Talk Socket

Cabaret

2009-03-08T17:44:00.013-04:00

Last night was Cabaret Night at the law school. We had a casino, a variety show with student performers, and auctions to raise money for the school's public interest fund. During the night I started a conversation with Practice Dummy, a girl I've liked for a few months. Two minutes into the conversation I accidentally jabbed her really hard in the stomach. Two minutes after that I spilled water on her dress.

I was mortified after hitting her but she seemed to take it in stride. At first she thought I'd punched her. I asked if I'd hurt her, and she said, "Didn't you feel my rock hard abs?" I replied, "I have no feeling left in my fingers of steel," and blamed that on my extensive Shaolin kung fu training. She nodded in understanding. I added that if I'd actually punched her, I would be apologizing to her tombstone right now. Smoooooth.

When I spilled water on her a little later, she asked if I was drunk. Of course I wasn't; I'd been drinking water all night. I walked away before I accidentally set her on fire or something.

I feel like I'm in friggin' middle school again.

effective immediately

2008-09-08T17:53:00.002-04:00

The Burger Court will henceforth be known as the "Food Court"

I'm hungry

Highlights of the first week of 2L year

2008-09-01T01:23:00.004-04:00

I'll write more about the summer soon. For now here are some highlights from last week, the first week of 2L year:

* Playing tennis with people other than my brother for the first time in years

* Seeing my friends in casual clothes again (I'll tell you more about our interviews in NYC)

* Finding out that my new roommate is pretty laid back, likes the same music I do, and doesn't cook in thong underwear

* Revisiting Insomnia Cookies (Jesus Christ what do they put in these things)

* Playing the war-weary wiseman to my 1L mentee who is actually older than me

* Wearing this shirt to a wear-white party; wishing someone would complain so I could say "Well put me on the ballot and call me Ralph Nader cause this is a green party now" (maybe it's a good thing no one complained)

* Having no class on Friday (this is a highlight of every week)

* Meeting batshit insane LLMs (foreign students) who dance as if their hearts will stop if their legs do

* Convincing a cute 1L who didn't know what Walt Disney looked like that Disney modeled Mickey Mouse after his own appearance

* Getting (1) a postcard from Persistence of Vision, and (2) my hopes up.

California state bar here I come

2008-07-13T05:07:00.003-04:00

Fill in the blank with the correct answer:

A person who commits a felony is a ____felon_____.

A person who commits a misdemeanor is a ___meanie____.

1L of a year

2008-07-13T05:00:00.004-04:00

I don't want to let this blog die in the cold so let me tell you how things warmed up toward the end of spring. As I said last time most 1Ls felt socially and academically dispirited after winter break. Two things helped bring me and my closest circle of friends (Sultan, Your Mom, and Pier 39) out of the fog.

The first was the annual 1L moot court competition. Roughly 140 1Ls--three-fourths of our class--argued cases before a mock appellate court in head-to-head competition. This gave us all something to talk about besides jobs and classes, although we were mostly limited to discussing how much fun we were having was since we couldn't talk about the case materials. More importantly, though, Your Mom made it to the semi-finals. Top 4 out of 140 wannabe lawyers and ex-"Webster's Dictionary defines . . . "-high-school-speech-and-debaters is pretty damn good. Me, Sultan, and Pier 39 cheered her all the way, spurred on by the fact that she had seriously considered dropping out of law school in the weeks before the competition. I think her self esteem lay at the bottom of the ocean after a discouraging talk with a professor and the disappointment of fall grades, so we were all happy she found a niche for herself. And by rallying around her I felt more invigorated and connected to my friends than I had for months.

The second thing is cookies. Insomnia Cookies. IC is a bakery that sells fresh cookies at two in the morning, kept warm and chewy in the oven before serving. It is perfectly adapted to the college town biome. The 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi wrote about IC when he said, "He who tastes not, knows not." I cannot fully communicate to you how good these cookies are. I can only point and make noises, like a gagged captive showing the police where his kidnapper hid the bodies. These cookies are murderous.

IC is a new business. I didn't know they existed until Negative Feedback told me about them sometime in April. He had been there eight times in the previous week. Once I tried it I knew why. I also knew I couldn't keep IC to myself, so I brought my friends there one night promising that the cookies would "materially improve their quality of life." They were skeptical, but here's how the first outing went:

Sultan (after taking one bite): I feel... closer to God.

Your Mom: I feel like I've sinned.

Pier 39: How is this possible?

We flagged down another friend who happened to be passing by. This friend--I'll call him Benadryl--ate a cookie, went back up to the counter, and asked the cashier, "Do you put heroin in these?"

