The Shark

blawg quotables #1

[dennis]

Advice to 0Ls. The Divine Details:

Apply early or else you’ll be the only person in your class to be waitlisted at a peer school and it’ll be embarrassing when the inevitable “So why’d you chose x over y?” conversation comes up.

This brief is driving me crazy. A Woman in Law School:

I have a brief due in a week. I realize that I have way too much on my plate, but I can’t let my team or partner down now-just too late.

Potty Time (at work). Law School Indeed:

Personally, I’m not pee shy, but I certainly don’t revel in the fact that someone might be watching me do my business.

Guess who has Swine Flu. The Reasonably Prudent Law Student:

I still can’t believe I have swine flu. Who gets swine flu anymore? That’s, like, so three months ago.

Increments. New Law Mom:

I have no idea what I am doing, but I sure am getting it done. Piece by little tiny piece.

Trying to avoid a panic attack. The Moonshine Project:

Would somebody please explain to me why I thought it would be a good idea to attend a career-planning session at lunch today, and schedule an individual appointment for tomorrow when I have a week’s worth of reading to catch up on?

blind student sues for equal access to bar and MPRE.

[petra]

Stephanie Enyart doesn’t want to be a law clerk indefinitely.

Enyart, who is working at Disability Rights Advocates in Berkeley, is legally blind. Since graduating in spring 2009, she’s been trying to take her bar and professional responsibility exams. And trying. And trying.

Enyart attempted to take the March, August and November multistate professional responsibility exams and the July multistate bar exam. All four times, she was denied accommodations she asked for, she told me.

The next time the tests are offered in February and March next year, Enyart is not going to take the same chance at rejection. The UCLA Law grad is suing The National Conference of Bar Examiners for discrimination against blind and low vision law school graduates. She’s asking to be able to use the same screen reading and screen magnification software she’s been using to get through law school (and at work) on the tests.

“I got all my accommodation for the California section – everything I requested,” she said, but not for the national segment. “It’s important to get my accommodations so that I can get on with my life … It’s not like you can take these tests anytime.”

The suit was filed this morning in the Northern District. Disability Rights Advocates is co-counsel with two out-of-state law firms working alongside the National Federation of the Blind. For more information, please see the press release.

Petra is a Cal Law reporter.

true life: i'm a gunner?

[cynthia]

MTV and Cardozo are apparently in talks to produce a reality show based on life at the law school.

Above the Law says the school is gathering opinions from students via Twitter. So, what's the consensus?

So far only three replies, but they're all a resounding no:

@caseyvaughn cardozo on MTV? http://bit.ly/3l2aNQ . GOD NO, DON'T DO IT. a solid 50% of the class is brain dead. talk about PR nightmare. @cardozolaw

@joshuetree @cardozolaw absolute not! I am one of your students too...don't do this to me.

@soverykerry @cardozolaw no. also, my boyfriend is an alum, and he says no. (Ed. note: Thanks for polling the bf, soverykerry. Cardozo appreciates your thoroughness.) 

ATL, which seems to have more success with crowd-sourcing information than, well, anyone else (including Cardozo on Twitter), ran a poll on the issue. 50%+ of poll takers agreed that Cardozo should stay away from MTV. As an avid appreciator of the egomaniacal genius of Spencer Pratt on The Hills and believer in reality TV in general, I'm gonna have to go ahead and hope this show really does happen.

bad blogger, good law student

[julie anne]

I've been a bad blogger. There, I said it.

In addition to The Shark, I write - or am supposed to write - for my personal blog on a regular basis, but, like the hefty price tag of my student loans, I had put them out of my mind in favor of reading case books, briefing cases and writing my first Legal Research and Writing memo.

Turns out that what people say about the first year of law school being a major time suck really is true.

Where I've been a bad blogger, however, I've been a "good" law student - I've gone to every class and have read the material - and an OK everything else, i.e. girlfriend, daughter, martial arts student, regular gym goer, regular dish and clothing washer, etc.

And I've done so without a single "FML" Facebook status update.

I've heard some people say that they are able to handle their day-to-day activities without scheduling them. But I honestly think I would not have been able to get through these first months of law school, and keep my sanity and my relationships, without doing so.

I've been finding it helpful to schedule all the "events" I have coming up for the following week - both law school-related and personal - in a personal planner that breaks down the days by the hour. Depending on how much time is needed, I group events in blocks of anywhere from one -and-a-half to three hours.

In pen, I block out my law school classes, my gym schedule and my weekend karate class.

In pencil, I block out the reading that must be done so I can adjust the time accordingly if I need to spend more time on any given subject, and any errands or chores that must be done

You'll notice that I haven't mentioned blogging. And I've done that to, um, illustrate a point. If I don't write something in and just think about doing something, I never get to it.

