Archive for the 'Law School' Category

…and, surprisingly, I won.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. This is a stupid thing to say since, really, every day is the first day of the rest of your life. Unless you plan to start living backwards, which I don’t. Today is also the first day with my new Alma Mater. I’m still trying it on and kicking the tires — two metaphors one doesn’t often see mixed — but I like it so far.

The last few weeks have been a crazy, incredible whirlwind of friends, fears, and beers and there couldn’t have been a more fitting end to what has been a life-changing course of study at IU Law. I’m going to try to recap it in a way that is short enough so as not to be boring, but let’s be honest: it’ll probably be long.

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A few weeks ago nominations the first round of voting was opened for three graduation awards: student speaker, outstanding contribution to student life, and the gavel award. Today we got an email with the finalists, so I’m going to use this space stump for my preferred candidates.

Gavel Award

• Prof. Hannah Buxbaum
• Pat Clark
• Jim Schutter

While Jim Schutter (our Director of Financial Aid) has done amazing work for pretty much everyone here, and Prof. Buxbaum is widely regarded as an excellent teacher (and, some say, the hottest prof at the law school), I really think the class ought to give the award to Pat Clark this year. I’m biased, of course, because I’ve been working with the admissions office for so long, but her 40 years of service to IU Law cannot possibly receive enough accolades, awards, or recognition. Do the right thing, 3Ls, vote Pat Clark for Gavel Award.

Outstanding Contribution to Student Life

• Chris Coakley
• Chrissy Habeeb
• Katie Jackson
• Jen Nagourney

I think Katie and Jen should be run-away favorites for this award, and I’m not sure how I’m going to choose between them. Chrissy has also done quite a bit — starting the law school’s first pro-abortion (love you, Chrissy) group took a lot of effort on her part and, while it’s not my cup of tea, it’s worth keeping in mind. That said, I think Katie’s involvement with damn near everything at the law school (SBA, Moot Court, and Trial Team to name just a few) and Jen’s work with PILF and the New Orleans trips have meant more to more people.

Student Speaker

• Chris Coakley
• Katie Jackson
• Eric Loftman

I definitely don’t trust Chris or Eric not to turn our graduation address into their own personal political rally, and even folks who agree with their politics should be weary of the possibility. I can’t think of many things that would be worse and while I don’t have anything against them, I don’t think this is the time or place for their ideologies. I’ll be voting for Ms. Jackson for sure, and you should too.

From my first job bussing tables when I was sixteen, throughout undergrad, and through two and a half years of law school I had a fairly remarkable record: I never interviewed for a position that I wasn’t offered. That streak ended quite unceremoniously today when I got an email informing me that I had not gotten the clerkship that I had applied and interviewed for.

It’s good to mix things up a bit, but I’m now trying (again) to figure out what I will be convincing someone to pay me to do upon graduation. My current frustration is with the law school’s job board, which contains a huge proportion of jobs that require that all “applicants” either a) have post-JD experience or b) have already passed the bar. Or both.

While I understand that, in theory, our alumni could use the job board… I don’t think many do, and besides, these jobs are listed in the 3L directory. What’s the point of that?

So… uh… anyone want to hire me?

Last night I had dinner with Kim, Hilary and Seth at some mexican place. It was tasty.

My interview this morning went well. Spent a healthy portion of the time talking football (which is good). Turns out the Judge had a run-in with Bear Bryant back in the day, so that was an interesting story. The Judge said it could be 6-8 weeks, but not to worry too much — if I haven’t heard from them, they haven’t selected a clerk. His secretary and current clerk assured me that it wouldn’t be six weeks. Over all, everybody was great and it seems like it’d be a fantastic place to work. I should have some clue what’s going on by March-ish if not earlier. That all said, if they offer me the clerkship, I’ll take it in a heartbeat.

In other news, I was looking at my referrers and I saw an interesting link from something called “Bloomington Startup Weekend“. They posted links to a lot of local bloggers in hopes that we would see the link and then do some advertising for them. They really screwed it up, though, because that page says absolutely nothing about what “Bloomington Startup Weekend” is. You have to click several links, and most of those assume you know what on earth a ’startup weekend’ is. I get the impression that the goal is for a bunch of folks to come together in one weekend to start a business… or something. Didn’t feel like doing an hour’s worth of research to do someone else’s marketing for them.

Maybe they’ll put out something that explains what the heck it is. Either way, I guess they accomplished their goal as they got a link back. Maybe next time they’ll do a little bit more with the “who”, “what”, and “why” questions in addition to the “when” and “where”.

I’ll be flying back into Indy this evening… catch you all later.

