tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6382293289257389362023-11-15T10:29:38.114-05:003L at U of LCasual observations of a late-blooming law studentSharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-71204653063257349352013-05-11T11:49:00.002-04:002013-05-11T11:50:54.773-04:00Trust Me, I'm a Doctor<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Sometime in the fall of 2010, I dropped a stack of
first-year law books onto a scale, then fetched the second armload and dropped
it on there too. The idea was to calculate somehow the degree and duration of
pressure the bad disk in my neck could withstand before it burst. But I’m no
good at math, and so I bargained with the disk instead. Three years, I told it.
That’s what I need from you. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Thirty-three months later, the disk is intact and
so am I, more or less, even if the gaping breaches in the gray matter are fully
exposed, and virtually everything I thought to be true is cast into doubt. But
that’s law school.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Prolonged stretches of boredom punctuated by
seizures of panic that a single misstep might cause the whole house of cards to
collapse. That’s law school. A vague sense that this might just be a colossal
scam, that there may never be adequate return to wipe out unspeakable debt and
make the whole enterprise a wash. That’s law school. Rare bonds of friendship,
the kind common among old campaigners who exist to assure one another that all
perception is skewed in here, after all, and that we will live to tell about this.
Maybe we’ll even laugh about it. That’s law school, too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Law school is a long moment of desperation from
which you might emerge whole in spite of your own self-sabotaging efforts to
snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Law school is wounded ego soothed now
and then with a thin balm of success. Law school is arrogance in the rightness
of your position, inflated in direct proportion to the hard-won realization
that there is no black and white and that sometimes your hubris is all you
have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Law school is furious vicissitudes of judgment in
which you conclude on an alternating basis that this was either the best or the
worst thing you ever did. Law school also is the prelude to what, by all
accounts, is The Worst Summer of Your Life. I have had more summers than some,
and the coming weeks will tell whether the one spent preparing for the bar exam
eclipses the others that were less than perfect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">I can contemplate all
that tomorrow. Because I get what passes for a sheepskin until the real thing
is in my hands, today can be one of the days on which law school was the best
thing I did. Whatever it turns out to be, it’s all right. Trust me. I’m a juris
doctor.</span><!--EndFragment-->
Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-52771492396476248152013-01-31T15:30:00.003-05:002013-01-31T15:37:35.887-05:00Wash Teeth, if any, and Draw Milan<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">January, even a good January, can be merciless. January pokes at the
sediment until it finds the motionless mass that is you, rousts you out off the
ocean floor and drags you wincing back to the surface. January went and did it
again, pulled me and my third-year colleagues back for the second half of what
conventional law-school wisdom holds is the year that bores you to death. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I am less bored with law school than inured to its attention-seeking
whine. A 3L has things to do. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Time
is elusive and patience is thin. There are bar applications and job
applications, forms and photographs and all manner of mysterious fee, and yet
law school whimpers for its due. We are more done with law school than it is
done with us, but the feeding tube is out and the morphine drip is in. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Whatever ground is left to cover, I am changed in fundamental ways. I
catch an old Twilight Zone, the one set in a gentlemen’s club at a time when
that meant cigar-chewing men in book-lined dens and overstuffed leather. An old
colonel annoyed by a young man’s incessant chatter promises him a half-million dollars
if he will refrain from speaking a word for a solid year. Time was, I would
have marveled at the masterful storytelling both for its own sake and for what
it said about human nature and desperation and the pull of the dark impulse.
Today, I switch off the set thinking breach of unilateral contract and shake my
head at the detrimental reliance at the heart of the whole affair. This is
where law school bows out and the world takes over. We’re inexperienced as hell
and equipped with just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but there are things
we won’t know until our boots are on the ground. We know, for example, that the
Uniform Commercial Code was authored by the devil himself, but the full
depravity of it is a mystery until then.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Those of us who suffer from competing streaks of perfectionism and
indecision know that when the twin traits intersect they can produce a deadly
philosophy that says until it can be done perfectly, it cannot be done at all. I
resolve to improve, and begin to experiment with lists. I turn to the Internet
for inspiration, the way one does, and run across two lists of interest. One is
a 1490 to-do list culled from a small leather notebook purportedly carried by
Leonardo da Vinci: “[Discover] the measurement of the Castello,” “Get the
master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.” “Draw Milan.” The
other is a 33-item list of New Year’s resolutions compiled by Woody Guthrie in
1942: “Wash teeth if any.” “Help win war – beat fascism.” “Love everybody.”
