Friday, February 26, 2010

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.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

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.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

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.

Monday, February 15, 2010

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.

Friday, February 12, 2010

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.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

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.

Friday, February 5, 2010

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.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

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.