (and, um, if we can just unite around the universal language of Western European music!). This could also be a redeeming theme of the book, but its execution here comes off as too simplistic to be more than a superficial gesture, a la Rodney King's plea, "Can't we all just get along?"

In the end... Well, I won't tell you the end because that's really the only reason to read the book, but for me it ended up not seeming like a very good reason. In fact, at the end of the book, I felt a little used, like I'd been tricked. I read all of this, for that? But rather than ruining it completely for those who've not yet read the novel, suffice to say the ending returns to the book's central theme that Western European culture, and specifically opera, is the only thing that can make this crazy world tolerable for civilized people. One of the main characters summarizes that theme in his final lines (speaking of Roxanne, the Soprano):

When I hear Roxane sing I am still able to think well of the world," Gen said. "This is a world in which someone could have written such music, a world in which she can still sing that music with so much compassion. That's proof of something, isn't it? I don't think I would last a day without that now."

Oh yes, opera makes life worth living. If the book were written differently, it might be possible to read this as a larger argument that, rather than building armies and trying to resolve conflicts with bullets, we'd be better off trying to encourage art and artistic expression around the world. That argument might have potential, but it's not really in this book. The novel sets up a situation—a sort of microcosm of "globalization"—where the characters could gain some real insight into their own lives and the larger world they live in; it does an excellent job of setting a scene where these potentially fascinating characters could experience real growth. But instead of allowing them to grow or learn at all, the novel spends far too much time talking about the magical powers of opera, making its characters little more than a passive audience for the beautiful music.

Why do the "terrorists" want to kidnap a president? As mentioned above, we don't know, and the book belittles the "terrorists" by making them seem like they don't really know, either. Would a small group of "terrorists" attempt a kidnapping like this without good and deeply-believed reasons? No. But the book never explores any of that, nor does it explore the possible participation of its hostages—these global business and governmental elites—in whatever events or injustices the "terrorists" might be be trying to address. Instead, the novel seems to assume its readers won't care about these things, because the music is what's important. Who cares what motivates "terrorists"? Play that beautiful opera, please!

Bel Canto won the "Orange Prize"* and the Pen Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The only explanation I can see for so much critical adulation is that the critical establishment is a sucker for romantic peans to European culture. Perhaps after Sept. 11, 2001 (the book was published in 2001, so I assume many critics were reading it in the context of that day's aftermath), many critics also enjoyed a novel that didn't ask them to think too deeply, if at all, about what might motivate a "terrorist," or about their own relationship to those motivations. There will always be an audience for escapist fantasy, I suppose, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that. I only found the book disappointing because its characters and setting suggest it's going to be much more than the "fantasia of guns and Puccini and Red Cross negotiations" promised by the book jacket blurb (from The New Yorker). But no, a fantasia is exactly what it is.

* Side note: congratulations to Andrea Levy, the winner of the Orange Prize for 2004 for her novel, Small Island.

Posted 08:30 AM | Comments (2) | ai books

Blog Conversations

Thanks to everyone who responded to my request for anecdotes, opinions, and comments about law students and blogs. So far the best response has been from Pre-1Ls and new bloggers. Anyone else out there care to comment? If so, please email or comment on this post or the earlier one.

My question and its response raises more questions. First, why do people prefer to email rather than comment on the blog? Second, why do you think a post about ironing elicits so many comments, while posts about more "serious" things (i.e. blogs and law school or myriad posts here and elsewhere on subjects of politics, current events, history, social justice, etc.) elicit none? This may relate to my thinking out loud about the effect of blogs on the public/private sphere: Do blogs encourage talk about personal/non-public issues at the expense of discussion about public or social issues? Are law school blogs as popular as they are primarily because they give us an outlet for narcissism, a chance to revel in the daily travails of wrinkled shirts and annoying classmates who talk too much and professors who teach badly? And if so, is that really valuable? Or are law school blogs doing something more?

Again, I'm just thinking out loud. All/any comments/thoughts definitely welcome.

Posted 06:42 AM | Comments (12) | law school meta-blogging

Non-Firm Summer Lunch

While Jeremy humorously recounts the way summer associates scramble to get free lunches from their firm, my non-firm summer job has bought me (and the other summer interns) lunch only one time in three weeks. Pizza. Good pizza. We loved it.

Meanwhile, Sam says lunches with firm partners can be awkward. Not a problem in our public defender's office; even the head attorney—the Public Defender—is cool and easy to talk to. The general lunch deal is most of the interns bring a bag lunch, while the attorneys go get something from a local "budget" establishment (top contenders: Chipotle, Subway, Popeye's, local non-chain sandwich shops). Then everyone takes their food to the conference room and we all eat together. It's really the best part of the day, and so far there hasn't been a single awkward moment.