“Dream good.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">My list reflects neither the erudite aspirations of Leonardo da Vinci
nor the sweet humanity of Woody Guthrie. For 30 days or more, it was a series
of tedious tasks capable of distillation into just one: gather up the shreds of
paper that document your existence on earth, shove the whole of your life into
a nine-by-twelve envelope and dispatch it to an omniscient force empowered to
assess the suitability of, if not you, then at least the paper you, for the
practice of law. Now that my bar application is submitted, however, I have
renewed hope for this list thing. With the bitterness of January gone and the
number of weeks in this final semester diminished by four, the list could
channel chaos and uncertainty into something that resembles order. If nothing
else, the list can be a way of re-centering oneself. The things we deem
important say a lot about who we are. I will start the Great 3L List with borrowed
ideas that constitute something of a Woody-Leonardo hybrid: Study hard. Be kind
to people and animals. Live with integrity. Dream good.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">If you’re seized by
third-year apathy, remind yourself that it’s only law school talking. Should
you reach the point where you no longer care, tell yourself it means you’re
good and ready to move on. Make yourself a list. While you’re doing that, I’ll be washing my teeth
and drawing Milan.</span><!--EndFragment-->
Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-41129524675074365102012-11-16T15:42:00.001-05:002012-11-16T15:42:58.095-05:00Viewed in the Light Most Favorable<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I don’t need a calendar. I know the season, more or
less, from the undefined ache that flares along my jaw line in the weeks
leading up to final exams. It must be November, for that’s when I curse myself
for taking on too much, for denying my own limitations lest someone else tell
me what they are. In another week, I’ll be convinced that my grasp of the law
is far too tenuous to survive any sort of scrutiny. But I’ll still be a
third-year law student, which means I’ll be operating on the sweet fumes of
apathy and resignation. I’ll find solace in the common third-year notion that
if law school were going to break me it would have done so by now, character
inquiries and bar examinations notwithstanding. My attention will have turned to
real-world concerns, like whether there’s a real-world job trading real-world
currency for a student-loan slave in an economy that’s in the toilet. I don’t
require excess, but I require enough. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I’m fresh off one of my semi-annual tirades on
postal abbreviations when I consider my own tendency to escape the overwhelming
big picture by focusing on detail. To understand that, you need to understand
that third year can be a lonely enterprise. You scan your classroom and encounter
a sea of unfamiliar faces. You never know whether you’re the only one who has
days of going through the motions and nights when the whole heaving continent
closes in. In those moments, lost in that broad gray landscape that separates
the truth from a lie, you retreat to those things you know to be true. And one of
the things I know to be true is that big honking two-letter acronyms may
facilitate the delivery of mail, but don’t do a thing for the flow of a
sentence. The old professor who said never yield to the U.S. Post Office on
that score also said never, under any circumstances, to use the word “enhance.”
And I never have. But law school has a way of eroding even the brightest of
your bright-line rules. My speech today is peppered with double negatives and
twisted phrasing. <i>Hey, </i>I could venture, <i>that protrusion in the middle
of your face is not inconsistent with a breathing apparatus</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I know I digress. It’s not about the odd neuroses
that defined us before law school, or the new ones that have supplanted them.
It’s about a vague craving for certainty and the rambling thoughts that occur
to you when you understand there’s no such thing. We should go for a drink
sometime, Two-Thousand-Nine Sharon and I. We could talk about this law-school
thing and linger for a time over the prospect. She could tell me the way she
thinks it will be, and I could tell her the way it is. Knowledge is power, she
would say. Contracts are hard, I would counter. And on it would go like that
until she said something trite like it’s all in the attitude, and I would punch
her right in her breathing apparatus. And then I would feel badly, because I
would know she is right. I would help her to her feet, tell her to gather her
senses, and get herself to law school. View it in the light most favorable to you, I might say in my newfound lawyerly nomenclature. You will mostly love it, I would say.
There will be days you will hate loving it, but you will love it nonetheless.
