A Glimpse of the Good Life

One thing I learned this fall is that lawyers kind of deserve their reputation as overcompensated societal parasites. I have lived in Little Rock for twelve years, but I had to enroll in law school to get a glimpse of the insides of the chichi Little Rock Club, the Little Rock Country Club, and the Arkansas Governor's Mansion. I visited all three last semester, and each had more old-money elegance than the last. I don't know what I'll do when I lose my privileged student status and am expected to pay to attend all these luncheons and galas. Now that I've seen the good life, can I go back to being a regular schmoe?

Decedents' Estates Exam

The lid is on my fall semester. The grand finale--the Decedents' Estates exam--was a horrible nightmare, but that doesn't mean much. I've taken three of this professor's exams, and they've all been horrible nightmares. It would be folly for me to try to predict my grade.

I will say this: I was very unnerved by the fact that I had to use a calculator to answer one of the questions. Lawyers, law students, and law professors hate math as a rule, so exam questions are usually formulated for minimum arithmetic. The fact that my answer did not come out in round, easy numbers is strong evidence that I did something wrong. I figure I lost some points there.

Federal Income Tax Exam

The Federal Income Tax exam is over and done with. It was comprehensive to be sure, but I think I had at least a plausible answer for every question. I won't flunk. Federal Income Tax was a bit like Business Associations for me: based on the course description, I assumed the worst, but the material turned out to be very interesting. I even registered for Tax Policy in the spring.

Also, it was a dirty trick for the administration to schedule an exam during the biggest basketball game of UALR's season. Shame!

Studying Without Outlines

This is the first semester that I haven't bothered to write outlines for any of my classes. I'm putting in lots of study time for finals, but I kind of miss the feeling of accomplishment and preparedness that comes from having one crisp document that lists all the things I learned in a semester. I guess I'm relying more than usual on luck this time around. It's a symptom of senioritis.

Last Day of Classes

The semester ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. Both of my professors went easy on us with lecture and review on the last day of class.

This fall was a lot like last fall for me, in that I put in a lot of time on extracurricular activities and gave my classwork short shrift. Last fall, the result was terrible grades. Now we'll see if I learned anything from that experience. My first exam is in ten days.

Finally on Someone's Payroll

From time to time, the student body will get a mass email looking for a student to take on a short-term research project for a professor or an attorney. As luck would have it, one of those emails coincided with my last day at the state supreme court. I sent in a resume and got the job, so for the last week I have been poking around the library on behalf of a local law firm, trying to see if its client has a legitimate claim.

This is the first experience I have had working for a real client. More importantly, it is the first hard evidence I have that people in this town sometimes do in fact get paid for doing legal work. Very heartening.

Passing Moot Judgment

Last week Bowen hosted an undergraduate moot court tournament. It was a big tournament, and I was one of several dozen students drafted to serve as judges. I did this last year, too, and felt poorly qualified to criticize anyone's forensic skills. This year, with more moot court experience under my belt, I felt like an old pro. This weekend I'll be judging again in an intramural moot court tournament.

The more time I spend around moot court competitions, the less I think they resemble real appellate advocacy, but it's still a fun academic exercise--much more fun from the judges' side of the bench than the advocates' side. Hopefully the powers that be will keep using me for these tournaments after I graduate. Hopefully I will have an actual job as an actual lawyer to justify my participation in these tournaments after I graduate.

Too Much "Free" Time

Finishing my moot court competition had an unexpected negative consequence: it freed up a lot of time for study. Preparing for classes is just the worst, and I miss having an excuse to skip or skim my daily reading. I'd like to say that I've lost my enthusiasm for classwork because I've outgrown it and moved on to more challenging stuff, but I think I've mostly just gotten tired and lazy.

Externship Extinguished

Last week I logged my one hundredth hour at the state supreme court. That means that I have fulfilled my externship obligation. I am still going into the office every day as a volunteer (I'll probably keep that up for a couple of weeks), but it's nice to not have to worry about time sheets and activity journals.

Knowing that my time at the court was drawing to a close, I looked back at all the legal memoranda I've written this semester and totted up just how much work I did. In about 110 hours spread over 8 weeks, I wrote 7 memos for a total of just over 10,000 words. The law review note I wrote last year was around 10,000 words, so if you assume a 40-hour work week it seems safe to say that your average appellate court clerk writes the equivalent of a law review note every three weeks. Phew! I really loved this job, but I can see how that kind of grind might get old after a while.

Back From D.C.

And just like that, my moot court experience is over. I had a great time and I never, ever want to do it again. My relationship with public speaking is complicated. I think I'm pretty good at it, and I've done a lot of it, but I always have terrible nerves beforehand and terrible self-doubt afterward.

As for the competition, my teammates and I finished in the middle of the pack (we made the cut from twenty-five teams to sixteen, then got knocked out in the cut from sixteen teams to eight). In a sense, that was the best case scenario. It was a two-day competition, with the first two rounds on day one. Since we were knocked out in the second round, we had all of day two to explore Washington. It was an excellent consolation prize.

Moot Court Week at Last

If I haven't posted to this blog in the last week, it is because nothing has changed for me in the last week. Day in, day out, it's practice for moot court competition. The First Amendment is melting my brain.
My partners and our faculty adviser have done a good job of wrangling practice judges for us. In the last two weeks we have had our arguments savaged by the dean, two professors, and three alums. I think we're ready. Ready or not, it will all be over in five days.

Practice Makes Panicked

My moot court partners and I have started up a rigorous practice schedule. We have about a week and a half until competition time, and I'm not sure that's long enough. I need to prepare two fifteen-minute arguments (one on each side of the issue), and I figure we've scheduled enough practice time for me to rehearse each argument eight or ten times.
The competition is going to be more of a test of my extemporaneous speaking skills than I would prefer.