So although some people may be making thousands of dollars this summer working at firms, see what they have to put up with? Stressful email competitions to get a place at the table, and awkward silences with partners. You're not likely to have these problems at your public interest summer internship. In fact, if you're like me, you won't even have a computer or an email address/program with which to compete in an email competition. (I can't believe how little our office uses email, but then, most accused criminals who qualify for a public defender aren't going to have email, are they?)

Yep. The public interest summer legal job. That's where the fun is!

Posted 06:40 AM | Comments (2) | 1L summer

Ironing Is Wrong

I've often been told I'm a master of the obvious, and in that role I'm here to tell you that the act of ironing clothing has got to be among the most pointless and just plain wrong activities available to modern humans. There is something very sick and wrong with a culture that requires clothes to be free of wrinkles, and places such a premium on this that it requires hours and hours of horrifyingly tedious work in order to ensure that no wrinkle sees the inside of any workplace with a "business casual" or "business" dress-code. What, praytell, is so awful about a few wrinkles? Ironing is so pointless it makes me want to scream!

Perhaps I will develop a very short but scathing explanation for why I think anyone who notices or cares about wrinkles is an asinine moron. Then, I will wear very wrinkled clothes—I will never lift an iron again. When anyone comments on how wrinkled or rumpled I look, I will lay into them with my short but scathing explanation of why I think they are an asinine moron. Don't you think this would be a great way to win friends and influence people?

Posted 05:16 AM | Comments (10) | 1L summer life generally

Airport Express and the Apple PDA that never will be

Apple released Airport Express yesterday, a little device that lets you: 1) broadcast a wireless internet connection to up to 10 users (just like a regular Airport base station or other wireless access point), 2) stream your iTunes library to your stereo, and 3) extend the range of an existing wireless network (it acts as a bridge). All for $129. Very cool.

Of course, this would be an even better addition to the "digital hub" if Airport Express also had a data-out line to allow you to plug into a television, VCR or other video input so you could stream your photos and iMovies to your tv. With this capability, Airport Express could give the TiVo Home Media Option a real run for its money.

Apparently Steve Jobs also announced that Apple created a new PDA sometime recently, but it will never see the light of day. This I do not understand. I mean, even if it wasn't a market leader, if it's made by Apple, you can bet they'd sell a few million—at least enough to pay back some of the R&D that went into creating the thing. Was it just not insanely great, or ... what?

I bought an eMate in 1999 for about $300—this was the "laptop" version of Apple's Newton. Compared to what's available now, the thing was big and heavy, but it was definitely very cool and way ahead of its time. It could surf the web, send and receive email, accept input via stylus and handwriting recognition or keyboard, play mp3s, etc. And best of all, it was bulletproof. Like a PDA, it used flash ram for memory (no hard drive), so there were no moving parts to worry about if it got banged around. It was made of superhard and thick plastic and the screen—the only sort of sensitive part—was shock-mounted to withstand hard hits. Instant on/off, 20-hour battery life (or more) using the equivalent of four AA batteries, etc. In some ways a dream machine, and definitely the ultimate reporter's or student's note-taking/story-writing companion. But all we got was the first version before it was discontinued. And even w/out support from Apple, these things are still going strong. Imagine what the descendant of a machine like that could be today!

I guess we'll never know...

See also:

• More on Airport Express from Jim Heid's Macintosh Digital Hub Site.
• More from Ars Technica.
• TidBITS review: "If you were to try to assemble the same set of features using the best, cheapest products from other makers, you'd easily spend $300 to $500."

Posted 05:39 AM | Comments (1) | mac geek

Blogs and Law School

Perspectives Wanted: I'm working on a short article about law students and blogs. If you are a law student (or soon-to-be or recently-graduated law student) or a law professor and you have any thoughts about the relationship between blogs and law school that you'd like to share, please comment or drop me an email. I'm specifically looking for thoughts and/or anecdotes in the realm of the following:

• Why do law students blog?
• What can law students gain from blogging? (Does reading and/or writing blogs help you get better grades? Does it make school more fun or interesting? Does it make you feel less lonely/scared/anxious/etc? Does it add something to your law school experience?)
• What do you find most enjoyable or valuable about reading or writing a blog? (If you're a reader, what are the best posts or blogs to read and why? If you're a blog author, what have been your best experiences with blogging?)
• Have you made any contacts via blogging that have led to professional advancement of some kind? For example, has anyone gotten job leads via a blog that actually turned into a job? Or have you learned about any other opportunities via blogging that have somehow been good for your legal career?
• Does your school have a "blog community"? By that I mean, do you know and/or interact with other bloggers at your school?
• Do you have any thoughts about law professors who blog? Do you find law prof blogs interesting or helpful in any way? Would you like to see more of them? Or do you find law profs who blog generally talk about things that don't interest you?
• If you're a law professor with a blog, why do you do it? What have you gained? Do you read student blogs? Do you think blogging is a valuable activity for law students? If so, why? If not, why?