Uncertainty takes care of itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Two-Thousand-Twelve
Sharon and her classmates are thumbing through a stack of paper handouts and
listening to a bar-admissions panel remind us that we need not only pass the
bar exam, but be adjudged of fit character to practice law. We’ve heard this
numerous times and, without fail, we leave the forum convinced that every past
misdeed is the one that will doom us. Every glass of spilled milk is the one
that renders the past three years moot and precludes our entry into the ranks. Only
when we’re good and paralyzed are we assured that our failings will be viewed
in the light most favorable to us. Experience does, after all, weave itself
into the tapestry that makes us who we are. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">I could go on about the bar exam itself, its
essays and its multiple-choice questions crafted with an intent to deceive, but
there will time to ponder all that. I have final exams to study for, and the
Real Housewives of Wherever to distract me from time to time.
Two-Thousand-Twelve Sharon is still a third-year law student, and her nerve
center has restored itself to a default setting of basic function: Eat. Sleep.
Think about postal abbreviations. Don’t fight her on this. She’s a volatile
third-year law student, equal parts trepidation and bravado, and that’s all the
stress she needs.</span><!--EndFragment-->
Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-77779636897540242572012-08-14T17:13:00.002-04:002012-08-14T17:13:15.584-04:00The Year of Living Arrogantly <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Suppose you have a mannequin in your trunk, she begins. Say it’s a nude, a male, and say you can’t close the lid without you tie it down with twine, and so you’re driving down the road with mannequin privates showing out your trunk. Can you get arrested for that?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Having spent the summer clerking for a criminal-defense attorney, I know that when the question is whether you can get arrested, the answer is always yes. But I also know there are times when it pays to be selective in one’s inquiries. And so I opted for the middle ground, responding with some vague speculation about whether mannequins are patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community and following it up with the disclaimer that trills as easily off the tongue as name and address: <i>Can’t give legal advice</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I dismissed the exchange shortly after it occurred midway through the summer because I hadn’t yet entered the profound existentialist funk that generally ushers one into the third year of law school. But then I started to wonder whether the skill it takes to answer that question and myriad others like it is the skill I’ve been working to master. It was a momentary sense of uneasiness coupled with the realization that that caveat about not being qualified to give legal advice, a hallmark of professional responsibility among law students, does not hold water forever. I don’t know why I thought I should document my symptoms, but I tore a sheet of paper from a legal pad. <i>Sluggish</i>, I wrote. <i>Suffer from apathy of unknown origin.</i> I consulted an attorney I know, who diagnosed me with an acute case of third-year malaise. Take two milligrams of suck it up and don’t call me in the morning.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">It’s the year that bores you to death, they say, that final year of law school when you grow numb and disgusted with the whole affair and prickly at the suggestion that all those dire reports of anemic job markets and inflated placement statistics and visions of student-loan slavery might just have some relevance to your life. By all accounts, it’s the year we phone it in, the year we’re entitled to take offense when our names are called in class, turn to some second year and say take this one won’t you, and, while you’re at it, make me a sandwich. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">But that’s not the whole of it. This is also the year we presumably experience a renewed sense of forward momentum fueled by a reuptake of oxygen into bloodstream and brain. It’s the year we load up our plates with last call for opportunity in the event we don’t eat again. The mandatory sessions on managing stress and coping with increased predisposition to alcoholism are behind us, and the only things standing between us and a license to practice law are two sets of finals and a little detail I like to call the bar exam. Humility will have its day, but these are heady times. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">And so we’ll shrug off the lethargy for a while longer and indulge ourselves another year in a law-school cocoon that is alternately terrifying and safe. Should your affairs grow complicated in another 14 months or so, look us up. With any luck, we’ll be qualified to dispense legal advice.</span> Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-62863104525764746942012-05-12T18:27:00.001-04:002012-05-12T18:27:36.629-04:00Nancy and Them<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">We met them in the summer of 2010, which was either a day or a decade
ago. It’s hard to say when you live in that strange time zone peculiar to law
school and the armed forces, a suspended reality in which connections coalesce
and dissolve at the mercy of intense temporary assignments.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">They had survived that intimidating first year of law school and thus seemed
infinitely wise. By and large, they still do. Tonight’s fresh crop of graduates
from the Brandeis School of Law will always be a year farther down the road than