Code Blindness

In chess, there is a phenomenon one grandmaster waggishly dubbed amaurosis scacchistica: "chess blindness." It is a player's unaccountable inability to see the obvious, such as a rook bearing down on one's queen.
This week I witnessed an example of what you might call "code blindness" in the form of approximately this exchange about the Internal Revenue Code:

professor: "When does section 307 of the code apply?"
student: "When a transaction is governed by section 305(a)."
professor: "Does section 305(a) govern the transaction on the board?"
student: "No."
professor: "Does section 307 apply to the transaction on the board?"
student: (long pause) "Yes."

This colloquy was repeated a couple of times, with lengthy explanations in between, before the professor got the answer he was looking for. It may have been the most awkward moment I have experienced in law school since my first semester.

Attending Oral Arguments

Yesterday I lived some lawyers' dream: I stepped out of a courtroom and confronted a wall of reporters and cameras. They weren't there to see me. The latest of the West Memphis Three's many appeals was argued before the Arkansas Supreme Court yesterday, and my externship got me a seat in the gallery. The attorneys for both sides brought their A game, so it was interesting stuff (the webcast is archived here), but the borderline party atmosphere outside the courtroom felt a little ghoulish. The press blitz lasted about half the day, but security did a good job of insulating court employees. I never had to come within a hundred feet of a reporter.

Blogger Went a-Courtin'

I finally got around to visiting a trial-in-progress this week.

It was the first time I had so much as set foot in the spanking new Richard Sheppard Arnold Federal Courthouse. It's a thing of beauty, inside and out (once you get past the airport-style security, complete with shoe removal). I have a professor who is fond of saying that courtrooms should be designed to invoke a sense of, "My God, something important is going to happen here." Mission accomplished.

Unfortunately, nothing particularly important seemed to be happening there when I visited. I sat in on about ninety minutes of testimony from a state department of education official about monitoring and compliance procedures. It was not exactly the stuff of Law and Order, but I was struck by how closely the real thing resembles the mock trials I've participated in at school. I'll have to go back when something with a little drama is being litigated.

Progress on the Moot Court Front

I did not meet my self-imposed deadline for sending my moot court brief to my partners. I sat down at the computer last night with the idea of emailing something out by the end of the night come hell or high water, but when I finally finished my draft I decided to sleep on it before I hit "send." Good thing. What feels like an epiphany in the wee hours often looks more like a hallucination after a good night's sleep. After a substantial rewrite, I sent my draft on its merry way (in the end, it was about twenty-five hundred words, not the three thousand I predicted).

Demon Procrastination

Well, my recent promise of moot court updates has gone unfulfilled. The due date for the brief is coming on fast, and I've barely started writing. On Tuesday I promised a teammate that I would get her a draft of my section of the brief before the weekend. At this point, that more or less means writing a three-thousand-word paper in a day. This is going to be a very rough draft.

Bombs Away

I just sent out my first few applications for real, honest-to-goodness, full-time lawyering jobs. The application process makes me sick to my stomach. The economy being what it is, there are scores of applicants for every job, so I know that every employer's first order of business will be to scan my application materials for a reason--any reason--to put them in the "reject" pile. No amount of proofreading feels like enough.

Schedule Conflicts

About half of my credits this semester are coming not from classes but from "co-curricular" activities: externship, moot court, law review. You would think that would make my schedule very flexible, but I am starting to see that it is going to cause some problems.
This week, for example, the judge I extern for wanted to take the office to lunch. I wasn't about to pass that up, so I missed Decedents' Estates. That would be fine if I weren't already scheduled to miss Decedents' Estates twice in October when I travel for my moot court competition. The DE professor will summarily drop anyone who misses more than four classes, so I only have one more absence to spare. My calendar is going to be pretty hairy before this semester is over.

It's Lonely at the Top

During my 1L year, everyone in the full-time program spent hours upon hours together. I think we all--even people like me, who didn't make a lot of close friends--felt bonded to the group. As 2Ls we began to scatter a bit as electives became available to us, but I still saw the same faces all the time.
Now I'm suddenly surrounded by strangers. The line between full-time and part-time students is completely blurred, my classes are full of 2Ls whom I've never met, and everyone in the 3L class seems to have more obligations off campus than on. In a sense, it feels like law school is already over. 1L and 2L were the war; 3L is just a mop-up operation.

The Externship Begins

Working at the state supreme court means passing through these doors to get to the office every morning. The resulting sense of self-importance is pretty intense. Here is what I learned in my first week:

1. Real attorneys spend a lot less time proofreading than students do. Every document I've looked at has more than its share of typos and grammatical errors.
2. Being asked to decide which side is right is much harder than merely being told to argue for one side or the other.

So far, I love the work. All indications are that it's going to be a great semester.

Bookmarked

One of my favorite things about being a student is, no fooling, having a use for all the bookmarks I have around the house. Think about it: cool, free bookmarks are everywhere, but who besides a student has more than one or two books going at a time? This semester I'm enjoying an outdoors theme, using the "Arkansas Sportfish" and "North American Hunting Club" bookmarks pictured here in my Fed Tax and Decedents' Estates books, respectively.

Gearing Up for Moot Court

Looking back at my old posts, I see that I haven't mentioned moot court in months. Get ready for a flurry of posts on the topic, because it's about to start occupying a lot of my time. My two partners and I have registered for the Wechsler First Amendment Moot Court Competition at American University in Washington, D.C. (greetings to any of my competitors who arrive here after Googling that phrase). We have the month of September to write our brief, then the first three weeks of October to practice for oral arguments. That's a tight schedule--I had three months to do the same stuff last fall--but I'm sure we're up to the task.

Unexpected Swag

Yesterday a spiral-bound calendar/planner appeared in my campus mailbox. It's a classy bit of swag, but the timing is strange. School has been in session for a week. Surely anyone who needs a planner already has one. I'm just going to assume that the 1Ls got these at orientation and the administration is only now getting around to distributing the leftovers.

I'm Gonna Flunk the Bar Exam

Decedents' estates is already serving as a terrifying reminder of how little I remember about property law, a subject tested heavily on the bar exam. Interesting stuff, though.

