i don't get it

One of my friends got me a "Lawyers" Calendar 2005. It's essentially a lawyer joke or some other piece of legal humor per day. But today's one really baffles me.

"A woman sat down next to a lawyer at a bar and said to him, 'I'll do absolutely anything you want for $50.'

The lawyer got out the $50 instantly and said, 'Paint my house!'"

Anyone get that? Please post a brief memo explaining the punchline, using footnotes where appropriate. Bluebook citation format not required. We have one very befuddled law student awaiting enlightenment.

law review revue

So today was the training session for Law Review. It was okay. Not the most fun I've ever had in my life but certainly not the worse time in my life either. Law Review does seem to have a habit of asking you to complete assignments at the most undesirable times. First was writing on during Spring Break. Now, right after finals, we're about to get our first assignment, and it's due in 3 weeks. Plus a good number of people who were fortunate to make it onto Law Review will have to do several assignments over the summer as well (presumably myself included).

Cool things about Law Review:

1. I now know the secret entrance to the library.
2. I now have 24 hour access to the library.
3. I now have access to the Law Review Office whenever I want.
4. They gave us a mug, white-out, a red pen, and post-its (original 3M ones even).

Yes, I am aware that all of those perks are granted for the precise purpose of helping us do cite-checking. I'm a dork, get used to it. I also found out today, after they went through one of the sample citechecks from the Write-On, that I certainly did not make it onto Law Review because of my excellent cite-checking skills. I'm also pretty curious to know how people who love cite-checking or love the Bluebook, get to be that way. Do they start out with an innate enthusiasm for checking minute details, or is it somehow conditioned into them, or do their minds just snap one day, and they begin loving it? I don't know which it is, but I'm almost a little afraid to find out.

On the plus side, everyone seemed refreshingly normal (apart from having a love for the Bluebook, but as I said, perhaps that's something you grow into).

lawyering skillz, yo

So the Lawyering Skills final was a little tougher than I thought. I don't think I could really have prepared any harder for it, though. Or rather, I don't think I would have gained very much from preparing any harder. I definitely reached the point of zero marginal utility sometime on Sunday night (probably after a very nice lasagna dinner courtesy of a classmate's friends - thanks DB!).

But for what seemed like the second time (but was really the first), I was done with 1L year. (Aside: Anyone ever wondered why it's called 1L? What does the "L" stand for? Law? Level? Why not "1Y," which would make more sense for a "first-year"? Granted it doesn't quite roll off the tongue as smoothly, but still. 1L? Another one of those arcane legal traditions I suppose.)

Anyway. Now onto the summer. :-)

isn't it nice when they don't color within the lines?

The U.S. Supreme Court today decided Granholm v. Heald, a case argued last term about the right of states to pass laws regulating the shipment of out-of-state alcohol, chiefly wine. The 5-4 ruling came out in favor of wineries, holding that states could not pass laws that subjected out-of-state wineries to unequal treatment vis-a-vis in-state wineries.

The holding itself is interesting for a number of reasons, but it's really interesting how the Court came out. The majority was formed by Kennedy, Scalia, Souter, Breyer, and Ginsburg. Which means Thomas, Stevens, Rehnquist and O'Connor were the dissent. Strange bedfellows, no?

I'll try and do a lame 1.5L (since I'm not quite a 2L yet) analysis of the decision later, but for now I need to get to my last final of the year - Lawyering Skills. Inference chains, baby, it's all about the inference chains. ;-)

funniest legal blog of the day award

Now that I've got gobs of free time on my hand, what better way to spend it, than to aimlessly surf the World Wide Web in search of a treasure trove of legal gaiety? I don't know if I found it, but Barely Legal is a pretty funny blog. I think I'm bookmarking it.

aww yeah

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the first year of law school. Technically, there is one more final on Monday for Lawyering Skills, and yes, I probably will study for it, but that's what Sunday's for. Until then, celebration!

And just in case you were wondering, Property wasn't as bad as I had dreaded. Either that or I totally failed to spot a lot of issues (I wouldn't be surprised about that either - I scored 190 on a practice exam when the class median was something like 250 or 290).

