when front page news intersects with the UCLA L. Rev.

Most people have heard, through the Web grapevine, about the Ferrari Enzo crash on PCH a while back, and the ensuing intrigue surrounding the former Gizmondo executive, blah blah blah. Which all makes for good, if somewhat frivolous, news.

Now that he's facing criminal charges for gun possession (and probably more), he went out and hired a criminal defense firm. (Smart move on his part; unfortunately I don't believe that you can achieve criminal justice without adequate legal representation on both sides in the U.S.) Now for the twist: I was in the L. Rev. office a couple days back, and posted on the noticeboard was a wanted ad from that criminal defense firm; they're looking to hire a UCLA L. Rev. member with an interest in criminal law, especially international criminal law, as a law clerk for the case.

I had to chuckle. The L. Rev. isn't quite making the frontpage news, but mayhaps one of us will get to be a part of a developing news story...

Oh, and on another note, congratulations to the new staff of the UCLA L. Rev. You've all worked hard over Spring Break, and it's paid off. (I would say that you "deserve" to be on L. Rev., but desert is a pretty loaded term, and arguably none of us truly deserve anything. I certainly never thought that I deserved to be on L. Rev.)

To those who tried but didn't get on... thanks for trying. While you might be disappointed, I hope that you found it somewhat rewarding or interesting (okay, if you're a law dork like me, you probably did, and if you're not, you probably didn't). The fact is that the write-on grading process is highly subjective, and every year, lots of people who are eminently qualified to be on L. Rev., don't make it. With a few exceptions (myself not included), the members of any law review are not smarter or better than their non-law review peers.

Besides, in six or seven months, when the new staff is whining about their citechecks, authors who don't know how to footnote or cite properly, and impending comment doom, you can cast your eyes heav'nward and utter a silent prayer of thanks that you didn't get on L. Rev. ;)

Rescue/ I Need You

I need You Jesus,
To come to my rescue;
Where else can I go?
There's no other name
By which I am saved
Capture me with grace
I will follow You.

Jared Anderson
© 2003 Vertical Worship Songs/ASCAP

Word. Especially for Laura & Rachel right now.

"Good grief!"

Reading this article, Manly Men Answer Call of the Wild, in the NY Times elicited this particularly Brownian (as in Charlie Brown. What, you think I'm some kind of scientist or something?) expression from me.

The gist of it is that men pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars to enjoy simulated survival adventures. The particular one featured in the article simulates an evasion exercise for military personnel in hostile territory. The irony is that anyone who ever served would not consider putting on camo paint, lugging 60-80 lbs. of gear, eating MREs and going without a shower for a week, to be enjoyable. The Army teaches you many things; one of them is that it's good to enjoy the comforts of life, like hot food and personal hygiene.

It also seems a little pretentious; I can imagine someone coming back to his law firm/bank/mundane office from one of these trips, and bragging about how he spent five days "living like a soldier in Iraq." I think I'd be sorely tempted to introduce someone like that to Mr. Fist, or (more likely) to several well-aimed barbs of withering scorn.

And of course, sociologically, I wonder what this says. Entertainment culture, where even otherwise life-and-death experiences become a consumable good? Emasculation of the male in modern-day society, forcing them to resort to games to regain some sense of being a man?

This post, of course, reflects a well-known fact about me: I'm procrastinating from studying again.

When research pays off...

Law students by now are familiar with the ongoing epic battle between LexisNexis and Westlaw for our legal research loyalty. Sometimes it's annoying to receive an incessant stream of flyers in your mailbox urging you to attend the latest snazzy training session. But sometimes, all those Lexis points and Westlaw points pay off.

Case in point? My Lexis points bought me my 8-piece Cuisinart cookware set, and my Westlaw points just got me this:

for only 3000 points. For those of you unschooled in the science of barbequeology (that includes yours truly), that's a Brinkmann® Smoke N' Grill Smoker. On the Brinkmann website, it goes for $60 + s/h (about $10). Most reward points programs out there allocate a point value of $0.01 for every point. Which means that my new smoker/grill was a real steal at an estimated point value of $0.023... even more so if you think that all I had to do to earn it was to do legal research that had to be done anyway.

Curiously enough though, the Westlaw catalog seems to assign point values based on popularity - an iPod is 20,400 points (street price of $270, which means an estimated point value of $0.013). At that point value ratio, my smoker/grill would be about 6000 points.

And if you couldn't already tell, finals are around the corner: that's the only reason I'd spend half an hour browsing the Westlaw catalog and blogging about a new smoker/grill. As a reward for reading my inane drivel, I'll throw a party at my place when the new acquisition gets here. BYOM. :)

love story

From today's L.A. Times comes this article about a mixed marriage in the days after the 1906 San Francisco quake, at a time when California outlawed them (at least if the groom was Chinese) and the U.S. itself saw Chinese immigrants as a threat to public order.