Decedents' Estates

My semester of Decedents' Estates began inauspiciously. The professor asked me a couple of questions I didn't know the answer to, leaving the impression that I was not prepared for class when in fact I had prepared quite thoroughly. The worst case scenario, really. I'll be spending a few weeks working my way back from that one.

3L Officially Begins

Today was the first day of classes, but I only had to dip a toe into school life. I had one hour of class today and won't be back at school until Monday.
One hour isn't much to judge by, but so far my Federal Income Taxation professor seems like the best kind of professorial cliche: rumpled suit, oversize glasses, waving arms, quirky vocal delivery. He was a very entertaining lecturer (he has obviously had plenty of practice--he was reading from a stack of notes so yellowed and brittle that they might have predated the income tax itself). Here is (approximately) the line from his introductory lecture that I thought was pithiest: "Everyone supports tax reform. Saying you support tax reform is like saying you support justice. It's just a question of one's definition."

Externship Orientation

Yesterday I endured a grueling six-hour orientation for my upcoming externship. The advice from a bona fide judicial clerk was terrific. The explanation of the rules and procedures of the externship program was necessary. The two-hour ethics lesson was a real drag, given that ninety percent of the attendees had already completed a semester-long ethics course. I suppose the professor needs to have proof that we knew better if one of us commits some egregious breach of ethics.
My externship doesn't start for another week or so, but I can tell already that the workload is no joke. I'm really going to earn these two credit hours.

Orientation Week

There have been several social events in the last few days--a minor league ballgame, a barbecue, etc.--to introduce the incoming 1Ls to each other and warm everyone up for the new school year. Being the gung-ho, all-in law student that I am, I attended three. It was nice to see some familiar faces.
I particularly enjoyed chatting with a few 1Ls about their expectations and worries. That first year is so hyped and so full of pomp and circumstance that nostalgia sets in almost contemporaneously. The new students are probably already sick of us 2Ls and 3Ls hanging around them, trying to soak up their innocence and enthusiasm.

Summer Grades

Summer grades are out. Now that my GPA has the inertia of sixty-plus credit hours holding it in place, grade day isn't the event it used to be. Anyway, the infinitesimal move in my GPA was in the upward direction, so hurray for that.

Associate Editing

I have my first assignment as an "associate editor" of the Law Review, and not a minute too soon. There have been no school-related tests or deadlines in two weeks, and the lack of stress has been causing me anxiety.
I was a little taken aback when I learned that I am going to be (among other things) evaluating other students' cite checks. This repeats a pattern I have already experienced a couple of times in law school: one day you're learning a new skill, the next day you're presented as an expert. It's hard not to feel like a bit of a fraud when I'm judging someone else's performance at something I've done all of four or five times.

Clearing the Bookshelves

I sold a half-dozen textbooks this week--five to classmates and one on eBay. Like any textbooks, law books date quickly, so I was relieved to be able to unload a few before new editions made them obsolete. The student email listserv is positively alive with textbook trafficking at this time of year. When I posted my books for sale, I got my first response in four minutes.

I still have about ten books that I've been holding on to, waiting for a professor to assign them. Now that I've had some success with eBay, I may give up on the local market and see if the Internet wants to buy them.

If you're wondering why I don't save my books to review for the bar exam, no one does that, at least no one I know. Thousand-page textbooks are just unsuited to the kind of cramming that precedes the bar exam. There are purpose-built books for that, and I'll shop for them when the time comes.

What I Probably Won't Be Doing Next Summer

It's time to stop worrying about getting good grades and start worrying about getting a job. Application season for judicial clerkships starts in September. I am very enthusiastic about the idea of clerking for a judge, but those jobs don't come easily. Clerking for a federal judge is right out--I'll apply, but those are prestigious jobs that attract out-of-state candidates with much better academic credentials than I have. That leaves state judges. According to the information distributed by the career services office, exactly one state judge in central Arkansas is planning to hire a clerk next summer.
The upshot is that I plan to spend a goodly chunk of my August putting together application materials for jobs I will never get. I am trying to gird myself for ten months of similar windmill-tilting. Looking for work in a bad economy requires a healthy appetite for rejection.

Criminal Procedure Post Trial Exam

The Crim Pro exam was an odd duck. Hypothetical situations are the bread and butter of law school tests, but this one didn't go that route. I daresay it was the only test I have taken in the last two years on which all of the essay questions were essentially, "Remember this thing we studied in class? Write down what you know about it." There were also a great many multiple choice questions. In sum, the test seemed to favor whoever memorized the most stuff. I'll stand my memory up against anybody's, so I figure I did fine.

Advanced Torts and Speed-Writing

The Advanced Torts exam was a bruiser. It consisted of a four-page story with a cast of (by my count) sixteen characters, culminating in a mandate to discuss all causes of action, defenses, and remedies available to everyone involved. I don't think it was possible to write an A answer in the time allotted, so it's anyone's guess what the grades will look like.

I say it wasn't possible to cover everything in the three hours allotted, yet a few students turned in their tests and walked out with twenty minutes or more still on the clock. There are a few of these early birds at every exam, and it unnerves me every time. Do these people type 100 WPM? Are they regurgitating all-purpose essays that they memorized for the occasion? Do they just think faster than the rest of us? Don't they check their work? Most importantly, do they get good grades for those instant essays? The possibility that anyone is that much better at law school than I am is simply too horrible to contemplate.

Almost Ready for Finals

Over the last few days I've managed to boil a semester's worth of notes down to seven legal size sheets of paper. If I can learn everything you see here in the next thirty-six hours, exams should be a piece of cake.

Farewell, My Ink-Filled Companion

O red ink cartridge, you gave me three semesters of loyal service, but now you are as empty as an unenforceable promise. I will think of you every time my attention is drawn to an underlined section of a case brief. You came in a multicolor two-pack, so I guess next year's notes will be in green.