Just like that, Insomnia Cookies became our social locus. "Hey Your Mom, what are you doing tonight?" "I was thinking cookies, then your mom." "Cool let's meet up at 9." Of course it was not all about the food. We wanted company more than cookies. But cookies were a convenient and delicious excuse to hang out. So every day we stumbled into IC like polar bears driven to human settlements by post-hibernation hunger. And like polar bears we ate a lot.

I don't want to give the impression that all law students are alienated and starved for human contact. It probably won't be like that next spring, when the pressure of getting good grades and finding a job will have lifted. Still I wonder what would have happened if not for moot court and IC. I don't think it's inevitable that my friends and I would have found another excuse to reconnect. I am not good at pursuing my own happiness. Throughout college I longed to meet more people but couldn't bring myself to go out without an acceptable reason or excuse (plus it didn't help that I don't drink). I was socially crippled and needed a crutch, and being mostly crutchless I spent many weekends sitting alone in my room. And that's more or less where I was after winter break this year, despite my relatively outgoing attitude at the start of fall.

Nor, I suspect, may my classmates be much better at finding happiness: lawyers, or at least lawyers at big law firms, generally work long hours, lack a social life or significant family time before being promoted, and find little satisfaction in their jobs. But I'm getting ahead of myself. My first year ended on a high note and so should this post.

brrr

2008-02-24T12:06:00.003-05:00

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

2008-02-17T23:26:00.008-05:00

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)

a brief complaint

2007-11-15T02:22:00.000-05:00

Law without philosophy is like physics without math.

--------

Speaking of physics, my torts professor said this on Monday (regarding a case that extended strict liability for blasting to include harm resulting from "concussive force" and not just flying debris):

“Now this concussive force opens the door to unlimited liability… now this concussive force in theory, according to Steve Hawkings, can go on forever.”

Intriguing

2007-10-13T03:34:00.000-04:00

While having lunch at the bagel place across from the law school, me and Sultan came up with a spur-of-the-moment photo op to boost our street cred:

It's hard to tell from the photo, but the two books in my hand (the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Federal Rules of Evidence) are upside down. I also had a Chinese chess set in my backpack but I figured it would just make things worse

People

2007-10-07T22:00:00.000-04:00

Here is where I'll talk about some of the people I see regularly and use codenames so they still want to see me.

Pier 39 is practical and good at cooking. She has kind of a monotonic, range-constrained way of speaking (so do I for that matter) but she can be funny when she wants to.

Your Mom makes a lot of your mom jokes and suggestive reversals, e.g.

Me: I want to do X
Your Mom: I bet you DO want to do X

When I say a lot, I mean a lot, which is pretty uncommon among girls (I wonder why she hasn't switched to your dad jokes). But she's funny and they usually work.

Sibbach is serious and usually keeps quiet when the rest of us are joking around. Maybe it's because she's older than the rest of us. Well, 26 isn't that old-- I think it's a personality thing. But she's been opening up a bit more lately.

Sultan is the person I've spent the most time with so far in law school. He's an ec major, but he has both a CS-y kind of sensibility and a philosophical bent like me. This has made for some great discussions between us. We've spent hours talking about philosophy, morality, religion, and (of course) the law. He thinks quickly on his feet, but he's not out to score points when he argues, which is a rare combination. I appreciate that. And the dude does a great impression of Prof. "Coach" Heise.

Negative Feedback looks like someone who went to Berkeley (but he actually went somewhere else). He seems to think everything here sucks or is meh at best. But many people like him, strangely, so I must be missing something.

Flutist was, like me, the flute section leader for her high school marching band. How cool is that. She seems like a very friendly, good-hearted person. But she thinks piccolos are manlier than flutes because piccolos aren't as gentle. WTF. First, piccolos are half as long as flutes, and second, flutes sound gentler because piccolos are bitchy.

Wikipedia will back me up on this one:

Range of a piccolo

I rest my case.

Finally, Skittles is demure, well-dressed, and nervously apologetic. She really wants me and Negative Feedback to be friends for some reason. Also she wants to learn chess (!) but doubts she'll have the time (:().

I hope this post does not bite me in the ass

A touching moment

2007-10-07T21:40:00.000-04:00

AJ: sup
Me: I think I caught a cold over the weekend
AJ: Aww that su-
Me: Why didn't you tell me your mom was sick?
AJ: ... dammit

Last weekend I went to an animal sanctuary and gave a 600 pound pig a bellyrub. I felt a bit awkward because I hadn't eaten breakfast that morning and my stomach kept rumbling while I was looking at the animals. Whoops.

dang dreams

2007-09-19T22:29:00.000-04:00

Last night I dreamt I was in an abandoned amusement park at night, searching for something I can't remember. I wasn't looking through my eyes, but from an isometric overhead view, like this:

Eventually I found a wide tunnel full of abandoned cars. I guessed that the tunnel led to an underground parking garage. The cars looked ancient, 50 years old at least, all rusty with broken glass and cobwebs spanning their steering wheels. It was a traffic jam. I wondered where the drivers went.