For some reason, a to-do list seems more daunting when it's floating around in your head, than when it's fixed onto paper. As such, that floaty to-do list never gets done.

Rather than drive me crazy with what could be seen as micro managing my days, the schedule actually gives me some relief when I see that, yes, there is time to sleep, spend time with The Boyfriend, and indulge in a show or movie from Hulu or Netflix.

And, yes, write a blog post.

If you're a 1L, what are you doing to keep your sanity? If you are an older student, or have graduated from law school, what did you do?

school sponsored blawgs: i'm not buying it

[dennis]

California Western Law School is taking an interesting and possibly misguided approach to law school marketing: school sponsored student blawgs.

There are eight blawgers, and a brief skimming of the posts confirmed my suspicion that the posts are thinly veiled PR pieces for the school.

Most blawgers love their law schools, but what makes a blawg interesting are the posts about the writer, and not the posts about the school.

That is why a student blawg is not a good school-sponsored marketing tool. Our lives are filled with procrastination, balancing tests, dating, shockingly inappropriate classmates,  blunders, and plenty of f-this-shit moments. The non-school related stuff is why we read blawgs, and that is exactly what is lost when the law school sponsors a blog that won't stray too far from "oh look how great Bumble Law School is, tee hee." 

I think the only effective blawg-marketing route takes a lot more nerve than most law students and law schools have: the school should support its non-anonymous bloggers, but not exercise any influence over them. Only then will the recommendation of that blogger mean anything.

Easier said than done right?

For example, I am fully aware that some of my school's administrators and professors read my blawg. Heck, my dean of students has quoted my blog while looking right at me. (Just to see me sweat, I'm sure.)

My school is not hostile towards my blogging because the administrators realize that I love the school and I am not going to write anything crazy or malicious. (With the exception of my career counselor, who is convinced that prestigious law firms will burn my applications…)

Sure, I'm going to have those "F-THIS! OH MY GOD WHY IS IT SNOWING?!" moments, but that is what makes my blog more relatable than the beauty pageant "things are wonderful, always" blogs produced by admissions. School-sponsored student blogs are only perceived one way:

And hopefully a law school's applicants are smart enough not to believe company-sponsored testimonials.

Prospective students contact me early during the law school application period, and I answer questions via email and twitter up until the first day of class. This is effective for the school because I serve as a positive yet real testimonial.

Sure, a student having so much unchecked contact with applicants is risky, but the power of a real and visible testimonal is an invaluable recruiting tool that cannot be contrived, which is exactly what California Western is trying to do.

windows 7 available to students for $30

[julie anne]

Recently, my law school's Office of the Registrar sent out the passwords to download the latest version of test-taking software Examsoft.

That's all well and good except, as discussed before, I'm a Mac living in the PC world that is law school. (By the way, based on the students who use PCs and those who use Macs in my law school classes, I can affirm that those who use Macs are in fact hipper and more attractive than their peers who use PCs.)

I had put the whole Mac or PC thing at the back of my mind in favor of learning the intricacies of personal jurisdiction, but the email brought the issue back to the fore: Should I buy a separate laptop for test taking, or should I just go ahead and install Windows on my MacBook with BootCamp?

The $120 price tag of the new Windows 7 operating system had me leaning the way of just buying a netbook that runs Windows, however, a new promotion for students from Microsoft has me considering the other option.

For a limited time, Microsoft is offering Windows 7 for $30 for students with a university email account. 

Here's a bit from an Ars Technica article about the promo:

"'In the US, students can pre-order their copy of Windows 7 beginning September 17th and can download the OS beginning on October 22nd (general availability),' a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed with Ars. For US students, we checked and saw that they need to have a .edu e-mail address or be attending one of the 158 schools."

My school wasn't on the list, but I registered my school email address anyway and received an email several minutes later confirming that I was cleared for download.

You can pre-register at www.win741.com.

the nice side of law school: no one actually cares about what you don't know.

[cynthia]

I'm not sure if this is news to anyone or what, but I can be a sort of negative individual. Some might even say (and rudely, I might add) cynical. But every now and then I come across something that even I can't think of anything negative to say about. This happened to me today, with the Really? Law? post on the Socratic method (hat tip to Thanks, But No Thanks).

The 1L in charge over there had these things to say about any insecurity you may be feeling about that one time yesterday you got called on by the professor and had no idea what to say and felt trapped in the headlights and Oh My God!!!!!:

1. We don’t really care. We’re too busy focusing on what the professor says. 
2. We don't remember. Unless you keeping bringing it up after class. 
3. We’re not laughing at you. We all know that next week the professor might be drilling us and we may not have the answer. It’s not funny and we’re not laughing.
4. We don’t think you’re stupid. You just got caught on the one thing you didn’t know. Or you got flustered. Or you misunderstood the question. Or any number of things that don’t involve your intelligence. Law school is hard–for all of us. 

