Scheduled for Spring

Registration for Spring classes is underway. From here on out there are almost no required courses. Unfortunately, I found the electives on offer less than inspiring. I signed up for Sales and Business Associations because both topics are tested on the bar exam, but I expect them to be as dull as the daytime Emmys. I registered for Advanced Civil Procedure just because it fit a hole in my schedule and I like the professor who teaches it. That course is all about class actions, which is an extremely specialized area of practice that I'll probably never experience. The one class I'm kind of looking forward to is International Criminal Law. The name of that course has such a James Bond quality to it, I don't see how it can be boring. Rounding out my schedule is the one required course: Lawyering Skills II. LSII is nothing but a semester-long mock trial, from the initial client interview to final judgment.

Moot Court Weekend

It was all moot court, all the time this weekend. On Friday, I was a judge at an undergraduate moot court tournament hosted by the school. On Saturday and Sunday, I competed with my moot court classmates in our own tournament. My partner and I were knocked out in the second round (meaning that we had to argue our case three times, because the first round consisted of two arguments: one from each side of the issue). I was not sorry to be knocked out early. The tournament won't affect my grade and, while the class was fun, public speaking is extremely stressful for me.
Incidentally, the issue I was arguing was whether the Sixth Amendment requires a criminal case to be retried if the defendant's court-appointed attorney falls asleep for a few minutes during the trial.

Must Get Well Or Else

I have a bad cold and two moot court events coming up this weekend. If my sinuses don't clear up soon, it's going to be "Elmer Fudd argues before the Supreme Court." I'm hoping Neti Pot (tm) will be my salvation.

Lawyering Takes a Lot of Paper

My partner and I turned in the final version of our Moot Court brief today. It came in at just over sixty pages (half of that was appendices). We were required to turn in eleven bound copies. If that sounds like a lot, dig this: if you file a brief with the Supreme Court of the United States, you're required to submit forty copies. It's all in Supreme Court Rule 25.

Cite Checking

I finally got a cite-checking assignment from my law review overlords. It's a 25-page chunk of a student-written paper. I spent about six hours of my Saturday on it, and I figure I have another three hours of work to do.

I've been dreading this assignment all semester, but it has turned out to be rather soothing. It's work that I'm good at, and in any case it's not for a grade. That adds up to a sense of certainty and accomplishment that is hard to come by in law school.

A Head Start on the Bar Exam

Yesterday I took the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (MPRE), the one segment of the bar exam that prospective lawyers are allowed to take before graduation. It's a two-hour, sixty-question multiple choice exam on ethics. Since I (perhaps foolishly) scheduled the exam in the middle of the semester, I didn't prepare much. I scored 75% on a practice exam, so I figured I could get by on what I remembered from the ethics class I took last summer. I wound up doing a lot of guessing, but I think I'll pass. The worst thing that can happen is that I'll have to pay $60 to take the test again. For the curious, here's an example of a question I got wrong on the practice test:

An attorney represents the wife in a marriage dissolution proceeding that involves bitterly contested issues of property division and child custody. The husband is represented by another lawyer. After one day of trial, the husband, through his lawyer, made a settlement offer. Because of the husband’s intense dislike for the wife’s attorney, the proposed settlement requires that the attorney agree not to represent the wife in any subsequent proceeding, brought by either party, to modify or enforce the provisions of the decree. The wife wants to accept the offer, and her attorney believes that the settlement offer made by the husband is better than any award the wife would get if the case went to judgment. Is it proper for the wife’s attorney to agree that she will not represent the wife in any subsequent proceeding?

A. Yes, because the restriction on the attorney is limited to subsequent proceedings in the same matter.

B. Yes, if the attorney believes that it is in the wife’s best interests to accept the proposed settlement.

C. No, because the proposed settlement would restrict the attorney’s right to represent the wife in the future.

D. No, unless the attorney believes that the wife’s interests can be adequately protected by another lawyer in the future.

Burnout

Three semesters of law school have taught me that week ten burnout arrives like clockwork. The last month of the semester is never fun because my head is already in exam week. My reading discipline is worse than ever. Let's get this thing over with!