we are and hence a shade more seasoned. This is significant even though, in
real time, a year is no time at all. In this context, where the not-so-subtle
pressure of indoctrination triggers seismic shifts in perspective within a
matter of weeks, a year is all the difference and then some. In time, we would
come to understand that their secrets were not so much secrets as time-tested
strategies handed down through generations of law-school culture as surely as
that threadbare maxim that the first year of law school scares you to death,
the second works you to death and the third bores you to death. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">And so we who were scared to death latched onto their coattails, hoping
to learn from their missteps lest we make them our own, and adapting their
recipes for success to fit our own ingredients. We listened to their
assessments of this professor’s penchant for toying with first years and that
one’s predilection for brain-twisting fact patterns on final exams. We tracked
their progress for harbingers of what was to come. Now they’re moving out to
study for the bar and pound the pavement for jobs, and we newly minted third
years are moving in. I’m told each year’s crop of students bears its own unique
stain. This newly graduated class -- or at least those members of it that I
know well – possesses varying degrees of brilliance, generosity and self-deprecating
humor, which is just the way I like my mentors, generation gap or no.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Law school threatens to break you down at startling intervals. If
you’re as lucky as we were, someone with a whole two semesters more under his
or her belt will come along to reassure you that it’s not as bad as you think
it is, that you are not in your right mind and that all that doomsaying is just
law school doing what law school does. I made a mess of class actions, I lamented.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>I totally tanked the Erie
Doctrine last year</i>, one of them shrugged.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I wonder what becomes of us now that we no longer share the
day-to-dayness of dwelling in the law-school foxhole. Are the new graduates so finished
with law school that they are also finished with us, along with our relentless one-more-year
chatter? Or are we done with them first, smug in our new status as the most
battle-scarred students in the house? My hope is that neither is true, that
those two overlapping years somehow cemented a relationship or two and that we
will reconvene periodically to show off our law-school scars and bore the
daylights out of anyone and everyone who wasn’t there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Congratulations, boys and girls. If nothing
else, we’ll see you in court.</span><!--EndFragment-->Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-44798509680110235502012-04-02T14:30:00.000-04:002012-04-02T14:30:18.970-04:00The Paper<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal.dotm</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>668</o:Words> <o:Characters>3809</o:Characters> <o:Company>University of Louisville</o:Company> <o:Lines>31</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>7</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>4677</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>12.0</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I called it Ayatollah for a day or two, and then abandoned the urge to give it a name at all for want of one that reflected its truly sinister nature. It was just as well, as a name would have granted the thing an unearned voice apart from my own and a power with which it might have seized even greater control of my life. After that, I just called it The Paper.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The Paper is a treatise on an obscure and all but doomed provision of the Affordable Care Act that would have offered cheap long-term care insurance to people who might eventually have used the money to stay at home and delay the need for an expensive government-funded bed in a nursing home. More importantly for my purposes as a law student, it represents an opportunity to fulfill my upper-division writing requirement. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has also robbed me of my even temper, temporarily displacing my congenial disposition with an uncharacteristic surliness. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">As a houseguest, The Paper was not altogether intrusive in the beginning. It slept a lot. Occasionally, it would stir and rise up blinking with a certain listless hunger, but then it would curl back onto itself and resettle into a gray mass with its face against the wall. In three weeks, though, it started to smell. In four, it turned on me in earnest. I would come home to find it had eaten my food, rummaged through my closets and rearranged my furniture. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I procrastinated, and then I tried to bargain with it. When that didn’t work, I procrastinated some more. And then I went back and tried to kill it with kindness. But it had these antennae that were sensitive to fear. It would curl a lip up over its fangs and grin, knowing that each day it was gathering a strength and intelligence that outmatched my own. At night, I would chain it to the kitchen table. It would chew through its restraints and wake me with a boot on my throat. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">As legal discourse goes, 26 pages (33 if you count endnotes, and why wouldn’t you?) is nothing. But it’s not the kind of writing where you invent people out of whole cloth and leave them to spin out their destinies on the page, nor is it the rough draft of history that constitutes a news story. Here, there is no truth without accuracy, and close enough is not nearly close enough. The endnotes alone demand a precision of format that would challenge a watchmaker. In the end, there is nothing to do but to accept the fact that it must be done. You wade in and wrestle back the tentacles until only one of you is standing.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I admit I am given to hyperbole. I understood I might have employed an unwarranted degree of melodrama when people with whom I have little more than a nodding elevator acquaintance in the building where I work started to inquire as to how The Paper was going. That can mean only one thing. At some point, in a desperate moment that didn’t even commit itself to memory, I have pinned a virtual stranger to an elevator wall and articulated the injustices of law school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I decided to keep it closer to home. I took to texting a friend who was embroiled in her own writing project. We exchanged progress reports several times a day, making vague promises to pop corks on fine champagne in the event we managed to meet on the other side of our papers. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">It all reminded me of a past life cobbling cryptic notes into what used to be described as a magazine-length piece and the angst that would always accompany the process. The memory dates to a time before law school, if there really was such a time, peopled with journalistic ghosts who still occupy the fringes of my life, but whose disengagement from all things law-related renders them momentarily irrelevant. My habit when I sat down to write was to stare at the blinking cursor for a time, and then turn to the colleague who occupied the desk just to the left of mine and plaintively call his name. “Let me guess,” he would mutter with a mouthful of bologna sandwich. “This is the one that’s going to kill you.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">As it turned out, this was not the one that would kill me. The day has come, as it always does, when you fling open the windows, wave a little sage around the room, breathe in the sunshine and find that all is well again. The Paper is fully formed, or as fully formed as it is likely to be, ready to go forth and either stand or fall on its own merits. For now, it lies in the hands of the professor and the three classmates he assigned to critique it. For all I know, they are at this moment yanking down its pants and stuffing it into a locker. After the way The Paper treated me, I am not even sure I will leap to its defense. That’s what I call justice.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-72915238153117299852012-02-12T16:19:00.003-05:002012-02-12T18:04:50.116-05:00Defending Those People and Sleeping at Night<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I’ve seen my share of courthouses and haven’t walked into one yet that didn’t smell of a complex blend of antiseptic and morning breath and standard-issue misery. Even the new ones acquire an odor that seeps into the pores of that low-bid government tile and is one of the peculiarities of practicing law that they can’t recreate in law school. A trip to one courthouse is more or less a trip to them all, all places where lawyers stride in and out of conference rooms and clients shamble aimlessly at their heels and jurors loiter in hallways checking their watches.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I know this by virtue of a previous incarnation as a journalist, but mostly I know it because I am a second-year law student with one foot in the classroom and the other in the courtroom, where I carry the coat of a criminal-defense lawyer and soak up the subtleties I always missed from my place in the cheap seats. It’s what I do with some 20 hours a week not spent enumerating the advantages of a revocable trust or parsing the intricacies of healthcare reform. If you’re a law student, regardless of where your proclivity lies, the criminal-justice system is not a bad window on how all this academia works on the ground. As fields of expertise go, it is the law the most closely situated to the heartbeat and it is also the law that most closely resembles a street-corner shell game. Or at least that’s the way it looks from my vantage point, unjaded by years of dreary deal cutting and more than a little prone to outrage. People who will need fulltime work in the not-so-distant future should be wary of carving out niches, but I do like it when the stakes and the adrenaline are high, and my limited exposure to criminal law affords me at least that much.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I’m idly running all this through my head as my boss and I pull onto the interstate and head for some county courthouse where he is to try a DUI case and I am to observe. He thinks it will be good experience for me. Now the law is crafted to cover all contingencies, and generally does until some aberrant set of circumstances demands it be tweaked or scaled back, broadened or honed to a finer point. But there are contingencies from which no artful language can save you and for which the legislature is of little use. These are the stalled engines and the vomiting toddlers and, in our case, the expert witness clutching his chest on an emergency-room stretcher an hour prior to trial. The lawyer hangs up the phone and rethinks his strategy aloud. There is reason to believe the court will not take kindly to a continuance and so the defense must prepare to go forward, witness or no. If our client has followed direction, he is waiting hat in hand to have his day in court. I can see the gears turning in that lawyerly head as he articulates his stance, and then takes up the government’s racket and nimbly returns his own serve. Jesus, I ask him, how did that even occur to you? Just thinking the way they think, he shrugs. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">As a person accustomed to taking two adverse positions and carving some truth out of the middle, I have had to work at this notion of aligning myself with one side or the other, using strategy to accentuate the positives and eliminate the negatives, whatever they may be. It’s important to know the other side so well that you could turn on a dime and argue their wrongheaded, unfounded position for them if you had to. It’s a technique I have the luxury of honing in the undistracted solace of the law library or at my kitchen table. To watch it done behind the eight ball in rush-hour traffic and against a ticking clock is to marvel at the skill of, say, an accomplished skater, when you’re still clinging to the rails. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That’s when it occurs to me that, at some point in your second year of law school, there is a subtle shift in the dynamic between the law-clerk you who is dispatched to the courthouse to fetch this or file that, and the would-be lawyer you, who is not a lawyer at all and who nonetheless has developed a sort of plucky hubris that says you get the idea and can take it from here, thank you very much. But this is the moment for which the law has been biding its time, the moment in which it gets to remind you that you don’t know one damned thing about one damned thing.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I’m learning, though. I’m learning the fine distinction between innocent and not guilty. A person who is not guilty is perhaps not innocent in the traditional sense of the word, but is culpable in a lesser way or for a different lapse in judgment than the government would maintain. A criminal-defense attorney is not always in a position to defend his client’s actions, but he has to defend his rights. It’s a maudlin sentiment more fitting for the pageant runway than for life in general, but a sovereign that wants to put a person in jail should at least be required to prove its case. And society deserves as much protection from overreaching prosecutors wielding a machete where a scalpel would do as it does from its own criminals. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We get to the courthouse and he explains to the client that there might or might not be a trial, but that he is ready nonetheless. As it turns out, though, the universe craves balance. A prosecution witness is sidelined as well, and the judge herself is hospitalized with some kind of swollen eyes. A stand-in judge tells us to come back another day. My boss laments the wasted trip. He tells me it’s always a victory when your client walks out of the courthouse with untethered wrists, but it’s hard to settle for a rained-out game when you knew you had a home run in you. I have not gotten to see a trial, but, just as he predicted, it has been good experience.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The law may be black and white at the margins, but is altogether gray in the vast landscape in between. And if you don’t buy into that theory, just give it time. Before law school is through with me, I’ll be crawling up into your head and arguing with myself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-6913133761597189082012-01-09T14:49:00.000-05:002012-01-09T14:49:18.304-05:00Mile 13<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal.dotm</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>626</o:Words> <o:Characters>3572</o:Characters> <o:Company>University of Louisville</o:Company> <o:Lines>29</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>7</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>4386</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>12.0</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I have a sister who runs, and I don’t mean casual pre-breakfast jogs to stimulate the circulation. I mean the self-flagellating, carb-loading, whey-measuring, cross-training, run-til-you-puke-because-it-feels-so-good sort of running that to me is symptomatic of a personality disorder. She has the musculature of a cheetah and the discipline of a monk and, I have long suspected, a seamless panel in her torso that conceals only circuitry and wire. It’s a makeup that serves one well in a number of contexts, and I consider it now because a colleague has repeated the worn maxim that law school is a marathon and not a sprint. The best marathoners are built for the long haul and the slow burn. We second years have covered enough ground by now to work a permanent shift in the disposition, and yet there’s as much distance ahead as there is behind, and that’s if you discount one post-graduation mean season in which life consists solely of preparation for the bar exam and another on the ropes waiting for the results. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">If that smacks of negativism, it’s only because a law student doesn’t feel the magic every day, and the days spent reanimating the brain after those idle Christmas weeks are among the least magical of them all. We’ve shown up for our first spring classes, albeit with bed heads and sleep in the corners of our eyes. Back, as Bob Dylan once put it, but not back all the way. I find that, in my zeal to upturn the overfilled plate of the fall semester, I have gotten too far out of my head. I neglected to pace myself as well as I might have last term, and, in my relief to be done with it, have cast my splintered interests too far afield. Reining them back into focus requires some muscle. Still, that vague sense of stolen time from a year ago is gone, and in its place is a happy resignation. Law school is the needle planted in my vein, and all that reasonable double-speak the fluid dripping from an unsightly pouch that swings from a pole and trails me wherever I go. I no longer bargain with law school over lost time or the propriety of its demands, and I’m surprisingly good with that.