I think this is all really nice. And practical. For all the flak law students get for being ruthless and indiscriminate in their ruthlessness, it appears that there are those out there willing to stand up for the nice side of law school. Particularly in these uncertain times, it behooves us all to stand up for some normalcy, in the classroom and otherwise.

but wait, how do i study? eight tips for 1Ls.

[patrick]

A friend recently emailed to tell me that he was starting law school, and to ask if I had any advice or suggestions for staying abreast of his first year. I did, and I do. 

While I realize the following eight suggestions may be controversial, I'm going to throw them out there anyway. The've worked for me and although each may be subject to qualifications and exceptions (isn't everything in law school that way?) I stick by what I wrote to my friend: 

1. Use the Examples & Explanations series (published by Aspen). Unlike casebooks or professors' lectures, the series covers the basic concepts and then provides examples for you to respond to, followed by explanations of how your answer should have looked. They're no substitute for your casebook, but they'll go a long way to helping it make sense. You can likely get your hands on one for each of your classes, and it's money well spent.  
2. Avoid using another student's outlines. First, nobody is perfect and you don't need to compound your own mistakes (which everyone makes) by building off of someone else's. Second, outlining a course is where the real learning takes place and there isn't any viable substitution for it - with outlines, it's the process and not the finished product that counts.
3. Do brief cases separately on your computer, at least for a while. The exercise is good because it is important to learn how to distinguish the "holding" in the case from the "reasoning" and so forth, but as time goes on two things will happen: First, you'll start to see that the distinctions are sort of artificial - e.g., the so-called "reasoning" is often intertwined with the so-called "holding" or the so-called "rule," such that the categories overlap. Second, you'll start to find that you can separate out the various elements of an opinion without actually having to type anything up. When that begins to happen for you, you'll know the case briefing exercise has lost (or perhaps realized?) its utility. At that point, you can trust yourself to take reliable notes in the margins of your book, and you can forgo the briefing exercise. 
4. Do read and reread each case until you understand it. You are after the rule at issue, and how it applied to the facts - don't stop until it makes sense, and I mean REALLY makes sense. This might take more than one reading at first because law has its own language, but it'll come faster with time. I promise. 
5. Do not worry about minutiae. Minutiae includes memorizing case names, judge names, the name of the court in which was heard, the state in which the court sat, and so forth. Some professor may or may not bust your chops over this in class some day, but I promise - PROMISE - you it will not be relevant to the exam. The exam will test your facility with the rules and your ability to apply them to the facts. It will not ask for nor will it reward trivial details that do not bear on the core rules and principles the cases for which you read stand.
6. Do not worry about what your peers are up to. There are probably people with crazy highlighter schemes and freakish coding or index card systems for rote memorization. These are likely the same people who talk about staying up all night, and who later in the semester will talk about how long their outline is, or whatever. What they are expressing is insecurity, not some kind of insider knowledge you don't have. Ignore them as best you can. 
7. Do not study with others. And if you can't take that advice, do not study with more than one other person. I know that sounds coarse, but as a 1L I fell a time or two for the "study group" thing and I swear it's the blind leading the blind. If you don't understand an issue, try to frame it as a clear and precise question, then go look it up yourself. You'll have the answer in front of you instead of the word of someone who is just as new to the law as you. If looking it up doesn't work, and it sometimes doesn't, go ask your professor in person. You'll have an expert answer from your evaluator, instead of a lay answer from someone in your shoes. 
8. Do not underestimate your ability to succeed. Law school is all about work, not brains. True, you have to meet some threshold level of intelligence to get by, but that bar is set disappointingly low. The most successful students are not the brilliant ones. The successful students are those who take the time to think everything through, to understand what is happing in a case, why the judge decided it they did, and what the case "stands for" now. Admittedly, there is a lot of information to sort through. But that's a blessing in disguise, because the volume of information makes it so that the people who apply themselves will succeed where the lax do not. And whether you apply yourself is entirely within your control.

Note that none of this addresses how to stay a cool person. Frankly, if you need tips or advice on that, you're already a gonner.  Do, however, try to remember:  it's only school.

save some dollars, buy a tumbler.

[dennis]

Many law students drink copious amounts of coffee like myself, but I am surprised by the amount of caffeine-lovers that do not carry tumblers.

A tumbler is not just a fashion accessory or Westlaw promotional tool. A tumbler is a very easy way to save a lot of money.