I could go on, but you get the idea. I obviously have my own experiences and thoughts on all of the above, but the more perspectives I can get, the better. I look forward to hearing from you. (And for the few of you I've contacted already about this, I hope to follow up with you soon!)

Meanwhile, this project has provided a good excuse to do a little research into the nascent field of blog history. A few interesting tidbits: According to Matthew Haughey and Peter Merholz, the word "blog" was coined by Merholz in about May of 1999. Blogger was born in August, 1999. This FAQ by Jorn Barger on RobotWisdom also offers an interesting snapshot of where blogs were in September 1999. It suggests the What's New page at Mosaic may have been the first blog, way back in 1993. Dave Winer says the first blog was the first web site built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. According to Rebecca Blood's history of weblogs, Barger was also the first to apply the term "weblog" to what we know today as blogs. The BlockStar Timeline puts all these pieces together.

According to this article, blogs are booming today:

Technorati, a San Francisco research company, says there are about 2.5 million blogs, with 10,000 being created each day.

The Pew Research Center estimates that between 2 and 7 percent of adult Internet users write a blog, and 11 percent visit blogs.

As for how many of those blogs are "blawgs" (or law-related blogs), the Legally-Inclined Webring currently has 449 members. If there's a better way to gauge the size of the legal blogging community, I'm not sure what it is. For comparison purposes, Denise Howell's blogroll at Bag and Baggage is quite extensive and clocks in at approximately 138 law student blogs (those "Learning the Craft"), around 52 "Academic" blogs (most of which are presumably written by law professors), and about 215 blogs in the "Practicing" category. So, according to these sources, the legal blogging community currently numbers

Posted 05:47 AM | law school meta-blogging

WIR #3: When clients are crazy

Week three of the public defender summer internship was short but eventful. I feel I'm settling in a little, getting more comfortable with feeling lost, perhaps. After three weeks, I'm impressed and surprised with the human pace of the work. The attorneys in the office stay quite busy and there seems to be plenty of work to keep a posse of interns busy, as well, yet only a handful of the attorneys seem to stay late or come in too early, and the atmosphere of the office is serious but not oppressive or too fast-paced. I'm sure not all public defenders enjoy this kind of pace, and I'm sure it feels different as an attorney than it does as an intern, but so far it seems that the promise is true that this sort of law practice is less all-consuming of time and energy than BigLaw.

Highlights of this week included some fireworks in court, a crash course in criminal procedure, and a visit to jail.

The fireworks in court were shocking, really, from the perspective of someone learning about and considering becoming a public defender. First, I watched as one of our attorneys (a public defender) entered the lockup adjacent to the courtroom to confer with a client prior to that client's appearance in court. Through the closed door, we could hear the client yelling at the attorney, and several minutes later she emerged looking stunned and on the verge of tears. She immediately left the courtroom, and I soon learned that outside in the hall she had passed the verge and was crying, after her client verbally attacked her competence and intelligence. Apparently she didn't feel physically threatened because the client was restrained in his cell, but she was still seriously shaken by his yelling. Later, after the attorney had recovered, her client emerged and asked to represent himself. I'm told that usually this judge would be loathe to grant such a request, and would usually order the public defender to act as assistant counsel to the pro se defendant. Not this time. The judge lectured the client on how stupid he was for giving up such good representation, and then granted his request. The public defender didn't mind.

The same day, one of "my" attorney's clients (by "my" attorney, I mean the attorney I'm working for this summer) showed up for trial in an apparently "altered" state of mind. Long story short, he tried to dismiss his own charges by signing a dismissal order as if he were the judge. "But that has no authority," my attorney told him.

"No authority?" he asked. "I put my copyright on there, it's authority."

"But the judge will know he didn't sign it."

"I am the judge!"

Ok. So my attorney told the client she was going to have to raise the question of his competence before the judge, the client got angry and said he was going to ask for different counsel, my attorney said fine. Then, while waiting for the case to be called, the client decided to leave the courthouse. He just took off. Not a good day.

I rushed through that story, but trust me, it was a pretty crazy experience. How can you help people as an attorney if they try so hard to make it impossible for you to help them?

The crash course in crim pro was just that, about four hours covering the basics of how to run a case from the time an attorney meets a client to trial. I was shocked by the degree to which state legislatures are free to depart from federal rules and procedures, and the degree to which states are free to stack the deck against defendants when it comes to rules of evidence and discovery. Although prosecutors have an ethical duty to provide all exculpatory evidence to the defense, they don't always do so. What's worse, according to our attorney-teacher, they're probably less likely to do so in bigger cases.

