Tuesday, June 29, 2010

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.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

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.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

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.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

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.

Friday, June 11, 2010

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.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

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.

Friday, June 4, 2010

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.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

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.