For the New Law Student

Since a link to this blog appeared on the school website, I know I've been getting some traffic from new and prospective students. Those readers have probably been disappointed to find that I write mostly to keep my friends and family up to date on what I'm doing, not to explain the ins and outs of law school.
I hate to disappoint, so this post is for you, incoming 1L. I have taken all the long-form, informative posts I never wrote and put them in one big pdf document for you to download and read at your leisure: Unsolicited Advice for New Bowen Students. If people find it useful, I figure I'll write an updated version next summer. Comments are welcome.

Summer Ends in Mid-July

I just wrapped up the last night of Criminal Procedure class. Advanced Torts will meet twice next week, then it's on to exams. Looking at the state of my notes, I think I handled the brutal pace of summer session much better this year than I did last year (which is good, because my grades last summer were weak). Even so, I'll need to spend a good chunk of this weekend on school work if I want to go into dead week with confidence. Guess I won't have time to mow the lawn. Pity.

Summer Session is Nearly Over

I'm trying to use the holiday weekend to belatedly start organizing my notes for summer exams. Have we really covered this much material in six weeks? This accelerated summer schedule is murder. I'm not sure I can get my act together in the three weeks between now and test time.

Stress and Relief

Today I was called on in the first thirty minutes of a three-hour class, which is about as good as it gets. After answering some questions about Echols v. State passably well (yes, that Echols: this was Criminal Procedure, and his case features pretty much every procedural move there is), I had two and a half hours to rest easy in the knowledge that the professor was done with me.
You would think that after two years I wouldn't mind talking in class, but the fear of public failure is evergreen.

Rules, Rules, Rules

When you sign up for a class with the word "procedure" in its name, you condemn yourself to reading a lot of dry rules. So while my Advanced Torts reading is all about sex (pornographers get sued for libel a lot, go figure), my Criminal Procedure Post Trial reading features a lot of sentencing charts and arithmetic. The Arkansas Rules of Appellate Procedure are about to wear me out.

Spring Grades

I'll never get used to that long wait between exams and grades. As it turned out, I managed to repair a lot of the damage done by my disastrous fall semester. My B-minus in International Criminal Law goes a long way toward making up for any grades I've received in the past that I thought were unfairly low. A D would not have surprised me. My grades went up from there, so I have no complaints.
Now that I've turned things around, my poor academic showing last fall is sort of comforting to me. At least now I know that all the long hours I put in really are necessary to keep my grades up.

One Reason People Pay $100K for Law School

The internet is rife with law student blogs, and I follow several. Today I ran across an interesting contrast between going to school in Little Rock and going to school in a place like New York:
At Bowen, as many as twenty law firms visit campus every semester to interview potential clerks. Ambitious students put themselves through five or six interviews in a two week period. Compare that to NYU, where the school sets up interviews by asking students to rank the top fifty law firms they'd like to work for. Wow.

Rubbing Elbows With My Future Colleagues

Today I was back in Hot Springs (the spa city!) for another day of the Arkansas Bar Association annual meeting. I spent most of the afternoon in a seminar on legal writing. I was heartened to learn that the advice judges give to lawyers on the subject is practically identical to the advice professors give to law students.

I also learned that when lawyers are invited to a reception on the veranda of a Victorian hotel in the middle of June, those who own a seersucker suit leap at the opportunity.

A New Era of Swag Dawns

I made my first trip to the Arkansas Bar Association's annual meeting today. Good food, good swag, good seminars. No networking to speak of. Sooner or later, I'm going to have to learn to mingle. I'll go back for more tomorrow.

The Illusion of Extra Credit

My Criminal Procedure professor has given the class the opportunity to write a short paper for extra credit. But in an environment where grades are curved--that is, where the students are graded against each other, not the test--can there be such a thing as extra credit? If my neighbor does the assignment and I do not, surely she won't just drive her grade up, she'll drive mine down if she passes me in the class ranking. I have to do the assignment too, just to keep up. For this reason, anything labeled "extra credit" smacks of graded work in disguise.

Advanced Torts

I just can't get enough of Advanced Torts. So far it's all about libel and slander, which is just as interesting as it sounds (next week we're going to study Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, could you ask for more?). Add the lively classroom dynamic, and it's like a twice-weekly party.

Crim Pro Could Get Political

The Criminal Procedure Post-Trial professor is a bit of a crusader. She's a criminal defense attorney who teaches on the side, and she's easily side-tracked into holding forth about the sorry state of defendants' rights in this country. No one has challenged her views yet, but I'll be surprised if we get through the summer without some law-and-order conservative picking a fight with her.

My Enthusiastic Classmates

Advanced Torts must be the chattiest class I've ever been a part of. I think the students have done more talking than the professor. Part of it is the professor's style--there are some twenty students in the class, and the professor calls on pretty much every student at least once in the course of a two-hour lecture--but mostly, I think a handful of the school's most gregarious students have just coincidentally converged on one class. Mind you, I'm not accusing my classmates of being what are pejoratively called gunners (students who volunteer in class just to flaunt their own intellect). These are just that unusual breed of student that isn't too intimidated to ask the professor for clarification.
So far, I like it. The constant back-and-forth makes the time trot, if not fly, and the professor's classroom management skills are such that we don't get bogged down in one subject for too long. It's going to be a nice summer.

Okay, one or two of them are what I'd call gunners, but I'm not here to judge.

Limited Study Space

I was back at the library today for the first time since I had to give up my private study carrel. You see, there aren't enough carrels to go around, so they turn over every semester. Now that I'm finished with my law review note, I no longer get priority when carrels are assigned. I'm going to miss having a place to store all my books and bags.

Gearing Up For Another Round

My summer books came in the mail today, just in time. Classes start Monday. I'll be taking Criminal Procedure Post-Trial and Advanced Torts (I did not get into the over-booked class I had my eye on). It is more or less an accident that I am taking these two classes--the summer schedule doesn't offer many choices--but they both look interesting to me. I think they can hold my focus for eight weeks, notwithstanding my new jaded 3L attitude.

