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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Celebrate Small Milestones

I just emailed a finished draft of my Moot Court brief to my writing partner. This thing has been a giant time suck for the last week and a half. It's nice to feel like I can finally devote some time to all my other reading and writing assignments.

It occurs to me that I haven't said anything about this Moot Court class, so here's a quick rundown: The school sends three-person teams around the country to compete with other law schools in written and oral argument. The farm system for those teams is an elective class in which we write an appellate brief and practice oral arguments before panels of mock judges (some of whom are real judges). All of the writing and arguing centers on one mock case and is done with a randomly assigned partner. I lucked out and was assigned to a partner whom I already know a little and whose skills I respect--not that there are any bad writers in a group of people who signed up for a class like this.

Break Time is Over

I naively thought that I would catch up on all my reading and writing assignments over spring break, with time to spare for a few movies or video games. Instead, I spent pretty much my entire break writing one paper, and it's still not quite finished. Maybe I slept in too much.

Spring Break!

Whoooo! I'm spending my entire spring break writing a paper, but that doesn't mean I'm not enjoying it. I don't think I can convey just how great it feels to sit and work on a single project for several days without the constant influx of reading assignments from other professors.

Sweet Relief

I turned in a paper yesterday - 30% of my grade in my writing class. With that monkey off my back, the reading load doesn't seem so bad. I should be able to get back on top of things by the time the next paper comes due at the end of November. We're starting to hear rumblings about the end-of-semester tests. There are test-taking seminars on offer and professors are starting to hand out sample questions.

RWA

Reason, Writing and Advocacy meets for an hour on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. It's one of two practical classes, which is to say we do written assignments throughout the semester. I like it. We meet in relatively small sections - there are seventeen students in mine - and get some kind of feedback from time to time. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but most of the classes - the "substantive" classes, they're called - have no grades throughout the semester. The final exam determines one's grade for the entire class. The periodic deadlines and grades in RWA are a welcome relief from all that uncertainty. Besides, my undergraduate degree is in history, so I write reasonably well and tend to get good grades.
The writing assignments are along these lines: we'll get a short description of a fictional client's situation and a list of court decisions that dealt with similar circumstances. Based on that information, we write up a paper that analyzes the applicable law and predicts the outcome for our client should the case go to trial. It's kind of fun.