brrr

One reason judges often give for holding a certain way on an issue is that the opposite holding would "chill" some desirable activity. For example: "The rule petitioner urges this court to adopt would unacceptably chill free formation of business contracts by destroying reliance on the written form." In this context it means the opposite of "incentivize" (yet another word I never heard before coming here.).

Law school has been pretty chilly lately. All of the 1Ls I've talked to feel less motivated this semester than last. For my part, I've been studying less, engaging less with the material (except for criminal law, which is fascinating), and slacking off more. And there's a social effect too. Me, Pier 39, Your Mom, Sibbach, and Sultan have barely eaten together this spring. Sibbach actually dropped out of our lunch group last fall due to, uh, circumstances between her and Sultan. As for the rest of us, I think our lack of colunching is due to two things: (1) we no longer have a small class together right before lunch, and (2) we have more classes after lunch this semester, so we spend our lunches doing homework. Neither of these is very good excuses, and (2) is just another symptom of the academic sickness (last semester I always finished all my reading the night before, not saving any for lunch). Which is too bad because we all miss the company. Some of us are supposed to watch a movie tonight (Jumper), but I doubt we'll follow through.

And there are the little things. I've been wearing glasses this semester because I'm too apathetic to put my contacts in (OK, this happened sophomore and junior years in college too). I played over fifty hours of Jagged Alliance 2 in the past two weeks instead of working on a big paper. And I've been taking my books home instead of studying at the library, so I've seen less of Flutist, Skittles, Negative Feedback, and Cash Hydrant (another regular in our group that I haven't mentioned before; he did I-banking for three years and quit to go to law school).

Then again I might not be missing much. Flutist and Skittles have drifted apart for no apparent reason. They're some of the nicest, friendliest people I've ever met, but they both insist they're really nasty and brutish. (And short, but Flutist is kind of sensitive about that). Modesty or honesty, I don't know. I've warmed to Negative Feedback, but lately he's been spending time with his girlfriend My Life for Aiur, a pretty Korean national who has somehow never heard of Starcraft.

So what's the cause? Some people blame the weather. Usually these are the people whose only personal experience with snow prior to Ithaca was static on the telly when the antennae fell down. If anything, I think cold weather helps you think--you have to rub your neurons together to keep your brain warm.

Others put it down to post-grade report depression. There's some validity to this. Why work so hard when you'll just get a B+ like everyone else? But everyone else worked hard too, so you need to keep moving to stay in place.

There's always S.A.D. but it's been pretty sunny this winter so I don't think that's it.

No, I think it's just the usual second semester fatigue I experienced in college. We're plain tired--if I were Southern I would say plumb tuckered out--from reading and writing. Cornell students spend too much time studying. You med school students will probably laugh--no, scoff--with powerful bitterness at those numbers, but shut up for a second.

Through the center of our apathy runs a tightly wound spinal cord of stress: the usual academic stress, but also stress about finding a job for the summer, figuring out what kind of law to practice after graduation, and wondering if we're really prepared to cut off our families and social lives to work 100+ hours a week for stupid sums of money. And, in my case, stress about having to dress up nice for interviews.

But maybe we should all just chill.

$46K a year for this

A selection of terms I've added to Word's dictionary since starting law school:

appellee
bailee (what whales who went to law school use to catch krill)
bailor (lots of -ees, -ants, and -ors in legalese)
berm (can't believe this wasn't already in the dictionary)
bonum (but wear a condom first)
conveyancing (I'm pretty sure some judge came up with this one on the spot)
crossclaimed (hyphens are for the dashing)
declarant (why can't they just say "speaker")
defeasible
dispositive (really handy word)
donative (e.g. "donative intent," the intent to make a gift and unsuccessfully sue to get it back, you heartless bastard)
ejectment (what happens when you throw a tin of Altoids really hard at the ground)
estoppel (GREAT word, if only because it sounds like something you'd ask to be sprinkled on your strudel)
estray
executory (this word evokes Darth Vader's theme in my head)
foreseeability (can't believe this wasn't in Word's dictionary either. Who woulda thought?)
hypotheticals (o rly)
inplead (no, outplead isn't a word)
joinder
judicata (part of the phrase "res judicata" which means "screw you dude we already decided this like two days ago")
justiciable (capable of being justiced)
lawyering (I still maintain this is not a real word)

I will take a break here to avoid list-fatigue





OK ready


go

lessor (disappointingly, not the opposite of "greator")
mens (. . . rea / restroom)
meruit (as in "Quantum Meruit," airing Wednesday nights on Sci-Fi at 9 Eastern/6 Pacific)
movant (I like the way this sounds. moooovant.)
offeree
offeror
overdetermination (as in causal overdetermination. I'm surprised I hadn't added this before since it comes up in some fields of philosophy.)
parol (not a mispelling of "parole")
personalty (an object you can move around, as opposed to realty or fatty)
possessory
privity (sounds vaguely naughty. I'm seeing English schoolboys in uniform, huddled in a corner of the yard, all goggle-eyed at the legal textbook they found in Dad's nightstand. The one in the middle is so amazed that his center-parted hair has rotated 90 degrees. Just sit for a minute and imagine what that would look like.)
promisee (mine mine mine)
promisor (yours yours yours)
punitives (i.e. punitive damages)
rea (mens...)
res (see "judicata")
restitutionary
retributivism (I will make another post about this)
servient (property law generates a lot of weird words)
tortfeasor (he or she who commits a tort. A repeated tort is a retort. (I wish))
tortious (semantically different from "tortuous" but they often come out to the same thing)
triable (as in "triable warfare," fighting between hostile triabs)
trover (thank property law for this one too. Also a good name for a dog.)
unconscionability ("UNCONSCIONABLE!" is my new expletive of choice. "That's friggin' unconscionable, bro.")
unestablished (I don't remember typing this)
unowned (nacho cheese)
voidable (as opposed to constipated)