Involuntary Summer Vacation

Today I got a polite "no" from the law firm I interviewed with last week. I'm starting to believe the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and too many blogs to count when they say I'll never find a job in this business. But there's no point in second-guessing myself now. I'll be in my seat with pen in hand when summer classes start next week.

Business Associations Exam

The Business Associations exam was a week ago, but I've been hanging on to this post because there was a late make-up exam date and I didn't want to inadvertently tip my classmates to the exam's contents. Here's the low-down:

My grade on the Business Associations final will make or break my semester. It was the only four credit-hour class on my schedule, making it 25% of this semester's grades. I went into the exam in pretty bad shape. I was under the weather all weekend, so I lost a lot of valuable study time to NyQuil-induced naps. Fortunately, the professor went much easier on us than she might have. The bulk of the exam was short-answer questions that anyone who paid attention in class should have been able to answer.

The bad news with an exam like this is that the questions that were easy for me were probably easy for everyone. The professor can't give everyone As (that's just not the law school way), so the difference between an A and a C will probably come down to marginal differences in our responses to the essay questions. Did I remember only five factors of what was supposed to be a six-factor test? Did I forget to mention that Delaware courts apply some variation on the general rule? That kind of stuff could kill me.

One unusual aspect of this test that is worth mentioning: it was not timed. The exam started at 9:00 AM and ended when the last person left. We've all had the awful experience of remembering some key fact (that sixth factor, say) on the drive home from an exam, so it is hard to walk away from an untimed test. I stayed for four hours, and there were at least a dozen people still at work when I left.

One More Chance at a Summer Job

A few days ago, the career services department sent an email alert about a late-breaking summer clerkship opportunity. I interviewed for the job this afternoon. Previously, almost all of my clerkship interviews have been on campus. It was nice to sit down in an airy law office instead of the claustrophobic, institutional on-campus interview room for a change. But I'm being uncharitable. I'm sure I found the on-campus interview room perfectly pleasant a year ago. I've just come to associate it with failure. By Monday I should know if I give better interviews off campus.

International Criminal Law Exam

I just wrapped up my International Criminal Law exam, and it was God-awful. I didn't take this class seriously all semester, and I paid dearly for it. It wasn't that the questions were terribly hard. I just didn't know the material very well, so my answers were short and shallow.
I was one of the few students who regularly volunteered in this class, so I'll just have to hope the professor gives me a bump for class participation. A word about that: grading of exams is anonymous--the professor will just get a stack of exams with random numbers on them. However, when professors turn in their grades they can, if they choose, include a list of students whose grades are to be raised or lowered for attendance and class participation.

One Exam Left

This time tomorrow, it will all be over. It is awfully hard to work myself up to study for this last exam. International Criminal Law was my least favorite class this semester, and it was only two credit-hours. It's also an open-book exam, making it tempting to think that I can go in underprepared and look stuff up on the spot (never a good strategy).

So far, I've gone through my notes and typed up three pages of bullet points covering the highlights of the course. It's well short of the fourteen-page outline I brought into my Sales exam, but it's better than nothing.

Planning for Fall

I finally have 100% confirmation that I have an externship waiting for me in the fall. I'll be clerking at the Arkansas Supreme Court. If you don't know what that entails, it's like this: when a case comes to an appeals court, it comes with a boatload of paper. There's the record of the trial proceedings, and then there are briefs (that are anything but brief) from attorneys on both sides. Most appellate judges have a couple of law clerks who read all that stuff, double-check any cases or statutes the attorneys cite to, and make a recommendation to the judge. Law clerks are the oompa-loompas in America's law factories.
Research and writing projects have been my favorite part of law school, so I could not write a better job description for myself. This is work I would do for free--which I will be, because it doesn't pay.

I also took my Business Associations final today. I wrote a longish post about it, but I'm going to wait a few days to put it online because some of my classmates haven't taken the test yet.

Sales Exam

Today it was Sales Transactions. This was an open book exam. I've only experienced a couple of these, and I don't care for them. With all my books and notes in front of me, it's easy to get fastidious and waste time looking up niggling details when I should be painting in broad strokes and getting more material onto the page. I'm a pretty good memorizer, so closed book exams play more to my strengths.

I walked out of the Sales exam feeling pretty much the same way I felt after the Advanced Civ Pro exam: all the questions made sense to me, and I wrote a lot, but that doesn't necessarily mean my answers were good.

Even Cheap Law Schools Cost Plenty

To remain a Law Review member in good standing, I have to spend one or two semesters working for the editorial board. It doesn't pay, but I do get course credit.

So today I paid the bill for my summer classes, and they charged me for my Law Review credit! That is, it's costing me just as much to work for a student-run organization as it does to receive classroom instruction. Man, that is low.

One Exam Down

Advanced Civil Procedure was a pretty good way to start this semester's exams. That was the class with only four students in it, so we all studied hard all semester and had no reason to fear the final. Certainly the professor felt no need to pull his punches. The exam covered about two thirds of the course in one sprawling essay question (my response was just over 1100 words) and mopped up the rest of the course material in three shorter essays. I don't know if I gave the professor what he wanted, but I will say this: I had something to say about every question. I didn't write any wild guesses or filler. That's about the best I can hope for.
I should be preparing for my next exam, but I'm wiped out. I'll just have to put in an extra long day tomorrow.

Well-Fueled Study Sessions

I don't know if the student government is burning off its unused budget for the year or what, but the student lounge has been positively bathed in free food this weekend. If the idea was to encourage students to study on campus, it's working on me. I rarely come to school on Saturdays, but here I am.

Getting Ready For Exams

Around half the professors offer optional review sessions between the last day of class and the final exam. In my experience, the professor will just show up and answer any questions students have. Today's review for International Criminal Law was an exception: The professor give a two-hour synopsis of the entire course. It was grueling, but very helpful. I'm glad I went.