It's a sweet story, set against the harsh realities of a bigoted society. But it's also sobering to think that if I had been born just decades earlier, I would have been a second-class citizen, if a citizen at all. Oh, and that I would probably have been beaten or killed for dating someone who was Caucasian. Talk about putting a damper on romance...

how unappealing

NY Times article on a splinter fundamentalist church that protests at the funerals of American service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

#1: How absolutely distasteful, purely as a matter of civility and good manners.
#2: "Judge not, lest ye be judged" and "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone" spring to mind.
#3: Never having taken Con Law II (First Amendment), I don't know what the test for First Amendment freedom of expression is, but somehow I don't doubt that what they're doing can be outlawed.

Off-topic #4: I really should be sleeping, and not surfing the Internet at 2:30 in the morning.

being admitted to an institution

Obviously, the title of this post is a reference to law school (it's just like any other institution out there that you might be admitted to).

So, it's law school admission/acceptance/rejection/waitlisting time again. Admissions departments at law schools all over the nation frantically crunch the numbers to project if they'll have enough students satisfying whatever student diversity/money/LSAT profile they have in mind, constantly balancing the competing constraints of admitting too many people (sort of like overbooking a flight) versus admitting too few (consequently flying with a half-full plane). In my year, UCLA was admitting people up till the first day of Orientation (so don't lose heart!).

Best things I've heard so far? A friend apparently encountered a prospective 1L who had been admitted to Columbia and UCLA, and was asking which school was better for meeting a nice Orthodox Jewish boy. After ascertaining that she was serious, it was recommended that she go to Columbia.

0Ls who ask if law school is really as bad as we say it is. My answer usually is, "It depends on your baseline." If they breezed through undergrad at a liberal arts college (like me), then quite possibly yes. If they slogged their way through a PhD, then probably not (coming back for a JD after a PhD only establishes that they really did suffer permanent head damage, and no further damage would be possible).

And finally, "Is law school corporate?" This is usually a concern of public interest minded 0Ls. The response to which is an unequivocal "YES." Law firms have money. Law schools want money. Law schools want alumni who have money. Large corporate law firms pay associates well. QED.

Of course, corporate is not necessarily bad. After all, our PILP friends will need to hit up law firms for money and other forms of support once we're all out there practicing. More to the point, I think assimilation into the corporate culture in law school can be resisted, just as Jean-Luc Picard and his crew valiantly resisted the Borg time and time again. (Yes, I am a law school dork.)

Passover

The story behind Passover, as I understand it, is that way back in the back beyond of history, God liberated the Israelites (the predecessors/ancestors of today's Jews) from slavery in Egypt. To make the Egyptians release them, God killed every first-born male child in Egypt. But the Israelites were commanded to slaughter a lamb for dinner, and to sprinkle the lamb's blood over their doorposts. This would be a sign for the Angel of Death to passover (get it?) their household and spare their oldest son.

I'm no rabbi, so I won't expound on what Passover means for Jews today (although at the seders I've been to, no one ever slaughtered a lamb and sprinkled blood). But Jesus was crucified during Passover, the timing meant to identify Him as our Passover lamb, whose blood is shed that we might be spared. So in a very real sense, Christians celebrate Passover too, that we have passed over from death to life, darkness to light, captivity to freedom. Now we are free.

I read Luke's account of Jesus' last hours today. Jesus still puzzles me, mystifies me, yet draws and attracts me. Who is this man who is unlike any other? Apart from Oasis, I don't know anyone with a big enough ego to say, "heaven and earth will fade, but my words will never pass away." Not even the Trump.

What also struck me, was the extent to which politics influenced the law back then as well (hey, this is after all, supposed to be some kind of legal blog). Pontius Pilate couldn't find any crime with which to charge Jesus (or more appropriately, the evidence was insufficient even to survive summary judgment), so he wished to release Him. But the political pressure of the people eventually caused Pilate to rescind his preliminary 12(b)(6) ruling, and he sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion.

Ultimately though, in reading through the Passion story, what really strikes me is that it is so much bigger than life; it's larger, bigger, heavier, than our mundane everyday existences. Strands of death, life, anger, hate, fear, redemption, forgiveness, pain, and yes, even... joy. Irony of ironies, that the only death I would celebrate, would be the death of the one I love most.

Write-on Part II

So a year ago, I laboriously slaved over my Law Review Write-On comment, painstakingly checking commas, periods, italicization, and signal order, hoping that all my hard work would pay off and I'd be invited to join the prestigious UCLA Law Review. At the time, a friend remarked that the reward for all my hard work was only going to be more hard work. I ignored him and slaved on. When I was done, I consoled myself by saying that nothing else that L. Rev. threw at me could possibly compare to the Write-On.

