Congratulations Mr. Poon!

Mr. Poon has officially passed the bar, and for that, we salute him.

Posted 06:19 PM | Comments (1) | law general

Congratulations Mr. Poon!

Mr. Poon has officially passed the bar, and for that, we salute him.

Posted 06:13 PM | law general

Anecdotes from today's schools

I've recently heard some disturbing stories about what's happening in public schools today. First, on a recent Monday morning in a public school kindergarten in the Midwest, the teacher asked her class of eager pupils, “How many of you went to church yesterday? Raise your hands.” All but one child raised his hand. To make matters worse, the teacher then said, “How many of you did not go to church yesterday? Raise your hands.” And of course, the same child sat alone in the room with his hand raised. I have no idea why the teacher was asking these questions, but it seems obvious that even if she had some pedagogical reason for talking about church attendance in her kindergarten class, she used the opportunity to strongly suggest that there was something not normal or even “bad” about people who don't go to church. Hello? This is a public school! Second, in an East Coast middle school, parents recently attended a “parents' night” to hear from the teachers what was going on at the school. There, the parents learned that the school has an official policy that teachers will never use the word “evolution” because it is too controversial; they also teach the principles of evolution as a “theory” among others. Teaching evolution as a theory is fine; that's what it is. It happens to have lots of support, but ok, we can't be “certain.” (of course, by the same logic we really can't be “certain” that we actually exist; our existence is a theory supported by lots of facts and information, but hey, we could be brains in a vat.) The point here is that this is a public middle school. I think the average 11-14 year-old can handle the massive controversy surrounding the word “evolution.” No wonder our nation seems stupid; we're teaching our kids to be that way.

Posted 08:32 AM | Comments (5) | general politics

Friday Question: Movie Double Dip?

Do you ever double dip at the movie theater? By that I mean, after you've seen one movie, do you ever exit that movie and slip quietly into another that's just about to begin in the same multiplex? When you pay $10 to see a movie, do you feel justified in seeing two? Anonymous responses welcome, of course. I'm just curious. I don't feel any qualms about this myself b/c I feel I've paid for about a thousand extra movie screenings in all the exorbitant movie tickets I've purchased, but apparently some people are very opposed to the double dipping. Where do you stand on this burning issue? ;-)

Posted 08:19 AM | Comments (10) | ai movies

Creepy “Good Job”

If I had more time.... I'd track down video footage of every time Bush has nominated a new cabinet member recently, and check the footage to see if Bush says “good job!” to the new nominee after the nominee says about three sentences. He did it with Condi and with Spellings, the new education secretary. Is it just a patriarchal thing he's doing with women, or is it something else? Whatever it is, it creeps me out. The short remarks by the nominees make them sound uncertain, lacking in confidence, and to have Bush step in and tell them they did a “good job” because they completed three sentences makes it seem like he's treating them like children. So the overall impression is that the relationship between Bush and his new cabinet is that of father to children, or possibly master to sycophants. Whatever, the darkest days are still to come...

Posted 09:09 AM | general politics

Kids these days!

Conversation between two undergraduate women in line at Einstien Bagel on the GW campus:

1: “So have you been talking online?” 2: “No, on the phone! Every week!” 1: “Even better! Is he seeing anyone?” 2: “I doubt it.” 1: “That's so cool.” 2: “He's so sweet. Last night he told me he had this new music and that I was gonna love it. He said I'd start taking my clothes off the minute I heard it.” 1: “Ahh, that's so sweeeet. I wish I knew someone who would talk to me like that.”

This is what passes for smooth these days? Is this what it feels like to get old?

Posted 11:14 AM | Comments (8) | 2L

I am not a witness

Ok. Being a witness in a trial is hard. The better the lawyers, the harder it is. Or maybe it's just being a pretend witness in a mock trial that's hard. I've now performed the role of the latter twice, and both times I've found myself underprepared and too easily flustered by the cross examination. They fluster you by picking an obscure word or fact from your earlier deposition (sworn statement) to quote back to you, asking you if you said that before in an accusing way that makes it seem like you probably committed a crime if you did say that. It's not fun. Yesterday I was supposed to be a doctor testifying about a former patient who was now dead. The patient's insurance company was trying to prove that he committed suicide, because then the insurance company wouldn't have to pay his wife's claim on his life insurance policy. So I was testifying about a conversation I had with the deceased several years before he died, and on cross examination the attorney asked me: “Didn't you say that he feared he might not be able to take care of himself or his family?” Sitting on the stand, I knew he had said he was worried about taking care of his family, but did he say he was worried about himself, or was the attorney trying to get me to extend my testimony in a damaging way? And then, in hindsight, the question doesn't matter anyway. Sure, he said he was worried about whether he could take care of himself; he just lost a big promotion and was worried about his future in general. Nothing unusual about that. That's a long way from any sort of suggestion he might kill himself. But the way the question comes at you it's not a question, it's an accusation, and it's easy to get defensive. Get defensive, and you look like you've got something to hide. Juries don't like that, and then you might cause the poor impoverished widow to lose her case against this nasty insurance company. That would be sad. But while I'm a pretty terrible witness, these mock trial things are still fun. And now I know that if I'm ever cross-examining a witness, one good strategy is to make my questions sound like accusations, and then the witness is mine! (insert evil laughtrack and perhaps an evil Mr. Burns fingertip temple for good measure here).

