Posts Tagged ‘CLS’

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??

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.

From the dawn of time man has sought to extinguish creatures large and small. Whether it be for food, clothing, or just the thrill of the hunt, the human race has attained its position of supremacy in the animal kingdom on the basis of its intelligence, guile, and opposable thumbs. But there are some feats of hunting that even we are no match for: I speak specifically of hunting mice in New York City.

You’ve followed my travails so I don’t have to tell you that I’ve tried everything. You’ll believe me when I tell you this is my very last resort. While I may have come up short in this epic battle for control of Studio Soleil, there is one creature that historically has never failed.

Meet my latest weapon, Six.

I spent a few hours on Thursday down at NYU Law (which is beautiful, by the way, and makes CLS look like a toaster) for their Public Interest Fair (we don’t have our own, but they let New York-area students leech off of theirs). I had an interview at 11AM and then I wanted to sit around picking the brain of one of the ADA’s who had a table there. The interview went well, I was very on. But I have approximately zero desire to work at the organization in question. I only gave their website a cursory glance before firing off an application. The night before the interview (and well past the deadline to cancel) I actually dug through their website and learned about their mission. Turns out I didn’t actually agree with a lot of their principles. But I figured interview practice never hurts. I left the fair around 3PM and headed up to my old neighborhood on the upper east side.

I got her from the ASPCA on 92nd Street. The people there are wonderful. I could not have asked for a better adoption experience. I went into the reception area and was greeted by a young, blond woman with a cheerful disposition and she helped me get my initial paperwork in order. Following that, an almost-elderly woman who volunteered as an adoption intake assistant (AIS) came to introduce me to some cats. She asked what I was looking for in a cat and I told her I wanted one that was no younger than ten. Incredulously, she asked, “Ten years old?” I nodded and she replied, “Why??” I told her that I felt sorry for older cats because no one seemed to want them and I didn’t mind so why not?

From that moment on I was paraded around the building like a war hero just returning home from battle. My AIS would stop every orange-shirted person she saw to tell them that THIS young lady wanted a cat that was ten years old and isn’t that special?

So then she brought me through the glass doors and sat me down to introduce me to Paulette. She was a very sweet lap cat. I don’t know what about me struck the AIS as someone who wanted a lap cat, but I wasn’t feeling any connection. And she was getting black hair all over my clothes. And she was only seven. So I asked to see some more cats. I met a giant fur ball named Brandy and caught a quick glimpse of my future. After I determined that I didn’t have a spare eight hours per day to spend vacuuming, my AIS led me upstairs and I saw a few more nice-looking cats in their glass habitats. No one really struck my fancy in the first room so we proceeded on to the second room where my congregation of AISes had grown to three. As they were definitely up there in years, I suspect they were particularly moved by my strict no youngins requirement.

I met a pretty white cat named Spot that they all seemed to adore although I could not for the life of me figure out why. He wasn’t friendly and when he was let out of his cabinet, he strutted around picking fights with all the other cabinetted cats. After Spot was put away, they showed me Shelley, who I had remembered from the ASPCA website. She was adorable. When they let her out, she came right to me and let me pick her up. I stood there holding her for a long while and knew she would be the one I would take home. She was apparently an ASPCA-worker favorite and everyone was especially nice to me when they found out I was taking her. At thirteen years old, she was the oldest cat I saw and probably the oldest one they had. She had her problems as old cats tend to have (a controlled-by-medication case of hypothyroidism), but she was small and perfect and I had to have her.

I brought her home, re-named her Six (not after the Blossom character), and she immediately went about inspecting everything. When bedtime came, I was surprised that she was still spry enough to make the leap from the floor to my bed. It being her first night and all, I allowed this transgression, but when I awoke in the middle of the night to her sitting on my chest I had a paranoid moment when I thought she was trying to kill me. This morning I put her little cat bed the ASPCA gave me on top of my bed and placed her in it. Ever since then whenever she jumps up onto my bed, she walks straight into her own and plops right down.

As I sit here alternating between writing this post and researching my issue for my moot court brief, she’s sitting under my chair quietly and calmly in a matter befitting someone of her years. As a Very Serious Law Student I’m happy with what a low-maintenance companion she’s turning out to be.