Ah well. Hey. It's over. I'm done. And happy, very happy.

*BEAMS*

I am so proud of myself - I finally figured out rudimentary HTML coding. Please look over in the sidebar to your right, down there, yes, there... see it? "Other Procrastination Tools"? That's me! I did that!!! *BEAMS PROUDLY*

Alright alright, so your seven-year-old nephew could do that and he can't even spell "procrastination." This is, however, a big step for me, okay? (Even if all I did was cut-and-paste the code from the other stuff in the sidebar.) And considering that I'm about to experience the 1L equivalent of Abu Ghraib tomorrow (aka Property final), I'll take all the ego-boosting I can get at this stage.

Summer's almost here... I can smell it. Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby's head.

blog recommendation

On A Mercy Ship.

it's good stuff.

limits: time or word?

That's a great hypothetical question I never really had to think about until today's Con Law final. Between having more time pressure or having a word limit, which would you choose? Until today, I thought I would have said a word limit. Until today's 6 hour, 4 question, 6000 word limit Con Law final. Wait, gentle reader, I hear you say, "6000 words? I could summarize War and Peace in less than that! With detailed character development to boot!" Ah perhaps indeed you might, but could you explain:

1. how a law requiring the licensing of hair stylists might be unconstitutional as applied to an African American hair braider;
2. how a federal law barring adulterous spouses from testifying at an evidentiary hearing on their persistently vegetative spouse's wishes regarding their preferences on removal of feeding tubes is unconstitutional;
3. how a law requiring a railroad wishing to exercise eminent domain for railway purposes to grant utilities free easements upon such condemned land is unconstitutional;
4. how Lawrence v. Texas might be analyzed under various modes of constitutional interpretation, and pick a specific mode to defend;

in less than 6000 words? Okay, alright so I know some of my classmates did. Well, good for them. I, however, had certain difficulties, resulting in my having to cut almost 1000 words and spend 45 minutes going over my answers changing "Supreme Court" to "SC" and trying to be as brief as possible without doing too much violence to the English language.

Sigh. Good thing is, it's one less final to worry about. Now I just need to worry about Property. My notes for that class alone has more pages than my outlines for Contracts and Con Law combined. However, nothing is going to be done tonight. Time to find a good DVD...

6 hours of constituting

So my Con Law exam is 6 hours long. You have no idea how happy I am about that. It means that a significant bit of time pressure is gone, which I think is good: how often in practice will you only have 3.5 hours to analyze a client's case and write a comprehensive brief (please someone say almost never)?

It also explains how I can justify posting to this blog while taking a sample Con Law final. I'd offer you real-time updates from the exam itself on Monday, but I think Examsoft shuts down access to any other programs while it's running.

more con law cynicism

In a Slate article opining on the current case before the Supreme Court regarding law schools' right to exclude the military from their on-campus recruitment events, I found this little nugget:

"More likely the Supremes will apply Dale to strike down Solomon. Can the court uphold the Solomon Amendment and hang on to Dale? Not without abandoning principled decision-making altogether. I'm confident the nation's highest court would never stoop to that. But I'm told my starry-eyed idealism comes at a price."

Given my current cynicism with con law, I think you can see why I found that amusing. Although to be fair, my cynicism isn't quite as deep as I may make it seem. I do believe that there is principled decision-making in the Supreme Court, it's just that those principles often bend in the face of ideological winds.

con law gripe

I really have enjoyed my Con Law class this past semester, I really have. For one, I had a piddling understanding of the U.S. Constitution before the class began. So I've really learnt a lot. Two, we've had some interesting discussions, debates, and uh, moments in class. Three, our professor is a pretty neat guy. No I don't mean fastidious, but just smart, funny, and entertaining (I think the administration knows the after-lunch classes are some of the hardest to sustain attention, which is why we've had Z and W).

