hip cat

So the other day Professor Property, who is in his later years, and who spews off anachronisms like "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander", totally gave away how hip he is. He talked about South Park. Totally caught our half-sleeping class offguard. "Respect mah authoritah!" was the phrase he spoke.

He's one hip cat. It also made me realize that I'm woefully and sadly out of touch with pop culture, if a professor old enough to be my dad knows South Park and I don't. Sigh. 25 and already out of touch with the times.

legal writing

I'm really quite struck by how unartistic legal writing can be. Or at least the way we're taught to do it. Essentially it's a straight-jacket, establishing very limited confines within which your writing is acceptable and good (and hence likely to get a good grade), and outside of which your writing is unacceptable and not sufficiently legal (and hence likely to get a not-so-good grade).

Honestly it's quite depressing. It feels like I'm being told how to write an essay, one of those classic five-part, intro, argument, conclusion, etc. formulaic pieces. I think more than anything, I'm just frustrated by the rigid criteria they impose. Short sentences good, long sentences bad, etc. I like the argumentative nature of it, but I dislike being dictatorially told how to argue. Do judges in the real world really evaluate memorandums and briefs in such a crude way? Someone please say no...

On the bright side, I'm thinking of starting a literary publication of some sort in the law school. An annual affair, to give law students and faculty the chance to publish something non-legal and non-scholastic (you may, if you wish, translate that as "something fun." I express no opinion as to the veracity of that translation). I'm suffering for lack of artistic expression.

word of the day

"Meretricious."

You learn some pretty bizarre things in law school. Just when you thought you've heard it all... there's a case in contracts where a husband and wife agreed to only have coitus once a week. Later when they separated, the husband argued that he shouldn't have to pay her as much in support because of her egregious behavior during their marriage. What was her egregious behavior? She apparently wanted coitus thrice daily.

(The court, by the way, denied his argument and required him to pay alimony. They held that both parties to a marriage had a duty to sexually satisfy each other and that their agreement regarding the frequency of their sexual relations was an unenforceable contract.)

fresh air

The Christian Legal Society (CLS) meets every Wednesday here at the UCLA School of Law. While I was at our meeting yesterday, it struck me that it's like a breath of fresh air, something quite entirely different from the rest of law school.

A typical law school day involves going to class, taking copious notes, attempting to do all your readings, make outlines of notes, prepare for the next day's classes in case you're called on, doing research for your memos and other assignments, preparing resumes and arranging interviews, attending meetings about the write-on competition for Law Review, etc. It's pretty busy, and it definitely gets pretty stressful. It's easy to get bogged down by the workload and the pressure and just constantly be subject to "the grind."

But the CLS meetings are an almost surreal break from law school "reality." For an hour, you forget that you're competing with your classmates for grades. For an hour, what you sense from the people in the room is love, acceptance, empathy, support. We pray for those who are in mourning, for those who struggle with their past, for those who need some help or some hope. We give thanks for the blessings in our lives, the grace and mercy that is being shown to us. We share how our lives are, both inside and outside of law school. The things we struggle with, our plans, hopes, dreams. It's a time and place where you can let your guard down and open up, relax.

Personal relationships in law school can often be shallow and superficial - partly due to the intense time pressures and perhaps partly due to the mentality in law school, which while not utterly cutthroat, is still quite competitive. I don't feel that at CLS. I feel that people there really do rejoice with those who rejoice, and mourn with those who mourn, that there is community and fellowship when we meet. Things I don't always feel in law school.

Fresh air. Everything else can be a little stifling after a while. And then on Wednesdays, from 4:30 till 5:30, we surface for fresh air. Like deep-sea divers, we break out above the surface and realize that there is still a heaven, still a Sun (and a Son), still a bigger (and deeper, or higher?) picture, a greater story unfolding in our lives. And refreshed, we plunge beneath the surface again, ready to keep striving, to keep working, for love, truth, justice, and the glory of God.