Ending My Career as a Full-Time Student

Can tomorrow be the last day of classes? It snuck up on me this semester.

This exam season is high stakes for me. For the last two years, I've been taking every opportunity to pick up extra credit hours so that I can have a light schedule as a 3L. That means that this semester will be my last chance to effect a big swing in my GPA (I took sixteen graded hours this semester. Next year I'll never have more than eight.). Goodness knows I'm going into cram week with a better handle on my coursework than I had last semester, but I still have a lot of work to do.

Mock Trial

We finally had the mock trial that Lawyering Skills has been leading up to all semester. It was surely the most fun I'll ever have taking a final exam. I bullied witnesses, I drew diagrams, I pointed accusingly, I marched up and down in front of the jury box. My performance might have been a little over the top, but my classmates were entertained. Later this week I'll serve as a witness for some other students' trial.
After two years of law school, I still have yet to go to court and watch a real trial. I should make that a summer project.

The Law is a Moving Target

I don't remember this ever happening in undergrad: Today in Advanced Civil Procedure, the professor started off class by saying something like, "I know you had an assignment for today on the syllabus, but two days ago the Supreme Court delivered an opinion that changed a lot of what we learned in chapter six, so we're going to revisit that material instead." Indeed, Perdue v. Kenny pretty much put four or five pages of the textbook into the shredder.

The experience goes to prove something we're told by our professors all the time: we're not really in law school to learn the law. The law changes, so we're always going to have to look that up no matter how well we think we know it. What we're supposed to be learning is the methods of legal research and analysis. Then again, if we don't pick up a little law along the way, we won't get very far on the bar exam. Back to the books.

Registration Woes

Web registration for summer and fall classes was available to rising 3Ls as of 7:15 this morning. I wanted a spot in the well-regarded and rather exclusive Judicial Clerkship Practicum class, so I was at my computer at 7:14. That wasn't good enough. At least twelve of my classmates type faster than I do, because the class was full by the time I clicked "submit".

I attended a sort of interest meeting for the class at which the professor said in so many words that she would likely enlarge the class if there was sufficient demand, so I sent her a quick email. We'll see what happens.

Joining the School Bureaucracy

The student government has appointed me to sit on the Faculty Publications Committee (three or four of the faculty committees include some token student representatives). I don't know enough about the Faculty Publications Committee to say whether this means that I have earned the respect of my peers or that I was just the first guy dumb enough to take the job. I think my only duties will be to attend a few meetings and report back to the student government, which should be easy enough. At minimum, I'll get to rub elbows with a few professors, and that can only be a good thing.

I don't have much of a handle on the relationship we students are expected to have with our professors. In some contexts (class) they can be very intimidating--deliberately intimidating, one often suspects. In other contexts, they're perfectly affable. Then, of course, individual professors vary in their approachability. It's all a terrible strain on my underdeveloped social skills.

I Like to Win

I really like to win. At Scrabble, at chess, and especially at school. So when an assignment comes along that smacks a little of competition--like the mock trial we're having in Lawyering Skills next week--I struggle to check my competitive streak so my classmates don't think I'm crazy (well, so they can't tell I'm crazy). It's all I can do to keep myself from working on this project sixteen hours a day.

Work at Last (sort of)

I have been (tentatively) placed in an externship in the fall. I had an interview today with my prospective placement. This is one interview that should be hard to screw up, since I am the only candidate for the job. Even so, I won't call it a sure thing until I get the final word.

Legal Ducks

The Bowen school is across the street from a large park, complete with ponds and fountains. As such, it is not uncommon for one to be menaced by ducks on one's way into the building.

Teaming Up

This week has been all about finding partners for projects. In the next two weeks I'm going to need a partner for the mock trial that serves as the Lawyering Skills final and two partners for a moot court competition in the fall.
The whole process sends me back to the many hours of my childhood spent on playgrounds not getting picked for this or that team. Fortunately, I'm better at lawyering than I ever was at kickball, so at least these days my classmates aren't actively avoiding having me on their teams.

Yet Another Interview

I subjected myself to another on-campus job interview yesterday--my only interview so far this spring, but my tenth or so since I started school. This one went pretty quickly, and my history with these on-campus interviews is not good, so I don't expect anything to come of it. I have two more applications out there, but my best guess is that I'm looking at a second summer of un- or underemployment.

The good news is, this spring is the last time I'll be looking for clerk work. The next time I send out resumes, I'll be asking for a permanent job.

Peer Reviewed and Peer Approved

I just got the email notification that my law review paper passed muster. Thank goodness. I like legal writing well enough, but if I had been asked to rewrite this paper I might have stuck a pencil through my hand.

The upshot is, I can now call myself a law review "member," as opposed to an "apprentice." That makes it sound as if I've joined the Freemasons or something. Decisions about which papers will be published are probably still weeks away.

Always Read the Directions

Last week being spring break, I had plenty of time to work on this week's Lawyering Skills assignment: a closing argument. It was a good one, too. Unfortunately, when I double checked the syllabus today I realized that the assignment was a closing argument not for the case we've been working on all semester, but for a new case that was distributed just before spring break. I guess a little extra practice never hurt anyone. I still have two days to do the right assignment.

The Gloves are Off

Last year, most of the cases we studied had pretty basic facts: dog bites neighbor, neighbor sues. That sort of thing. Some of the cases in my upper level classes, by contrast, are laughably complicated. The Business Associations and Class Actions textbooks in particular are full of stock fraud cases and the most esoteric contract disputes. Unfortunately, the complex cases are probably more representative of what I'll see in practice.

Spring Break

It's spring break this week, so I've had time to organize the blog a bit and switch to more spring-like colors. This time last year, I had a big paper to write (the same one my blogging schoolmate is writing now). This year, spring break is just a chance to take a breather and maybe get a head start on prepping for final exams. So far, I've done some cleaning around the house, but no school work at all. In the next two days I need to get it into gear so I can be on top of things when classes resume.

