In more ways then one, actually.

I’m pretty sure this one isn’t going to be selected as next year’s example of how to write a contracts exam.

Oh well. Next up: Civ Pro.

Now begins the frantic reviewing (and in some cases, learning) that always comes before the exams. Personally, this has always been a problem for me: I tend to learn things the first time and then have trouble reviewing them. This can be good or bad: if I learn it wrong, I may be in the position of knowing it wrong. On the other hand, it saves a lot of time.

Contracts II
I’ve got some pressure here. I had the best grade of my section last semester. On the other hand, that was the easy stuff. This time around we’ve got the parol evidence rule, interpretation, promise vs. condition, mistake, misunderstanding, impracticability and impossibility, and myriad other things I cannot recall off the top of my head.

Civ Pro II
This will be interesting. I didn’t do so well last semester, but I blame that primarily on the aforementioned new professor and her screwball all-multiple-choice, heavy-on-Erie exam. She’s gone the other direction this time: open book. Now, instead of getting a bunch of nearly identical multiple choice exams, she’s going to get a bunch of nearly identical essays to read. For me, however, it levels the field, since I’m better at looking up and reading the FRCP then applying them from memory.

Property
Scary stuff. We’ve learned a lot. The upside is that it all makes sense. No matter how much the professor tried to catch us up with “Does that seem fair?” I always seemed to know what was going on. She’s a stickler for detail, though. I’ve got to make sure I keep my real covenants separate from my equitable servitudes.

Con Law
This all comes down to handwaving. I think nearly anyone who’s slept through the class and can crib together a quick list of fundamental rights and the organizational chart that is the Constitution should be able to get through this. I could be wrong, however.

Elevator summary:
While I remain interested in the law, and find it very exciting in theory, in practice I find that I dislike the industry. Between the frequently artificial air of competition and the way that the ABA, schools, and firms work the ratings system to maintain their standards, it just doesn’t work for me. I seem to have underestimated just how much the school’s rating matters and the individual student’s skills and experience do not. For what I’m currently paying, I’m more and more certain that I won’t be getting a net gain. Because of this, I’m going to quit, not while I’m ahead, but while I’m behind by only the value of a sportscar.

And so it goes on:

I’m not the best student in the world. I’ll admit that I’ve probably spent some time this year playing video games or watching TV that I could’ve spent studying. On the other hand, I’ve yet to see that spending all the time in the world studying yields any better results then spending “enough” time studying. Judging from last semester’s results, there isn’t any real correlation, as I spent a lot more time studying for Civil Procedure then I did for Contracts, and the grades certainly didn’t reflect that.

Not all teachers are alike, and that is to be expected. In the last ten months, I was blessed by some pretty darn good instructors. For Contracts, I had a professor who’s been doing this for ages, and is committed not only to the subject material but to being an excellent teacher. This is key: people who teach not only need to know what they are teaching, but how to convey this information to others in a way that they can receive. Torts professor: great lecturer, not such a good tester. Crim. Law: very organized, somewhat abstract, decent tester. Civ. Pro: terrible – disorganized lectures, non-authoritative, non-inspirational, and capped off with a terrible test.
Perhaps I’ve been spoiled – while I had some crappy teachers at Oregon State, they generally didn’t obstruct me so much. Even though I’ve had some great professors, I feel that for what I’m paying, I deserve better.

Deciding to go back to school entailed a lot of thinking about money. Being unemployed in the bay area is ridiculously expensive. Putting private school tuition on top of that is even crazier. In the last 10 months, I’ve dug a hole of debt large enough to swallow a Porsche. Ok, I’m thinking in terms of the ‘cheap’ Porsche, but still – that’s one year. By the time I graduate, I need to buy myself three sportscars plus interest before I can break even.

