Archive for October, 2009

So fantastic news. We didn’t actually get our Legal Methods exams back, but the professor sent out a mass email detailing the good news and the bad. The good news – and it certainly is good – is that for the first time in years, no one failed the exam! Yes that’s right. We are rock stars. The bad news? None of us mentioned any facts. And apparently facts are important when you’re a lawyer? (According to the professor, “Ours is a fact-dependant profession and this I either failed to convey or you declined to learn.” I think from now on any time a professor calls on me, I’ll respond with, “I declined to learn that.”) Ah well. Failing Legal Methods would be an inconvenient humiliation I just did not need right now. So I’m happy.

Know what else makes me happy? Writing class! The first five minutes of class was productive: we were informed that our memo outlines are now due a week later (which gives me back my weekend) and the actual memos are due four days later. The rest of class we spent eating Halloween candy and building things with Play Doh from our writing instructor. It was a pretty good class.

Oh, the first memo! I got it back. She had individual conferences with all of us to discuss what we did right and what we could improve. Apparently I got confused about the structure and I need to re-arrange the whole thing, but she said my analysis was “great.” Re-writes aren’t required, but I’ll probably do them. I really like our writing instructor (see above re: candy and Play Doh) so I don’t want her to think I’m not taking her class seriously (even though see above: candy and Play Doh).

The other interesting thing going on for 1Ls is choosing our spring elective. We have three required classes next semester (property, constitutional law, and criminal law) and we get to choose our fourth out of seven options. It’s some kind of lottery system where we rank all seven options in order of preference and the Registrar endeavors to assign as many of us to our top choices as possible. I have it narrowed down to two top choices. One is a class that sounds really fun. It meets three times a week for an hour each session and you spend the first two classes learning about some aspect of lawyering and then the third class you actually apply what you learned by assuming the role of an attorney in a given situation (like a custody battle, for example). The other class is all about statutory interpretation. The reason I’m considering it is that it feels like it might be more useful in the long run and more impressive to a judge (I want a clerkship after graduation). The other thing to consider is that for the first class, we’re graded on a paper and a final exam. For the second class, we have two papers and a final exam. (Now that I think about it, that should end the debate right there.)

So I’m not sure what to do. Do I take the fun-sounding class with the less harsh grading? That class is guaranteed to be huge and maybe I should think about taking the statutory interpretation class which will be much smaller. The powers that be keep telling us we should be cultivating relationships with faculty for letters of recommendation down the road and that would be easier to do in a 20-person class rather than a 100-person class. Then again, next semester I’ll be taking four classes instead of three and I already feel like I couldn’t handle any more coursework so maybe I should try to take it easy with the elective. Decisions, decisions.

Then again. Maybe I should just take intellectual property.

Any 2Ls or 3Ls have advice?

As you may have noticed, IvyLife is no longer blogging here at t14. We have begun the search for her replacement and if you were contacted by us in the past two months about a position, you are still in the running. We are reaching out to the internet, though, in search of additional, new applicants who meet the very specific criteria we believe would be ideal for the open spot. We are seeking someone who:

• Attends Stanford, Boalt, or Duke.
• Is a 1L female who wants to blog.

This isn’t meant to discourage those who do not fit the criteria from applying, we are considering every application submitted. If you are interested, shoot me an email at blog@subtledig.com.

- Paul

I’ve always hated professors. It has nothing to do with their authority over my academic success, though I do have issues with authority. As a class, professors are simply dull, stuffy, tame, vapid, and extremely disconnected. HLS profs, unsurprisingly, are the fucking apogee of this stereotype.

I recently crashed a semi-exclusive event filled with equal parts professors, administrators, students, and firm partners/donors. The event featured a bullshit cash bar, though everyone received a free drink with dinner. Fortunately, seeing my quickly empty glass, the waiter took pity and provided a free refill … seven times.

The format of the event was: mingle, eat dinner, watch a small presentation, eat dessert, mingle again. I was at a table in the back of the room with three profs (none my own), two other students, and two donors. Despite the alcohol, I was able to make it through the presentation without doing anything that could be framed as impolite. As the dessert carts came out, though, one of the donors asked me how I was enjoying law school, so I said, as nicely as possible, “I’m a little bored but everyone tells me that exams are pretty intense.”

The profs at the table immediately intervened, asking about my professors, my workload, and what I thought about both. I was honest. I said that while I’m sure the profs are quite intelligent and respected, I found their classes to be “only occasionally useful.” I didn’t have time to address the excessive workload, as both professors dove right into a discussion about how law students today are so focused on the next step, they don’t take the time to appreciate their wonderful scholastic opportunities, with which the table (including myself) agreed. Then they both made a catastrophic error, both in terms of fund-raising and mere validity. They asserted that the blame for students not properly appreciating their time at law school lied with the firms and the outrageous salaries.