I suppose I was right, but arguably there is one thing worse than doing the Write-On: grading the Write-On. 1Ls mistakenly think that all we do is read through their submissions, subjectively decide which ones give us warmer fuzzies, and separate them into two piles: the In's and the Out's. Quite wrong. Given that the Write-On topic is usually something most L. Rev. members are encountering for the first time, we actually have to read through the Write-On packet to get the proverbial lay of the land. This allows us to spot faulty legal analysis and questionable interpretation of the law, and figure out who's pulling a fast one and who's actually going to pull their weight.

Then comes the reading through 10-12 various papers, checking to make sure there are only 28 lines per page, 70 characters per line, etc., etc. And then deciding which ones are better and which ones are not. If that weren't enough, then there's the grading of the production test problems. I didn't know this at the start, but apparently I'm responsible for grading all the answers for the question that I set. Which means I need to grade 140+ mistake-riddled (and hopefully corrected) production test questions.

The one good thing, is that I have more than 6 days to do it. This is, however, outweighed by numerous other bad things, such as my not having started any outlining or significant studying for finals, and various other commitments that are yet to be definitively completed. Let's just say it's going to be an intense ride. :)

what a crazy world we live in

I think that's a song by Rufus Wainwright. Sorry for the absences and infrequent posts, but I'm currently grading L. Rev. Write-on submissions (and internally debating the merits of the staircase vs. dartboard methodologies of grading), trying to finish papers, trying to start outlining, working out where I'll be next fall, and dealing with life in general. In a typical "grass is always greener" nostalgia, I saw a bunch of little kids on the bus today and half-wished I was a little tyke again (of course, I don't really remember what that was like, but man, those kids I saw today sure seemed carefree).

I'm also contemplating several major changes to the blog, but we'll have to see. I might just put that off till the week before finals.

In the meantime, in honor of this being Holy Week leading up to Easter Sunday, I'll leave you with a question. Who is Jesus? Can anyone satisfactorily explain the man and the mystery? The N.Y. Times has an Op-Ed contribution today by Garry Wills, who argues that we can't ask "what would Jesus do," because Jesus did and said some pretty crazy and socially unacceptable things. He argues that Jesus transcended morality, and to try to co-opt Jesus to our human agenda (and I use that in the plural, because I think the singular of "agenda" really should be "agendum." Any "philatinists" out there want to set me straight?) is to engage in an absurd task: Jesus simply cannot be understood that way.

I don't fully understand Jesus. I am equal parts knowledge and mystery, doubt and certainty, faith and disbelief. All I know is that Jesus challenges me, indeed, challenges all of us. We either choose to face the challenge and struggle with the question he posed ("But you, who do you say I am?") or we discount or dismiss him, and try to get on with our lives, absent the turmoil that he brings.

Peace & Justice: International Human Rights Law in Sudan

The N.Y. Times Magazine has an excellent article about the International Criminal Court and the investigation of crimes against humanity in Sudan, written by Elizabeth Rubin.

She does a good job of explaining the ICC and the strange political game that goes on in Sudan, where the Sudanese government tries to stay one step ahead of the ICC by "investigating" the crimes against humanity in Sudan, a political shell game meant to keep Darfur and all its atrocities as far out of the spotlight as possible.

She also recounts the United States' hypocritical and, in fact, sinful opposition to the ICC. (I call it sinful because I do believe that opposing the pursuit of justice is a sin, and the U.S. is certainly not doing very much to encourage the development of international laws to protect humanity, by demanding that U.S. citizens be above any such laws.)

But more than any of that, she seems to want to focus on a deeper question, which is: What is the relation between peace and justice? Can you have peace without justice? Reconciliation without reckoning? This was a subject of debate at a recent conference held at Pepperdine University. No justice, no peace? Or no justice without peace?

A lot of it centers around your definition of justice, and your definition of peace. Justice for who? And peace for who? I'm not here to offer answers, because I still grapple with these questions as well. But I do think that they are very closely linked in Christian Scripture. The Hebrew prophets speak of God as a God of justice, and remind us that those who follow God must seek justice. They also remind us that God is a God of peace, and His greatest gift to us, is peace (the Hebrew word is shalom, which connotes a lot more than just the absence of conflict).

Perhaps in the West, we've become used to the idea of justice as involving prosecution, adversarial litigation, judgment, punishment. After coming to power at the end of apartheid, Mandela established the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, as a way to establish peace. Those who submitted themselves to the Commission's jurisdiction and confessed their guilt before their victims and their families, were granted immunity from prosecution. Those who did not, remained subject to criminal prosecution for their crimes committed during apartheid. Not everyone was a fan, of course. Some believe that confession is not expungement and it does not compensate the victims for what was done.

I don't have any answers. I believe in justice, and I believe in peace. Above belief in these principles or concepts, I believe in Jesus, and in faith I believe that somehow He has the answers. Naive, simplistic, perhaps. But no one has shown me a better hope for humanity (saying that there is no hope, or that humanly-wrought inhumanity will always exist, may be construed as realism, but I wonder if it isn't just fatalism in a softer guise).