In theory, by investing that $100,000+ in a bright and shiny degree, I will be raising my income-earning potential. In practice, however, there’s some issues. First, as a person with a degree in computer engineering, and a few years of experience working with real companies doing real things, I should be able to make $70k plus, here in the Bay Area. In fact, when I left my job to come to school, I was making more then that. That’s a little bit short of what many lawyers make, it is true, but the average salary of graduates of my school is about $63k. This is for various reasons, ranging from the fact that many of my classmates will go into public interest law to the fact that this is a “fourth tier” school. Basically, nobody who wants to pay money is hiring from here unless you are the top 3% of the school, and even then it is dicy. From where I am at the moment, I would be gambling $70,000 (Two Porsche Boxters, for those of you following along) on graduating near the top of my class and getting a good job. The other option is probably just to get a decent job with potential, and not only work my way up to a six-figure salary, but to gain income instead of debt for those two years.

A year ago, I started digging a hole. At the bottom of the hole, there should be a bigger shovel that I can use to dig my way out. I’ve discovered not only that I started with a pretty decent-sized shovel, and that the shovel at the bottom may not be as large as I had hoped, but that I may have dug in the wrong place.

I’ve been told several times that I’m pretty lucky. Even though my school is low-rated (but is getting better, honestly), we’ve got three law reviews on-campus. While they offer membership to the top 10% of the 1L class, and have a write-on competition for the rest of us, there’s apparently no limit as to how many people can be on law review: the “competition” is more of an exam.

Lucky isn’t quite the word for it. This morning, we turned in our memo of points and authorities for our legal research and writing class. Coincidentally, this is the weekend for the write-on contest. The two are substantially similar, involving search & seizure and supression of evidence. It’s actually annoying that this is closed-library (we can cite only the cases we’ve been given) – I’d love to do research on this.

Part of the exam is proofreading a short article. The worst part of that is going to be keeping my head from exploding while reading it. I really cannot stand crappy writing.

Now, if I can just get through the bluebooking exercise…

Anyway, for those of you who’ve been hiding under a rock for the last month or so, I suggest you read Obsidian Wings’s writeup which goes into some pretty good detail. Actually, it is suggested reading in general.

I personally feel that the constitutional law issues are pretty well settled: people have a right to determine their own medical treatment, and if Terry’s choice was not to be kept alive artificially while in a persistent vegetative state, then who am I, or anyone else, to meddle. It appears that the state-level legal issues are relatively straightforward as well: the husband went to the courts seeking an order and presented evidence that this was Terry’s wish. Her parents disagreed. The court sided with her husband, and even after all the appeals and threats, that’s the way it stands.

Procedure-wise, here’s a great article. It discusses what went wrong at the end, and what possibly could’ve been done to take advantage of the ridiculous last-minute day in federal court that the family was granted. I’m not sure if would’ve helped in the end, however.

This semester? Not so much. I feel that like my professor, I could blather for hours about the finer points of Constitutional Law – so I certainly hope that’s what we’re going to have for the exam. Contracts last semester was all about consideration: spotting it and knocking it down (even if the test turned out to be all about remedies). This semester we’ve got all kinds of interpretation, parol evidence rule, miscommunication, unilateral, and other exciting things. It doesn’t really seem to have gelled as well. Property? This is the one that currently makes a lot of sense to me, but I’ve heard that the professor writes tests guarenteed to leave you breathlessly wondering who let that LSD-crazed moose into the room and where your pants went in the meantime.

Anyway. The books call. And I’ve still got no summer job, so I’m not sure how the rent will get paid.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a lawyer. I won’t even be 1/3 of a lawyer by the time summer rolls around. But I’m not going to work for free for anyone who is making money. I’ll consider doing nonprofit charity work. I can understand that some of the public interest jobs are uncompensated.

But law firms make money. Companies make money. If I’m going to be giving them some time, I’m going to need some compensation. Even the students in my class who didn’t quit $70k/year jobs in order to go to law school have at least an undergraduate degree, and can provide at least some useful function.

