Archive for the ‘Soleil’ Category

Today at 5PM the final drafts of our appellate briefs were due. We’ve been working on them all semester. Now that they’re in, they’re going to be mailed to alumni judges and we have about one month to prepare for oral arguments. I think Columbia might be one of the few schools that makes moot court a 1L requirement. On the one hand, this is cool because it’s good experience. On the other hand, I can’t really put moot court on my resume when it’s a requirement for class. (Remember the days when you did things for the fun of them and not because they added padding for your resume? Yeah, me either.)

The computer labs were packed all day. Printers were in pieces scattered on the floor. Staplers were…well, they’re always broken. But by mid-afternoon I had four printed copies of the brief and dropped them off about an hour and a half before the deadline. And just like that it was out of my life forever! At least until the time comes to start prepping for oral arguments. But I have no plans to even think about that for the next two weeks.

Things are starting to get fun again. I won two free tickets to a new Broadway show that’s opening on Thursday, I’m going to a restaurant opening next Tuesday, and my mom and dad are coming to the city next week. Next week is spring break and I’m staying in the city. The weather has finally started to get spring-like so I’m planning to spend a lot of time outdoors. Many of the restaurants in my area have opened up their sidewalk cafes again and I can’t wait to get sushi in South Street Seaport while sitting outside and sipping peach saketinis. New York is awesome.

Another sign that spring is practically here is the throng of admits milling about the law school. They’re easily recognized by the folders in their hands and name tags clipped to their shirts. We had our first admitted students days last week. I’m not involved in any of the admissions activities so my interactions with admits were limited to the few of them who happened by my table during the PILF auction.

Oh, that reminds me. A brief PSA: To any 0Ls who plan to visit Columbia, this question will not be well received: “I got into Harvard and Yale…so why should I come to Columbia?” Apparently it isn’t common knowledge that that is a really obnoxious question. And any student who represents Columbia in any official capacity will probably not tell you you’re a d-bag for asking. But I don’t represent CLS. If you ask that question, you are a d-bag. And please, for the love of God, DON’T come to CLS.

It’s kind of crazy to think about the next class coming in and being finished with 1L year. I’m looking forward to 2L year but sometimes my Facebook friends who are 2Ls have some scary status messages about 2L year actually being worse than 1L. I had always just assumed 1L year was the hardest and that 2Ls who were overburdened brought it upon themselves by taking too much on. Any 2Ls care to comment??

So it’s official: I accepted the job offer and now I have to start withdrawing my applications from other places. It’s a pretty big relief to have my summer employment situation squared away. Without getting too far into the details, I’ll just say it’s a government position, it’s in New York City, and it’s unpaid. I’ll be living off my tax refund and Columbia’s guaranteed summer funding for public interest work. In order to qualify for the latter, I have accrue five volunteer hours helping the Public Interest Law Foundation with their two major events this spring: the PILF Auction and Deans’ Cup. The auction is this Thursday and I signed up to help out. Hopefully I can knock out all five hours so that I can just be a spectator at Deans’ Cup (our annual basketball game against NYU Law).

Now that the summer job thing is out of the way, I can put all my energies toward keeping up with my reading. Unfortunately, I just discovered this little show called Jersey Shore. Now, part of me feels that I should get up-in-arms about this affront to New Jersey and Italian-Americans just like my fellow Jersey countrymen, but it’s undeniable: Jersey Shore is just good TV. I’m about halfway through season one.

This weekend was supposed to be just like last weekend and I was supposed to be totally dominated by my brief. To a large extent that was true, but I did manage to see Shutter Island with James, my non-law school friend and neighbor. I usually hate movies like that but I thought Shutter Island was pretty well done. Anybody else see it? I think the trick to being cool with handing over $12.50 to see a movie is to lower your expectations to the floor before going in. You’re guaranteed to enjoy it. Unless it’s so bad that no amount of lowered expectations can save it (see: Vanilla Sky, Memento, Clerks II).

Anyway, the second draft of the brief is due tomorrow. I’ve finished the bulk of the changes I needed to make, but I need to edit it down big time. It’s just way too long. I have to cut at least two pages. But I’m so sick of looking at the damn thing.

So I just found out today that there are admitted students events going on at CLS this week? If any admits are reading this and have any questions about the school, feel free to leave them in the comments. I’m probably not the best person to dispense advice since I don’t think I’m having the typical 1L experience…but I also don’t hate law school as much as other 1Ls seem to so maybe I am an appropriate person to deal with the as-yet untainted 0Ls…

High school was far from the high point in my life. I was shy and didn’t have much self-confidence. I made mostly A’s without trying very hard, didn’t drink or really do anything very bad. In college, the CHI ceramic hair straightener was invented and suddenly it was a whole new world for me. Needless to say, I was not all that thrilled to hear from 2Ls that law school is exactly like high school. But they were right!