People are gonna tell the truth in a traffic case. But they might not tell the truth in a murder case—there's too much at stake.

This is consistent with small and large reminders I've picked up in the past few weeks that people working in law enforcement and criminal prosecution don't always care too much about the truth. In just three weeks, I've seen police lie on the witness stand, and I've heard prosecutors bully defense attorneys over very minor issues. Such things certainly diminish whatever respect I had for the criminal justice system, but they also increase the incentive to go into criminal defense—the need for good defenders is real.

Finally, the jail. Unfortunately, the jail will have to wait because I have to run to work. I'm sure I'll be visiting the jail again before the summer's over so I'll say more about it after I've been more than once.

I also wanted to send good wishes to my fellow 1Ls and beyond who are doing fascinating legal jobs elsewhere, but I've run out of time to track down the links so instead I'll just say: Have a good week, everyone!

See also: WIR #1 and WIR #2.

Posted 05:43 AM | 1L summer

Blogging in public and private spheres

This is going to seem random, but that's the way my mind works. What follows is just some thinking aloud about how blogs might affect the public and private spheres. My thoughts are related to the idea of the public sphere as described by Jurgen Habermas, but I'm thinking in more simple terms of a sort of basic line between what people feel should be/is public (acceptable for public discussion, public knowledge, related to other people), and what people feel should be/is private.

Question: What happens to the division between public and private spheres when people begin putting their daily diaries online? Does this already fungible division, A) disappear altogether, B) become somehow more entrenched, or C) something else or in between?

A) The division between public and private disappears altogether. If people put their most intimate thoughts online (in a blog, for example), nothing is left for the private sphere. Everything that's published goes into the public sphere, and the private basically shrivels up and dies. There are ways in which this could be a wonderful thing.

Example: Let's say that previously my decision about what kind of car to buy was a private decision, one I felt I could and should make on my own, possibly with only a little input from people very close to me. If this is a private decision, part of the private sphere of my life, I might feel free to buy the biggest, most gas-guzzling SUV I could afford. After all, this is part of my private life and affects only me (and perhaps a few people very close to me). Sure, people will see me driving my car, but by then it's too late. I've made the decision, and it's my decision to make, so who cares what they think. On the other hand, if this is now a public decision, one I make in a public way, with public input (i.e., via my blog), I may have many second thoughts about buying that big pollution machine that may cause more people to die so that don't have to pay too much for all the gas it requires. Instead of thinking that my decision affects only me, I will be reminded that it has far-reaching affects on all of my readers, as well as people I've never heard from or met. Net result: Fewer people buy SUVs. With a smaller or less clearly-bordered private sphere, I will be less able to delude myself into thinking my actions do not affect other people, and I will be more likely to make choices that are good myself and others, instead of those that only seem (superficially) good for me.

Of course, a disappearing private sphere could also be a bad thing. Is my decision to have an abortion a public decision, or a private one? What about my decision to have gay sex in my bedroom? The Supreme Court said last year that this was part of the private sphere, and therefore not subject to legislation. This is a positive step. However, I wonder if the same goals could be achieved by making this less private and more public. Instead of closing gay sex off in the privacy of personal bedrooms (a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" model), what if we all talked about it openly, with at least the same honesty and frankness with which we talk about heterosexual sex? Would prejudices against gay sex then disappear?

Bottom line: It seems impossible that the private sphere will ever completely disappear. Certainly blogging won't erase it....

B) The division between public and private becomes more entrenched. People do not put their most private and intimate thoughts online. Blogs encourage people to put more information online, so that at first glance it appears the sphere of privacy is disappearing—what was once reserved for the privacy of a personal diary or the intimate conversation of a trusted friend, is now published online for all the world to see. In some cases, this does appear to be happening. Especially on certain LiveJournal sites, for example, blog authors appear to be publishing very intimate details of their lives, pushing those previously private details into the public sphere. However, those intimate detail-blogs are by far the minority. While many blogs reach a surprisingly personal level, most still withhold a great deal of information about their authors' lives and thoughts. What is withheld is often guarded zealously, with blog authors taking great pains to keep even the slightest whiff of those subjects out of the public eye. So while the private sphere may be shrinking, it is far from disappearing. Instead, it's becoming more entrenched, more vehemently protected, more private and more precious. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Hard to tell.

C) The division between public and private neither disappears nor becomes further entrenched. Perhaps it doesn't change at all? Do you think your ideas of what's public and private have changed at all since you began blogging or reading blogs? Have the lines dividing what you feel you can and should discuss with other people moved at all? Has your idea of your relationship to other people/the world changed in any way?

Posted 08:21 AM | Comments (2) | meta-blogging