This weekend I’m headed out to Maryland to hang out with Hilary and Kim. I also have an interview on Monday for a clerkship with a circuit court judge. I’m pretty excited about the interview, as it signals that I might not be totally unemployable and, if I get offered the position, it means that I can dispense with all of this “job search” nonsense and take a job in a place I’d like to live, learning things that I want to learn. It’ll be pretty cool.

That said, I’ll be sparse until Monday evening, but I have already written some posts to be published over the weekend so as not to break my New Year’s Resolution just yet.

While I’m gone, though, you can check out Dolphin Olympics over on Kongregate… it’s a lot of fun. My high score so far 2,606,338 6,119,319.

Classes have been in session for a few weeks now, and I’m still missing one of my grades. This is not a surprise, though, as this particular professor is notorious for taking forever. It’s interesting, really. Like most professors, this one doesn’t really accept late work. He doesn’t accept much in the way of excuses for missing too many classes. On more than a few occasions, he has attributed that to “professionalism”. Professors, when they say such things, often make allusions to practice — “If a motion is due by a certain day, it’s due. It’s your job to get it done.”

Why is it, then, that year in and year out, this professor takes weeks longer than any of the other professors?

Granted, the class is very large (~150 people), but the final is also fairly long (an 8 hour take home). If this professor can’t handle grading the exams in a timely manner, maybe he should limit enrollment in the class, or shorten the final.

It appears that this is really just a priority issue, though, as he continues to update his blog when he should be grading finals.

In copyright today we spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the difference between these two classifications. After a few minutes, it occurred to me that the distinction between them is trivial at best.

One student, when asked to explain the difference between an analog and digital camera, said something to the effect that an analog camera stores the “actual” image while the digital camera stories an “approximation” of the actual image.

I don’t buy it.

Film works through a light-sensitive chemical reaction. The difference between the chemical reproduction of an image and the digital reproduction is one of granularity. How much can you enlarge that image until there’s a noticeable degradation in quality. It’s my un-researched belief that currently film is sufficiently granular that the quality bottleneck would be at the lens rather than the film. Digital isn’t far behind.

Moore’s law suggests that digital will eventually overtake analog… but many will ignore the true benchmark in favor of this one: when you blow up a film negative too large, the image becomes blurry. Details are lost in that blur. With digital, you blow it up and see pixels… the quality degradation is more pronounced.

The real difference is not one of medium, though. The reason one has to distinguish between “analog” and “digital” in a copyright class is because of the ease of copying digital works. That has less to do with the distinction and more to do with the nature of the hardware. If every person walked around with a photocopier in their pocket, we’d have had this copyright problem a long time ago.

So, my law school schedule is finalized. I have class in the afternoons, Monday through Wednesday. I was bumped from my Friday class, but it wasn’t needed to graduate, so I’m going to close out my law school career with two classes: Civil Rights Statutes and Copyright.

The course I was bumped from, though, still irritates me. The professor is a distinguished alumnus of IU Law and has an awful lot to teach future litigators about the way the world works, but the class is limited to those who have not taken (and do not intend to take) the full trial ad class.

Pardon me?

We have this amazing resource, and it’s being wasted on people who will (in all likelihood) never use it. It’s like having Da Vinci teach an intro drawing class at the local community college. What’s the point?

Today I had to wake up before noon (booo) to go to a little orientation meeting for this semester’s externship. During the tour we stepped into a courtroom just long enough to hear a defendant say, “I’ve seen enough reality TV to know the officer should’ve done more investigation.” I am not shitting you. The prosecutor had to turn around in her chair so the Judge wouldn’t see her about to die laughing.

Anyway, all this just means that the last semester is just around the corner — I’ve been told classes start on Thursday. Here’s what I’m taking:

• Trial Tactics — Friday afternoons (first six weeks only). This is being taught by some super-litigator alumnus from LA. I think it’ll be pretty awesome.
• Civil Rights Statutes — (Tues-Wed 11am-Noon) Hopefully I’ll learn something besides how wonderful the world would be if it weren’t for middle-class white males.
• Copyright — (Mon-Wed afternoons) Since I’ve taken so many classes that have covered Copyright, I figure I might as well take the full class, so as to learn as little as humanly possible this semester.

At the moment I’m in Crim Pro instead of Copyright, but that’s a morning class, so I’m hoping to switch it around. If it all works out, I will take my only final exam on April 22nd, at which point I will have roughly two weeks of screwing around (and trying to distract other people from their finals) before graduation.

As you can see, this is a very, very stressful schedule — I hate being a 3rd year.

So… the culmination of the last few crazy weeks is a mock trial competition in Buffalo this weekend. We’re leaving a little later this afternoon and won’t be back until… who knows when. Sunday night if things don’t go so well, Monday night if they do.

At any rate, we’re going to have some fun-filled nights in Buffalo (HA), so if you don’t hear from me, it’s probably because we’re sitting under 200 feet of snow.