• Lockers. In high school they were a necessity. Mine was a veritable jungle of loose papers, pens, Post-Its, hair ties, spare gym clothes, and other crap. My locker today is bare except for a pen and a flyer for some event by the Center for Chinese Legal Studies. Theoretically, it’s a very handy thing, my locker. But since I prefer to leave the law school building the second class ends, I really have no use for it. I can count the number of times I spent any significant amount of time at the law school outside of class hours on one hand.
• Crowded hallways. My junior year, a wing of the high school had to be shut down while they cleaned out the asbestos in the walls. (Yeah, Jersey public schools!) As a result, they put us on a split schedule with the upperclassmen arriving at 6AM (as opposed to our normal 7:15AM) and checking out at 12PM. Then the underclassmen came in and had their classes till 6PM. This lasted about a month. Our high school was so overpopulated that the infrastructure couldn’t handle us. Similarly, in law school, practically everyone is on the same schedule and all the classes are held in this one building. When class ends and people pour into the hallways it’s always impossible to move for a minute or two while people mill about.
• Gossip. I guess gossip will exist whenever people are thrown together in any context, be it school or work or whatever. I’m not really plugged into the whole law school gossip scene; I never know what’s going on. Occasionally I’ll hear interesting things, but on the whole, law school gossip is a whole lot nerdier than high school gossip: who’s working where, who got what grades, who’s stalking what professor’s reading groups…that kind of thing.
• Back pain. One year the problem got so widespread at my high school that the administration sent a note home with “helpful tips” on how to reduce back pain. Their favorite suggestion was the rolly backpack. And just like in high school, wheeling one of those things around the law school is not an option. So on Wednesdays, the day I have four classes, I trot back and forth the ten blocks to my apartment to switch out books thus ensuring that I am as inefficient with my time as humanly possible.
• Pizza. Maybe your high school wasn’t like this, but mine always smelled like pizza, whether they were serving it that day or not. The smell just always kind of hung in the air. Similarly, Columbia reeks of pizza all the damn time. You walk in the front doors and you’re immediately assaulted by the thick cheesy aroma because this or that organization is hosting a lunch and no one goes to anything during their lunch hour unless there is free food (this aspect is a lot more like college than high school). Crafty organizations advertise their events with the alluring “non-pizza lunch” descriptor. It doesn’t matter what it is, but if it isn’t pizza, it’s sure to draw a crowd.

In other news, by this time Friday I’ll know what I’m doing this summer. Actually, I already know what I’m doing in terms of the work, but location is still sort of up for grabs. Well, not really. I’ll be in New York of course. But Friday I have a deadline to accept an offer. The only reason I’m waiting is that I still haven’t heard from another organization that I would also really like to work for. The jobs are the same so it doesn’t really make a difference though. But it’s exactly the kind of work I came to law school to do so I’m pretty excited about that. I can’t wait to be working again.

I bet you didn’t have as sexy a Valentine’s Day weekend as I did. The first draft of our appellate brief was due Monday and by Saturday I had nothing but a meager outline going for me. I was up by 8AM and fueled by Stewart’s Root Beer (also known as ‘God’s gift to mankind’), I powered through all day. Twelve hours later I was practically finished with the first of two sub-issues so I rewarded myself with Netflix and early bedtime.

Sunday, Valentine’s Day, was largely a rerun of Saturday except for two hours spent at Jorge’s (far superior) studio apartment hammering out the facts section for the brief. Well, two hours is probably an exaggeration. We probably spent most of the time ordering lunch, eating it, and gossiping about our classmates and maybe only 20 minutes really working on the facts.

I returned home and spent the next seven hours completing the brief. By 10PM I had an adequate first draft and the satisfaction of clicking Send to turn it in was mitigated by the fact that I still hadn’t started any of the reading for my three classes the next day. I thought about just not doing it. But last week I resolved that this week would be the beginning of a new leaf for me. A leaf in which I actually did all the reading for all my classes and actually showed up to all my classes. So far it’s been going really well. Although (as of this writing) it is only Tuesday. Baby steps, people.

Even though the hallowed day of love was ruined by the wretched brief, I reaped some karmic benefits in class today with a little post-Valentine’s Day romance. I had a premonition Monday night that I’d be called on in class the next day so I read the cases very thoroughly. Sure enough, out of an on-call panel of at least 50, she called out my name. But I was ready. I explained the case and the issues (and did an awesome job of it), but then she asked a technical question. A simple question with a simple answer that eluded me since it had been a whole three days since we’d discussed the topic. It was there — buried somewhere in depths of my brain, covered by more recently-learned information. (You know what I’m talking about. The shelf life of case information in your brain is pathetically short. We read it a week ago? Well that’s the equivalent of ten years in Law School Time. I have a better chance of remembering how to balance a chemical equation, a feat I only half-mastered back in the 11th grade. You know, back when Savage Garden still had a career.) ANYWAY. So I blanked on the answer and emitted the requisite “Ummmmm,” in a desperate attempt to stall for time as I scanned the now-jumbled text on the page of my casebook. Right as I flirted with the edge of the line between acceptably long pause and embarrassingly long pause, the guy who sits next to me leaned over slightly and whispered the two-word answer which I quickly repeated to the professor. I continued adeptly handling the remainder of her questions until she set her sights on someone else.

I turned to my hero, smiled widely and whispered, “THANK YOU!” He returned the smile and replied, “No problem.”

Way in Which Law School Differs from the Real World #427: Forget flowers and candy and candle-lit dinners. A Socratic life raft is pretty much the most romantic thing ever.