Of course, the donors were like WTFWAT!? They posited that law school, with its archaic focus on extremely broad topics and one test per semester structure, was fucking retarded. They spoke about not learning a single thing in their third year and having no clue how to practice at graduation. Why should the students care about the work if it brings no utility?

One of the other students, who had been quiet the entire exchange, spoke up before the professors could respond (AND I QUOTE):

“Fellows, we are on a slick precipice that shall yield no fruit, might we change themes?”

I was the only person at the table who found the statement absolutely absurd, which means I was the only one at the table laughing, though I didn’t notice. Still oblivious, I put a piece of oddly flavored cheesecake on my nose and said:

“Fellows, the dessert is on a slick precipice, I feel as though it might meet its demise momentarily.” Then I moved my head forward and went, “OH NO! NOM NOM NOM.” The cheesecake did, in fact, meet its demise. I’m not positive about this, but I think I made one of the donors laugh.

The event broke for mingling shortly after and everyone at the table bolted towards opposite sides of the room. I went and found one of the professors and asked if he would be willing to discuss law school over a drink. He declined.

Then, I found the other professor and interrupted his conversation with someone who didn’t look very important and asked if he would accompany me to the bar down the street, where we could discuss the relative merits of law school. He looked at me as though I was some fucking cretin and said that he had to be leaving soon.

So I found one of the donors, who was talking to a relatively major administrator, he called the professors a myriad of harsh names and asked if I had any use for his four drink coupons. (apparently the donors were given extra drink coupons)

“Yeah, if you don’t need them.” Jackpot.

I ordered four whiskeys with the coupons and carefully carried all four glasses in stacks of two to the donor and the administrator

“I got these for you guys.”

The administrator turned me down but the donor seemed quite touched. He ended up drinking two of the drinks and we discussed the ridiculously contrived bullshit that is law school.

In conclusion, I still hate professors.

So as I said before, I have some thoughts about gunners that might run counter to what most people think. That is, gunners aren’t all bad. I am not, nor do I ever intend to become, a gunner and the gunners in my place have made themselves easily recognizable — always raising their hand in class to add their thoughts about some principle or another, countering the Professor’s hypo with a slightly modified hypo of their own, rushing to pack up their things at the end of class to be the first in line to ask questions to the Prof. Yes, it can get very annoying. Especially if the gunner has like an annoying voice or something, it can be like nails on a chalkboard whenever you see their hand shoot up mid-lecture (or better yet, when they don’t even raise their hand and just interject mid-lecture . . . which is quite disrespectful I’d like to add. Even more so considering how brilliant these professors are; I am sometimes awestruck how some people interrupt the flow and dynamic of the classroom with sometimes ridiculously trivial side comments).

Ok, so there’s a lot to be said about the negative qualities of gunners, but gunners live everywhere, not just in law school: business school, med school, even undergrad. Moreover, gunners exist everywhere OUTSIDE of school, like in your office when they might be competing to get the boss’s (or senior partners’) favor. So while it’s fully established that most people dislike gunners (unless one is a gunner oneself), what about the positive characteristics of gunners? This topic is something that has largely been neglected and I must say that I don’t think I have ever seen or heard anyone talking about the great things gunners do for the rest of us — not in person, not on ANY law-related Internet forums I have read, and not in any other venue. But from what I can tell, there are at least two very distinct and very positive qualities about gunners that deserve attention.

First, gunners give the rest of us a break in class. That is, when a gunner raises their hand and makes some comment that everyone else is certain is irrelevant or maybe extremely tangential, it gives us a break from the mad rush of typing notes for an hour-long class session. Unless a gunner’s comment or question is particularly brilliant or engages the professor in some compelling way (which it NEVER does) you can almost guarantee that it won’t be at all important in the scope of the class and that it will most certainly NOT be addressed on the exam. Thus, you can bet that any notes on the issue raised are useless, giving all of our cramped fingers and cloudy minds a short break from a bombardment of Socratic case analysis.

Second, everyone hates gunners. If the mutual suffering of 1L year doesn’t get people in a class to bond, you can bet that mutual hatred of another person will. Everybody else can rally around their distaste for this one person (or small collection or people). In effect, what you get is a great benefit to the many at the detriment of the few.

So at this point, that’s all I’ve thought about on my pro-gunner argument. But I would appreciate any further ideas — I’m writing a research paper. Ya know, in all the free time I have between writing memos and reading casebooks.