Final Draft

The final draft of my law review paper is due tomorrow. I turned mine in a couple of days ago, as did most of the classmates I've talked to. We were required to turn in so many outlines, research materials, and drafts over the last eight months (the schedule has nine deadlines on it) that there was little chance of anyone being behind at this stage. As I was running off the four paper copies I was required to turn in, I spotted a typo. I chalked it up to wabi-sabi and let it go. The editors need something to do.
Now, we wait. The editorial staff will grade each paper and either pass it or demand a rewrite. If my paper passes, I get the all-important advanced writing credit required for graduation and my paper gets thrown on the slush pile to be considered for publication next year.

Judges With Unfortunate Names

For tomorrow's International Criminal Law class, I have been assigned to read an opinion by Judge Sayeman Bula-Bula of the Congo. The Congo has a Judge Bula-Bula? Really? Really?

Incidentally, International Criminal Law is, as I hoped, much better than the Intro to International Law material that preceded it. Intro to International Law was basically a philosophy course about the nature of law and statehood. Zzzz . . . In International Criminal Law, by contrast, we are learning about what happens in the real world when people are prosecuted for war crimes or apprehended in international waters. Great stuff!

The Oxford Comma

I am a grammar snob. I am one of those people who takes photos of signs with misplaced apostrophes. And at some point during my formative years, I learned that serial commas were not just unnecessary but plain wrong. Then, some thirty years later, I read this in my Aspen Handbook for Legal Writers:

Although the final comma in a series (often called the Oxford comma or the serial comma) is optional in most writing, in legal writing it is required.

It is easy to see why if you consider this sentence from a hypothetical will, also from the Aspen Handbook:

I leave all my property in equal shares to Jim, Helen, Tim and Eva.

So, do Tim and Eva get a quarter share apiece, or do they split a one-third share? If there were a third comma, there would be no question. Now, after all those years of turning up my nose at serial commas, I experience a flash of cognitive dissonance every time I see a comma-separated series with or without the controversial extra comma.

Application Essays

If there is a way to write an application essay without coming off as insincere and self-aggrandizing, I haven't figured it out. Between admission, scholarships, and internships, I have had to write eight or ten such essays in the last two years. Some were successful, some were not, but they were all just awful. The worst of it is, the essays that are the most honest (in my case, these are the essays about public service, because my goal has always been to work for the state) tend to look the most sycophantic precisely because they are written with such enthusiasm. It doesn't help that I have a weakness for florid rhetoric. I hope it isn't too much in evidence in my blog entries, which I try to make as frank as possible.

Anyway, I just submitted an application essay for the Fall externship program. If I am accepted, it will not be because of my essay.

Stories Without Endings

Most people won't resort to litigation unless they're in a truly intractable conflict, so most court cases have compelling stories behind them. Unfortunately, those cases are included in legal textbooks not to tell the stories, but to illustrate some distinct point of law that came up during the litigation. As a result, one often starts reading a case, gets to know the characters and learns about their tragic circumstances, only to reach the end of the case and find that the moral of the story is something like, "the plaintiff may recover damages if a jury determines that the parties intended their contract to extend the liability imposed by statute." The end. There's almost never a footnote to tell you who won in the end, no closure, no catharsis. When I get into practice, I hope I'll at least know whether my clients win or lose.

Working Weekend

I'm pretty good at confining my schoolwork to business hours, but once in a while a weekend like this one comes along: I have a cite check to do for the law review, an application to complete for externships in the fall, and I haven't started on next week's reading assignments. I'll probably spend a good chunk of the weekend in the law library. Never mind the fact that I still haven't done my federal income taxes. I'd better get on that, because I'm expecting the refund to finance summer classes.

Missing My Calendar

The paper calendar I used to carry around ended with 2009, and I have yet to replace it. For a few weeks it was no big deal, but now that we're in the meat of the semester I have a lot of appointments and deadlines to keep up with. Back at the beginning of my 1L year I tried using a web-based calendar for a while, but I found that it was much faster and easier to deal with good old fashioned pen and paper. Even so, before I buy a new calendar I may try to master the calendar function on my cell phone. Maybe it can marry the immediacy of paper with the flexibility of digital information. Let me make it clear that I pack a four-year-old clamshell phone that was designed for talking on, not a pocket-clogging smartphone of the type that most of my classmates carry.

While I'm on the subject, I'll offer this observation: classrooms are like movie theaters. No matter how many times you warn people to turn off their phones, someone's is going to ring at the worst possible time.

New Student Lounge

The renovations to the student lounge are finished, and only a couple of weeks behind schedule. It's too bad I don't have a "before" picture for comparison. The old lounge had a beige, characterless, public-school-cafeteria vibe. The new lounge looks like a Starbucks. The televisions are new. Time will tell whether they are an improvement.

Legal Stagecraft

In my lawyering skills workshop, we're starting to concentrate on the formalities of the trial ("Your honor, I move that the photo marked defense exhibit fifteen be admitted into evidence," and the like). I'm surprised by how hard it is to consistently get all the procedural minutiae right, even in a controlled classroom setting. As laid out by the professor, showing a piece of evidence to the jury is a seven step process.
In practice, of course, the courtroom formalities are mostly empty show because the attorneys know each other's cases and aren't going to be surprised by anything that happens at trial. Even so, our professor warned us to learn to say all the magic procedural words smoothly and with confidence. If you come off as a bungler, he said, the jury won't take you seriously. Good advice, I'm sure.

Rank Envy

The dean recently posted a blog entry about law school rankings and the frustration they engender. My school is comfortably in the bottom half of law schools nationally and probably always will be, but it certainly doesn't look that way from the inside. The student/teacher ratio is low, the professors are all very expert, the classroom technology is top notch, and the students--at least the ones who aren't just punching the clock--are as sharp a group of people as I've ever been around.
For a guy like me, who has no plans to enter the national job market, it would be downright foolish to pay twice the money to go to a top twenty school, even if I could get into one. I'm not pulling that ratio out of the air, either. Every single school in the U.S. News top twenty costs at least twice what I'm paying (or, more accurately, what my wife is paying). More than half of them cost four times as much. I hope that my position on the moot court travel team gives me a chance to visit one or two top tier schools next year so I can see what all that money buys.