As I entered the tunnel, my vision shifted to the first-person. The tunnel spiraled downward for some length before abruptly opening on a huge, circular indoor lot. My guess was right; it was a parking garage. The place was well-lit and the cars here looked newer than the cars in the mouth of the tunnel. I sensed that I was close to what I was looking for. My intuition led me straight to a black, boxy looking car in the center of the lot. It had an 80s style and was probably the newest thing here, hardly any signs of wear. The door was unlocked-- no surprise-- and I stepped into the driver's seat.

After I closed the door, I felt a sudden shiver of fear and looked at the rear view mirror. Something wasn't right. I adjusted the mirror so I could clearly see the driver's side of the car behind me. Where there had been empty space not a minute ago, I now saw a decayed skeleton, still wearing a fancy suit. Turning around I saw that all the cars were not empty but filled with corpses, some looking like they'd died in terror, clawing at the glass. The windows were no longer broken but whole...

I quickly turned away and tried to open the driver's side door. It was locked. I bashed the glass to no avail. That's when I first noticed the smell inside the car-- and knew I had a passenger.

...at this point I pressed Escape to reach the main menu and reload my game. No, I'm not making this up. This happens to me all the time. Most people wake up from their scary dreams. I have an in-dream mechanism for keeping the fun alive. I selected an old saved game, and soon I was back in the amusement park, earlier in the day. I don't remember the rest-- something to do with wizards.

don't tase me bro

2007-09-18T23:43:00.000-04:00

I've settled into a routine over the last couple weeks. My typical school day goes like this:

Morning: class
Lunch: eat with classmates, often discuss cases
Afternoon: classes (Wednesday-Friday), dicking around on the internet (Monday-Tuesday)
Late afternoon: nap, sometimes cut short by meetings and errands
~5PM-11PM: study in the law school library, with dinner thrown in somewhere, usually eaten by myself . I don't always work to 11 every night, and I don't always start at 5.
After studying: come home, study chess for an hour or so, go to bed. Been watching Battlestar Galactica lately, too.

It's a pretty comfortable routine and I hope I don't get too bored. Or boring.

The temperature has dropped sharply over the last week. Starting to get chilly. California lifers glancing sideways at each other like kids looking into a deep dark well. The kind that doesn't echo when you drop a stone into it. Like the one that little Billy fell into last summer, never to be seen again.

Well, maybe not that bad. But with the winter chill will come a social chill as the 1Ls freak out about exams. I'm not looking forward to the quiet weekends, the annoyed "What do you want?"s, the stress under everyone's eyes. They say 1L fall is the worst semester of law school. Why can't people just chill.

RIP Alex

2007-09-13T18:49:00.001-04:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070911/ap_on_sc/obit_alex_the_parrot
:(

1L: two week review

2007-09-11T14:20:00.001-04:00

I've had a little more than two weeks of classes now, and overall it's been pretty fun. The material is more interesting than I thought it'd be. I thought I'd only care about criminal procedure, constitutional law, and IP, none of which I'm taking this semester, but torts, contracts, property, and civil procedure actually keep me engaged. I think this is because we've been looking so closely at particular cases that I haven't had time to step back and evaluate the philosophical underpinnings and find them dull.

Apparently "Coach" Heise, my torts professor, was John Elway's backup quarterback at Stanford. That explains his mannerisms. I usually leave his class feeling like I haven't learned much, though, either about the law or about how to "think like a lawyer." Almost everything I've learned in his class was gleamed from the casebook and not from lecture or in-class questioning of students.

Prof. Summers really hammers the lawyering methodology. Most of his questions in class are directed at criticizing the cases we've read (and the student's briefs of those cases) and encouraging us to read carefully, talk with our classmates outside class, and think creatively. It's fun hearing him tear apart the opinions in our casebook-- casebook that he cowrote with another professor here.

I'd estimate my workload at 3-3.5 H cores equivalent. Homework is 3 hours on average every night, maximum 5.5 on bad days (Tuesday nights). Not too bad. Less work than college. I'm glad I went straight from college to here, because many of the students who took time off seem to have trouble getting back into the academic world. It'll kick up though. 1L is supposed to be the hardest year.

Property

2007-09-06T19:18:00.000-04:00

We watched this video in Property today:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=pUPsfYJONrU

Later our professor mentioned that Michael Jackson didn't invent the Moonwalk, then performed the dance for 30 seconds in case any of us forgot how it looked. The little "Hoo!" at the end was the clincher. Bear in mind he's a 60-year old balding white man with crazy fashion taste (he usually comes to class wearing a blue-on-white pinstripe suit and pants, pink ruffle-collared shirt, and a loudly colored bowtie. All he needs is a porkpie hat and a cane to twirl).

What an awesome class.