Posted 07:30 AM | Comments (4) | 2L

Should've Known Better

Note: You can safely ignore this post. I'm sure it's just the typical pre-finals angst here and everything will look rosier come December 15 or so when those finals are over. Or maybe the rosiness won't come until grades come out in February. Or maybe that will kill the rosiness. Whatever. It's all cyclical and predictable and really, I should just go study. Ambivalence about law school reigns. While good law students like Energy Spatula spend hours in the library trying to nail down complicated rules (and getting jobs—congratulations!), I've been feeling like law school is a distant acquaintance I haven't seen or really thought about in years. It's time to buckle down, outline, study study, but... Well, as regular readers known, and as you can see again from the lengthy discussion in comments of this post, I haven't been thrilled with my experience of law school so far. That's no shock; lots of law students aren't thrilled with law school. If we took a survey, we might just find a good majority of current and former students actually loathe (or loathed) law school. Why? I could list reasons, but they all beg the question: Does law school have to be such a crap experience? It doesn't, but it is. Everyone told me it would be like this. (Well, not everyone; I know practicing attorneys who loved law school, but only a couple.) I knew it would be like this. I mean, in theory you could get a bunch of people together to study the laws that regulate our society and expect to get some lively discussion of pressing issues, some critical thinking, some new ideas, some passion. But that's not law school. That might be something professors do in their own research and writing, but not in their teaching. Not when they're teaching 100 students or more per class, and not when they teach in an educational system designed by and for business/corporate interests. But I really don't want to go into it all here. For more thoughts on how law school could be improved, check out an upcoming edition of the [non]billable hour's five by five series (sometime in the next couple of weeks; I'll link to it when it comes up). So it's time to do the study thing. And all the other law school stuff. And then I see the decision by Evan of Going to Cooley to drop out of law school for now (for family reasons, I gather), and I admire it, and it makes me jealous. Being a law school drop out sounds so blissful! What a joy it would be to walk away now! But I fear the joy would be short-lived as I faced the prospect of getting a job and living a life wondering what I might have done had I finished this damned degree. And then I see Jeremy decide to turn down an offer from a big firm because the law just doesn't really grab him like writing does. I think, yeah, me too! Or, me neither! Maybe I should just do what Jeremy's doing—get the J.D. and then do something else. Obviously, that's an option. But that means I still have to take these damnable finals in the next few weeks, doesn't it? *sigh*

Posted 09:10 AM | Comments (3) | 2L

bogging Down

Apologies to any readers who don't give a rolling doughnut about madcap novel-writing, but that's sort of what I'm doing and thinking about these days so maybe you can just skip these posts and not hold them against me? I'll become a law student again soon enough, I'm sure. In fact, that's one possible reason I've never made it past about 36k words in any previous year. Starting a novel is easy, and putting the rest of your life on hold for a few days, or even a week, maybe two—that's not so hard either. But at some point, the backlog of work begins to catch up with you, and the focus required to keep a narrative moving becomes more and more difficult to maintain. Thinking back on my past NaNoWriMo experiences, it seems that it was always around week two or three that I really began to sputter, and I wonder if the reason for that was simply that the rest of my life began reasserting itself, demanding attention, and making each word that more difficult to come up with. As I try to juggle the different demands on my time this month, I find my mind pulled in so many directions that when I do sit down to write, it's hard to concentrate, or even remember the story I'm supposed to be telling. Could it be that a month is, in fact, too much time to give yourself for hacking out a really really bad 50k-word novel? Maybe Sui Generis is onto something doing nearly the whole thing in two weeks... Elsewhere: The WaPo featured NaNo yesterday!

Posted 09:10 AM | Comments (5) | NaNoWriMo