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Quote of the Week:

“Why are you nodding your head ‘yes,’ when the answer is clearly ‘no?’ – Professor Cross

I don't remember who was in the hot seat when the professor asked that question, but it could have been any one of us.

Three weeks in, the welcome banners have been ripped down and wadded into trash, the door prizes long distributed and I’m sitting here with my Civil Procedure book and a companion volume of federal rules. To one side are the last two issues of my favorite magazine, still in the shrink wrap, along with an arsenal of brightly hued highlighters and Post-It flags that are not yet fully incorporated into my note-taking strategy.  On the other is a shoebox containing the remnants of a care package from my friend the organic gardener, who resorted to mailing the cherry tomatoes I requested when it became clear I couldn’t work a trip to her house into my schedule.

And something tells me they’re still taking it easy on us.

But while law school is taking on an unmistakable resemblance to work, I'm aware of an odd contentment I haven't experienced in a long time, a sense of momentum that comes with letting up on the throttle and allowing that needle in the brain to quiver in the red.

Whether by design or some kindly alignment of the planets, I ended up with a nominal amount of work for the weekend, a circumstance which gave me some time to reflect upon what I’ve learned. At this point, my body of legal knowledge consists mainly of some disjointed concepts, threads of what I’m told will eventually acquire some cohesion and weave themselves into a tapestry.

With that in mind, say you covet a piece of property.  My evolving grasp of adverse possession would suggest that you could throw a fence around it and, in the event no one notices for 15 years, claim it as your own, provided you’re willing to live with the stigma of being a land pirate. You wouldn’t want to try that just anywhere, though, and that’s one of the things about the law. What stands in Georgia doesn’t hold water in Minnesota. Then again, I could be wrong about the whole thing. Like I said, the concepts are all swimming around up there and my contracts are bleeding over into my torts.

And that brings me to my runner-up for Quote of the Week, courtesy of Professor Tomain:

“That’s the problem with the law -- there’s so much of it.”