At the Feet of the Master

On Friday, only two students showed up for Advanced Civil Procedure (as I reported earlier, there are only four students on the roster). The three of us went ahead with class. As one of my classmates pointed out a week or two ago, this class is probably dollar-for-dollar the best educational bargain any of us will ever get. Not only do we get all the personal attention from the professor we could desire, we're studying the rules of civil procedure under the person who drafted many of them. This professor--he also taught my first year civ pro class--has been on the Arkansas rules committee for more than twenty years.

Micromanagement

A typical assignment in my International Law syllabus goes like this: read pages 652-56, 667-70, 680-86, 690-92, 727-30, 732-35; then go back and read pages 721-23 and 692-99. Honestly, if you're that particular about what your students read, it's time to edit your own textbook. Skipping around the book like this really disrupts a body's rhythm.

Staying Home

Today is the third day in the last three weeks that the campus has been closed due to inclement weather. I think I've maintained pretty good discipline: there has been a certain amount of goofing off and snowman construction, but I am a day or two ahead of the syllabus in the reading for most of my classes.

Tax Time

We're getting into tax issues in my Business Associations class. Reading about the arms race between tax accountants and the IRS leaves one with a cynical view of corporate America. Perhaps I should say an extra cynical view--I think it's a rare person who has an ingenuous view of corporate America.

In general, Business Associations has been a much better class than I expected. The two-hour classroom sessions really drag, but the textbook is the most interesting reading I have this semester. The material on taxes actually has me looking forward to Federal Taxation, which I will probably take some time next year.

Law Review Milestone

The second draft of my law review paper is back from the editor. There are only a few minor changes, so this project is almost behind me. I've been lucky. I think some of my classmates picked such hot topics that they're having to do major rewrites as the law evolves. From here on out, my law review duties will consist mostly of light editing on other people's work.

Legalese Again

Sometimes you have to wonder if judges go back and read some of the stuff they write. Here's a federal judge reconciling the various subsections of a statute in Wisconsin Knife Works v. National Metal Crafters:

In any event, we are not suggesting that "waiver" means different things in (4) and (5); it means the same thing; but the effect of an attempted modification as a waiver under (4) depends in part on (2), which (4) (but not 5) qualifies.

Really? This is supposed to clarify things for me?

Unmet Expectations

Back when I scheduled my classes for this semester, I said that I was most looking forward to International Law. How quickly things change. Now I dread the sight of my International Law textbook. So far, the course is more philosophy than law. After all, can there even be such a thing as international law if there is no international legislature to pass it? No international executive to enforce it? If a sovereign nation recognizes a law higher than its own, can it still call itself sovereign? These may sound like fascinating questions to you, but they've been boring me to death for three weeks. I'd rather read Mosley v. General Motors Corp. any day.

There is some hope yet: the first third of the course is a general introduction to international law. The last two thirds is devoted to international criminal law. That has to be juicier, right?

Review

Now that I'm taking mostly electives, it's easy to see why we were all made to take the same classes last year. The tenets of contract, property, and tort law are pervasive in the upper-level courses. It looks like a lot of the next three semesters is going to be an ongoing review of the first two. I'll need it, since most of that stuff will reappear on the bar exam.

Grades

Fall grades have been posted. As I feared, mine were a fiasco: My GPA for the fall semester was a full point lower than my GPA last spring. I should do better this semester since I don't have so much paper-writing to do, but I've probably damned myself to a middling class rank for good.

Budget Cuts

Going to an inexpensive state university has its disadvantages. The state cut the university's budget this year, so there is a spending freeze in effect for the next several weeks. One by one, the restrooms are running out of soap, toilet paper, and paper towels. The student lounge is under renovation, so we've already been deprived of coffee. Pretty soon it's going to turn into Lord of the Flies around here, and we'll see how devoted to the rule of law we really are.

Struggling to Stay Awake

My Business Associations professor speaks in the same slow. . . contemplative . . . monotone . . . that comedians use to impersonate President Obama. Over the course of a two hour, Friday afternoon class the effect is quite hypnotic. Fortunately, the subject matter is more interesting than the name of the class suggests. Today we read a case in which Karl Rove sued a senatorial candidate who couldn't afford to pay his consulting fees. Word to the wise: if you're going to run for office, incorporate your election committee. Keeping things informal can have dire financial consequences.

Legalese

Sometimes lawyers earn their reputation for linguistic puffery. I just learned from a synopsis of the 1971 case of Gizzi v. Texaco that Texaco, an oil company, "in its advertising, urged reliance on men wearing such oil company's insignia." Do tell. For the young or culturally illiterate, the case is referring to the jingle in this commercial (about 35 seconds in).

Nowhere to Hide

There are four students in my Advanced Civil Procedure class. I think this is the first time I've been in a class (other than lab or workshop classes) of fewer than fifty. I guess I'll be showing up to that class very thoroughly prepared.

Watching For the Mailman

Every semester I get a little more confident about ordering used books online. This time I took care of books for four of my six classes that way. In the process, I bought from five different sellers (all through Amazon.com's used book marketplace). I haven't been burned yet, but I've never cut the timing this close, either. I'm expected to read material from a couple of these books before Tuesday, six days from now. Here's hoping expedited shipping comes through! I figure it's worth the risk: even after shipping costs, I'm saving more than $200 vs. the campus book store.

Worst Part of the Semester

It's time to buy textbooks. My schedule is loaded up with substantive law classes this semester, which means many, many pricey hardbacks. To make matters worse, the official book list has not yet been released (it's supposed to come out today). Classes start in one week, so any books I buy online at a discount might not be here for the first day of class. This is going to hurt.