How a tumbler saves:

• You can save around $2 every day if you use your tumbler to bring your first cup of coffee to school. That’s about $120 over a 12-week semester.
• A good tumbler keeps beverages warmer, which means that you will throw out less cold coffee, and save more money.
• Most chain coffee stores offer a discount if you fill a tumbler. Sometimes the discount is only 10% off of a cup of coffee, but if you are a frequent customer the barista may charge you as little as $0.50 for a refill.
• Study at Starbucks? Some Starbucks cafes offer free refills for the duration of your stay if you use a Starbucks gift card. This is relevant to law students because it only takes 715 LexisNexis to earn a $10 starbucks giftcard. You can have Lexis cover all of your coffee expenses if you consistently research and complete the point-earning tutorials.
• Do you remember the alcohol awareness speech from high school or college? One of the hokey things they tell you to do is alternate between beer (or whatever adult beverage) and water. This alternating technique is a good way to save money on coffee as well. Try stopping at the water fountain before you grab your second drink. This will help keep you hydrated and the jogs to the bathroom will prevent you from feeling guilty about skipping the gym to study torts.

some inspiration to get you started on that 1L blog.

[dennis]

Thinking about leveraging your law school experience into some small-time Internet fame? Here are 10 quotes to address some typical concerns of prospective and fledgling law school bloggers:

1.  “I’m in law school. How unspeakably boring! I don’t have anything interesting to write!”

“Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.” – Don DeLillo (from Falling Man)

You don’t have to write about something sensational to maintain a steady reader base. If 4 million people show up to read about Heather Armstrong’s nursing problems, then there is an audience for your tales from the library.

2. “But I’m busy! I need to brief more, sleep more...IRAC... my tummy hurts…”

“Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.” – Norman Mailer (from The Spooky Art)

Calm down, breathe, and write for five minutes every day. If Posner can find time to write his epic posts, then you can spare five minutes to document your day. And the tummy pain is probably from yesterday's sketchy "free" bagel.

3. “I want to blog…maybe I’ll start one later... after the Conlaw midterm... or X...”

“Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” – William Blake

The longer you put blogging off, the harder it is to start. Most blogging services are free. It takes all of five minutes to start. You can have a blog set up quicker than it will take for you to think of a better excuse not to.

4. “I’d feel better writing under a pseudonym, but I don’t know if I could maintain one.”

Anonymous Blogging doesn’t work anyway. As I said, most professional (or school) bloggers move within a world circumscribed by a very limited number of real-world walls. This means your anonymity is inversely proportional to the actual value of figuring out who you are. – 3yearsofhell

Reasonable people can disagree on whether pseudonyms work, but I’m sure we all can write meaningful blogs using our real names without offending our peers or employers. I’ll change my mind when I get fired or heckled at school.

5. “Fine! I’m going to start. Who should I copy?”

“There are many who think that they are marvelous if they can simply resemble a great man in some one thing; and often they seize only on the defect he has.” – Baldesar Castiglione

There are many great blawgs out there, but it is better to be a first-rate version of yourself than a second-rate copy of someone else. Remember what we learned from the mall: the girl who stays true to her own style will look great, but the girl who copies a store mannequin will always look like a hot mess.

6. “Do I have to force this? What’s the point anyway?”

“We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of the imagination, should come first – at least, for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom.” – Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write)

Yes. And blogging will also cure cancer and acne. Seriously. I have reasons why I blog, and I suspect everyone’s reasons are a little different. But like the miracle of Rogaine, you will only believe it if you try it!

7. “Will this be a waste of time? Shouldn’t I be reading? I'm behind. Seriously...I don't even know what Res Judicata is...”

“No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.” – Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write)

Res Judicata is a doctrine that bars a person from asserting previously litigated claims. Now that you are enlightened, you have time to blog. Blogging is a great stress reliever, a way to establish your authority online, and a great way to network. I got my first law school job offer from twitter – so don’t tut-tut online networking.

8. “I majored in underwater basketweaving, and I can’t really write…”

“The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.” – Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write)

You are in law school so you have at least a basic sense of grammar right? Maybe? Okay, the trick is to be more like Hemmingway and less like Joyce: people prefer to read shorter sentences written in plain English. This is why we like reading modern cases and not those horrible 100-year-old things they torture the 1Ls with. A rule of thumb is if your reader has to use a dictionary then the word is too big.

9. “Okay, but seriously, what do I write about?”

“Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.” – Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write)

Pretend that your blog has a twitter prompt: “What are you doing today?” or, ‘What happened today?” – it’s not hard to write about your day for about 5 minutes and hit “publish.” After a semester of doing this you can do pretty extensive outlines of your semester, which are extremely helpful for next year's victims law students.

10. “But, wait, on second thought, I’m actually really busy…this is law school. I want to blog, but I really don't have the time!”

“Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.” – William Blake

Pestilence! You hear that? We are talking itching, scratching, H1N1 pestilence... I think of time in law school as something that is made and not "had." I make time to blog because it forces me to take a step back and think about my day. Even if I don’t write about it, a review of my day forces me to remember the 4 hours wasted on Apartment Therapy, or remind me that I may have too many shoes... This review of my day makes me more productive on a weekly because I have the opportunity to axe unproductive habits and stay on track before things get out of hand. There are no wasted weeks for a blogger.