Anyway, it appears that BIGLAW is complaining that they are no longer getting associates willing to give up their lives for the firm:

http://biz.yahoo.com/law/050302/56638ee5cf6eae0ec228a15610e3da6a_1.html

Attorneys from Generation Y – those born in 1978 or later – are plenty smart and generally well educated, say firm leaders and industry experts. But these young attorneys also are lacking in loyalty, initiative and energy, so the criticism goes.

I especially like the closing line:

In addition, the group has a greater degree of cynicism than in generations past, she said, stemming from the dot-com failure and 9/11 terrorist attacks. The result is diminished long-term loyalty to their employers.

“They’re saying, ‘I’ve looked at the world and there’s no such thing as job security,’” she said.

Guess what, kids, there really has never been job security, and while the dotcom failure should’ve told you that, 9/11 has absolutely nothing to do with it. It was in your contract all along.

That rant aside, she has overcompensated this term: she wishes to have an open-book test. I’m generally all about the open book, really. Especially compared to a potential multiple choice test of this subject.

Anyway, I just spent an hour or two copying and pasting most of the FRCP from Cornell’s excellent site. And marking it up into something easy to read. And auto-generating a table of contents.

…now I just have to annotate what we’ve learned in class, cross-reference the exciting bits, highlight the deadlines and the difference between the judge’s required and optional actions, and possibly index it.

I spent much of the morning writing a quick program to split up a partition of picture files and generate a file which could be dumped onto a DVD for safekeeping. Not that I don’t trust the computer, but paranoia is getting to me.

Writing software is still enjoyable to me, especially when it is something simple and useful that doesn’t have to be looked at or even used by anyone else. I was either riding that fine line of caffination that sharpens my mind to it’s maximum, or law school in general is helping me to focus and actually improving my coding skills. While I’ve never been blazingly familiar with python, things clicked and hummed.

Anyway, I asked about last semester’s grade. I recieved a C in writing, and while I generally don’t have much of a policy of griping about grades, I was wondering if there was anything specific I could do to improve. The first half of the answer was about what I expected: our school is pretty strict about curving grades – professors need to make strong arguments if they don’t want to fail the bottom 5% or so of the class, and bend the curve accordingly. There are 14 people in my writing class – I’ll leave doing the math as an exercise for the reader. Additionally, I’m willing to say that my section has some particularly sharp cookies. I feel pretty good about my classmates, but the my nonreaction to competition may place me at a disadvantage.

The other half of the problem is that I don’t go into enough depth. He said that the arguments are good, but the problem is with waiting for other people to read a lot more into the argument then I write.

Perhaps I’m not too smart for my own good. I’m assuming others are smart.

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2005/02/20/hst/index.html

Anyway, our professor has given us a case modeled on one that he actually defended and won. Of course, he’s made it even harder for us.

The basic premise:

Our Defendant was driving through an intersection westbound in his ‘79 Mustang. A police officer stopped at the northbound entry to the intersection observed shoulder restraints and that the defendant was not wearing them. He initiated a traffic stop based on suspicion of a seatbelt violation. While approaching the defendant’s vehicle, he observed him to buckle a lap belt. There were no shoulder belts for the front seat. He observed that the defendant appeared drunk, so he conducted field sobriety tests, which were failed. He then conducted a further search of the car and discovered a baggie of what turned out to be methamphetamine.

Also, unknown to the police officer, some guy down at the station, who’s been arrested for dealing meth, “cut a deal” by saying that our Defendant had recently purchased.

Now, to the layman, this is pretty open and shut, especially if you ignore the Constitution and let your fear/hatred/mistrust of drunk-driving meth dealers without seatbelts (and possibly drivers of ‘79 Mustangs) take hold. The only real defense is to claim that the initial traffic stop was illegal and suppressing the evidence – but even that is not particularly easy.

Anyway, I’m hoping he takes into account the severe handicap of the defense when he grades us, since half of the class is working with a “gimmie” case.

Now I have to get my grades into the “stellar” region so I have at least a little chance at their summer associate’s program.

I may just disable trackbacks.