According to Prof. Alexander the Moonwalk was invented by James Brown, but I think I've seen it even earlier. See Cab Calloway's moves here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=HaZOXF83zBg

In other news, my Lawyering professor read everyone's Facebook profile that he could view. =/

today's ingredient

2007-09-02T00:44:00.001-04:00

I met a girl who is a human Necker cube. One second she'll look cute, then suddenly she'll look like the host from Iron Chef. I cannot explain this any further.

One nice thing

2007-08-30T08:45:00.000-04:00

One nice thing about being a CS major from Silicon Valley is, you can tell all the poli sci kids from New York that Sunnyvale gives complimentary "wireless hats" to its residents. And they'll believe you.

Tomorrow: Steve Jobs gives my dog a free iPhone

last weekend

2007-08-28T23:11:00.000-04:00

* Met two people who immediately grokked my shirt. Nice.

* One of them has read the Monster manga. Double nice. But her favorite Pokemon is Psyduck. Eww dude. Scyther all the way.

* Helped a drunken person hobble and puke her way back to her apartment for the first time. Amazingly I never did this in college despite being the only Sober Guy at most drinky events.

* Listened to the same person practicing violin in the law school kitchen the next day. She's hella good (pro quality) and I guess she gets over hangovers fast. Hope she keeps practicing regularly.

* You know who's not good? The guy in my apartment who diddles on his keyboard when I'm trying to sleep. Argh stop accompanying imaginary middle school choirs (that's what it sounds like)

* Signed up for a few clubs at the activities fair. Especially the ones that gave out food. The Hong Kong Students Association had white rabbit candy! Nice! See you guys on Saturday!

* Noticed the undergrads here are signif. more attractive than at H and immediately felt guilty for thinking that. Man I was a college senior not three months ago and now I feel like the star of the next To Catch a Predator episode.

* Note to self: avoid Collegetown Bagels and Rulloff's for breakfast.

Early impression of professors

2007-08-28T22:39:00.000-04:00

Summers (Contracts)
The 2Ls said he's scary. Picks one poor student every class and latches onto him for an hour, teaching the whole lesson through a Q&A session with the kid. So far he does seem to like staying on one victim, but he's not all that scary, despite trying to trip people up. (Look for a change of mind when I'm in the hot seat.)
Favorite line: "Ma-toor" (mature)

Heise (Torts)
They call him "Coach" Heise and I see why. First day of class he told us that we were all his "clients" and he would work for us. He talks and gesticulates like he's trying to pump us up for the BIG GAME WHOO GO TORTS. But he also likes to let students answer questions and doesn't answer very many himself. I wonder if he knows what's going on sometimes. Occasionally he says things that sound good at a distance, but when you step closer you're not sure what he just said. I will call this the Heise Uncertainty Principle.
Favorite line: "OK GOOD NOW TURN THAT EXACT SAME ARGUMENT AROUND AND MAKE IT WORK FOR THE OTHER SIDE YES EXCELLENT"

Alexander (Property)
At first I thought he was touched in the head. He speaks slow-ly and e-nun-ci-ates every syllable like he was screwing a lightbulb into the mud. He even wiggles his head a little bit from side to side like the lightbulb doesn't want to sit still. But he's my favorite professor so far. Alexander is agile in answering students' questions and he asks good questions of his own. And he's pretty funny.
Favorite line: can't remember one, his style of speaking is funnier than his words

Rossi (Civil Procedure)
Rossi is old and has been doing this shit for a long time. He has his lectures memorized hard. He seems like a good lecturer so far, but I can't really judge. The material is pretty dry (read the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure sometime) but at least easy to follow.
Favorite line: his impression of an unscrupulous judge trying to get two parties to settle out of court

Mollenkamp (Lawyering)
This guy is crazy energetic. He would live a long life as a fish he's so off the hook. We haven't done much substantive work in his class yet but I still feel exhausted when I step out of Lawyering.
Favorite line: "WOO!" (quoting Will Smith)

Class schedule

2007-08-28T00:30:00.000-04:00

This is what's up

M
0905-1000: Contracts
1010-1105: Torts
1115-1200: Property

Tu
Same as M

W
Same as M with the addition of Civil Procedure from 1325-1420

Th
0905-1000: Lawyering (damn straight it's a word)
1010-1105: Torts
1115-1210: Property
1325-1420: Civil procedure

Fri
0905-1000: Lawyering
1325-1420: Civil Procedure

16 credits

Ithaca

2007-08-28T00:06:00.000-04:00

Ithaca used to house a firearms company famous for its shotguns

Cornell has a reputation for a high suicide rate

Coincidence?

(Non sequitur-- must establish that Cornellians have unusually prehensile toes. -Ed.)

how did this get here

2007-08-27T23:58:00.001-04:00

haha whoa what the fuck

OK guys cut it out