But for as much as I liked the class, I am not terribly motivated about the exam. I know the doctrines, I know the standards of review, I could bone up more on the cases, but I know enough for now. What irks me is the artificiality of constitutional law. Another professor (unnamed for his protection) once said about Con Law: "Tell me the judges and I'll tell you the outcome." What he was saying was that whenever it's something controversial, they're going to follow their political inclinations. But we're not explicitly taught THAT analysis in class. Which makes everything that we are taught sort of like smoke and mirrors. We learn how they attempt to support their decisions and holdings, but they're all riddled with holes. Scalia's dissents might be the most doctrinally consistent of them all, but even then they're not watertight.

Okay, so perhaps no body of law is watertight. But let's just say that in a flotilla of leaky boats, Con Law needs an emergency flotation device to stay above the water. Sigh. Someone pass the bucket...

for Love or Money?

Several days ago, the LA Times ran an interesting story about a lawyer who represents Christian recording artists. He's suing Verity Records, a label under Sony BMG, for "tortuous interference with business relations, trade libel, defamation, and violating unfair trade practices laws. The suit alleges that the defendants deprived gospel writers and performers of effective legal representation in an effort to negotiate lower compensation rates with the artists and monopolize control over the market." (taken from a press release on his firm's website.)

Walker, the lawyer, is essentially good at negotiating royalty deals for his clients. Verity doesn't like that, and has allegedly told his clients that if they want to sign onto their label, or appear on their compilation WOW series (very popular - I own several), they have to find a new lawyer. The legalities of the case aside, I think the case exposes a struggle that I think all musicians, but especially Christian ones, face.

I think all musicians are faced with the money vs. music dilemma. Do I do it because I love the music, or do I do it because I want to make some money? To a certain extent, the dilemma is moot because most musicians don't make a whole lotta dough out of what they do: most musicians are in it because they love the music. Of course, I doubt many of them would walk away from the money if it were offered to them. But I think Christian musicians (and possibly musicians of other faiths as well, I can only speak of what I know) are faced with an extra dimension: ministry.

If they see their music as God's calling on their life, and they pursue it as a way of reaching people for God and doing God's work, then it's not just a choice between music and money: it becomes a choice between doing God's work and money. And c'mon, we all know what the standard Sunday School answer to that question's supposed to be. That's why in the LA Times article, several artists bluntly state that they decided to find a new lawyer in order to continue being able to reach their audiences, even if it meant getting paid less.

Personally, I think that's just exploitation by the record labels. I really don't see what's wrong with having a lawyer who drives a hard bargain working for you. If it's all God's work, then why should the artists get squeezed while the record labels increase their profit margin? It'd be a different game if somehow the Christian music business had a smaller margin of profit, but last I checked, Christian CDs sold for pretty much the same prices as regular ones, and I don't think it costs a cent more to make a Christian CD (okay, hands up if you really think the record label hires a priest to come in and bless each CD as it rolls off the production line). Seems to me that if it all really is ministry, the record labels should be willing to take even less profit, or give more of it away (try telling Sony BMG that).

Christian musicians: Money is a blessing (c'mon you should know. What was so fun about pawning your axe for rent money?). Stop letting record labels guilt trip you and forcing you into a false dichotomy of choice. There's nothing wrong with demanding what you deserve for your work - a worker is, after all, worth his wages.

Mr. Walker: I wish you the very best of litigious success. And by the way, your press release used "tortuous" wrong. I think you meant "tortious," because "tortuous" means "full of twists, turns, or bends; twisted, winding, crooked, sinuous." Hmm, although "crooked" might be quite apt in this case.

following up on downloading

While taking a break after a medium difficulty level Contracts exam (okay considering that it was about nine hours after the exam, I was procrastinating), I started reading a classmate's blog. Well, back entries in a classmate's blog, to be precise.

But I found this, which is basically what I had said in my last post about file sharing/downloading being free market regulation of the record industry. Too bad he said it about a year and a half before I did, thus rendering me unable to claim any credit for originality. I do recommend his blogs though, especially the one on law school. He's a good writer, funny as heck (can I say the other h-word on a "Christian" blog?), and quite quite smart. Makes for a good combination.