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I am good with it even when my head writes checks that my body can’t cash and I lose sleep over which commitment can best weather the short shrift. I’m OK with it even when I read another version of that perennial trade-journal story that says anyone smart enough to get into law school should be smart enough not to go. I’m OK with it because I can make the black and white arguments, but to navigate the gray space where the lion’s share of the law lives requires more than a surface commitment. I’m OK with it because the dogged nature of any given challenge more or less corresponds to the reward of knocking it down. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">For those of us who tend to think of every moment as a weigh station on the road to something else, who are forever chasing some nebulous point on the horizon where all is well and we’re content to maintain the status quo, there’s nonetheless a satisfaction in conquering the here and now. My sister and her circle of running enthusiasts explain it this way: when the world serves up an amorphous, indefinable pain, long-distance exertion lends it a tangible dimension, something it’s possible to vanquish and overcome. I relate to that in the sense that I can do an hour on the treadmill if there’s a glass of pinot noir in the offing, but it makes more sense in law-school terms. The more intense the chase, the sweeter the victory tastes. And, even though humbling moments abound and straight answers are scarce, there are triumphs along the way. Last semester alone, I discovered a penchant for the courtroom and drafted a brief I like to think was instrumental in persuading a judge to rule the way my boss wanted her to. And, in all that time, I wished ill to be visited upon only one professor, and it was only fleetingly and only that one time, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t even mean it. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">By all accounts, the genuine fatigue in a 26-mile marathon sets in around mile 20. That’s when they say you have to dig deeply for something you’re not even sure is there, the point at which you settle into a crippled saunter that might as well be a walk. Given that, mile 13 is not an altogether bad place to be, and another 13 is hardly anything at all. I can already taste the pinot noir.</span><!--EndFragment-->Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-634161977709784542011-12-02T23:05:00.000-05:002011-12-02T23:05:23.502-05:00Purple Daze<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal.dotm</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>701</o:Words> <o:Characters>3996</o:Characters> <o:Company>University of Louisville</o:Company> <o:Lines>33</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>7</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>4907</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>12.0</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">For some two weeks now, I’ve been suspended in the last surreal phase of the emotional lockdown that characterizes final law-school exam season. That means I shove my feet into faded-blue terrycloth slippers and pull on what is now known as my finals sweater, a bright purple rectangle of chenille fabric constructed for utilitarian purposes with no nod to aesthetics at all. I can’t remember how it came into my possession, but it’s the kind of sweater people pad around in when they’re sick, a comforting, affirmative statement that whatever self-consciousness you might once have had is long dissipated, and it perfectly suited for the study of law. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The prolonged wearing of the purple sweater is proof that I have entered the final throes of final exams. I know, because I’ve been here twice before, and the progression goes like this: three or four weeks prior to the first exam, the internal momentum that’s been building all semester reaches critical mass and the stress manifests itself in some physical way, typically a toothache or a twitch at the corner of the eye. What follows is an intensified, vaguely agitated phase in which I alternately pace the kitchen floor and hover in the glow of my laptop over 12 weeks of cryptic class notes. It is shortly after this that I notify my non-lawyerly friends that I will be incommunicado until further notice and that I will make it all up to them in December (or May, as the case may be). This is the phase where I begin to dream terrible dreams of what should become of my grades in the event my toothache should devolve into abscess or I am befallen by some other misfortune or, for example, lose my sense of direction and become incapable of locating the law school again. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">This, too, is when I begin to find the notes. We second-year students have endured two exam seasons already, and we’ve learned to recognize certain communal symptoms, principally the unshaven, myopic focus interrupted on occasion by the detached exchange and the uninhabited gaze. Aside from that, though, each of us bears his own peculiar indicia of pressure paired with unique coping mechanisms, and the writing of notes to myself is evidence of mine. I find myself writing them with increasing frequency since I started law school. Leather-bound planners, smart-phone calendars and beeping digital to-do lists are all for show. The real story of my wildly fluctuating emotional temperature is told in a scattered collection of sticky notes with lint where the adhesive used to be. I pull on a coat I haven’t worn since last winter, shove my hand into the pocket and draw out an expired coupon or the torn corner of an oil-change receipt bearing words that must have meant something at the time I reduced them to writing. <i>Positive energy, </i>one might say. <i>Find out what this is</i>, demands another, with a bold arrow pointing to a faded pencil sketch of what could be anything from a formula for calculating punitive damages to a drawing of some insect I spied on the front step. Perhaps I fear all the new information going in will cause some of the old to slip out, that the firmly rooted hearsay exception now firmly rooted in my brain will dislodge some less-consequential fact, like, say, the password to my iTunes account. Perhaps I fear that crumbling in the gray matter that will put me on the receiving end of the disconnected look I’ve given to certain members of my family, on the side where the strain of undiagnosed mental illness tends to run. I can’t be sure. Self-analysis is a luxury a law student can ill afford.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Finals season can work on you and work on you like that if you let it, until you finally give in and resort to living in the unlaundered purple sweater with the toothpaste smear on the shoulder and console yourself with the knowledge that there are many, many ways of making it in this world that do not involve the practice of law.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I’ve yet to take a law-school exam in which I didn’t pause about 100 minutes in and flirt with the idea of crushing the thing under the toe of my shoe, packing up my belongings and strolling into the sunlight, leaving the law to wend its own way out of whatever hypothetical gridlock our professor has invented. Invariably, I dismiss the thought and soldier on. We all do. For all their emotional brutality, exams roll around infrequently enough for the pain to subside and for you to think, after another season on the ropes, you might just have another one in you.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">I am now down to one – Evidence – or, as I will be calling it until 9 p.m. Monday, The Beast. This weekend, I will gin up the stamina to pull on the purple sweater once more, for I am on the ropes, but I believe I have another one in me. Hand me a paper napkin, so I can make a note of it. Then call a cab, hand the note to the driver and tell him to drop me off in mid-December.</span><!--EndFragment-->Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-73902650339235786672011-11-10T12:28:00.000-05:002011-11-10T12:28:41.392-05:00Mock Trial is Your Life<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal.dotm</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>537</o:Words> <o:Characters>3062</o:Characters> <o:Company>University of Louisville</o:Company> <o:Lines>25</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>6</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>3760</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>12.0</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">My co-counsel hasn’t slept in five days and I haven’t showered in two. I glance around the room and conclude that no one has shaved in a week or more. My adversary glides toward the witness box, evidentiary rules tucked like a neat row of arrows in a quiver at his hip. I object. I <i>strenuously</i> object. But he is nonplussed. In a fluid motion, he draws Rule 801(c)(1)(d) from its sheath, the screaming arrow flies and my objection rattles in neatly split halves to the courtroom floor. Like that 1970s sitcom disc jockey whose reflexes only grew keener as he ingested more alcohol, my opponent’s precision is heightened when he is unencumbered by a need for sleep. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“From now until the second week in November,” our coach has announced with gravity, “mock trial is your life.” I quickly do the calculations in my head. If mock trial is to have my life, I must first barter it back from the splintered interests to which I’ve mortgaged it already. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s worth noting here that second-year law students lose a sizeable share of their sympathy stock. As demanding as the first year is, it’s all standard-issue stuff. Virtually every moment is accounted for, but every activity is required, mandatory, non-optional, de rigueur. There’s no way short of retreat to lessen your burden. After that, though, your wounds are largely self-inflicted, and the patience of those who once wished you well can begin to grow thin. But law-school resume builders appeal to that competitive streak that flares on some days and lies dormant on others and more or less defines us all. Perhaps you don’t need this thing or that, but you’re compelled to chase it nonetheless, for to do otherwise is to acknowledge limits, a thing law students are loath to do. We don’t like to lose, either, and that brings me back to the Intrastate Mock Trial Competition.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I’ve tried out for the team with the partial aim of polishing my courtroom presence. Effective litigation is more than having good law and a modicum of truth on your side. It’s the casual gesture that is not casual at all. It’s the pregnant pause scripted to appear unscripted. It’s a process of animation, a thousand calibrated parts disguised as an extemporaneous whole. I watch my more-experienced teammates and I envy the controlled delivery of one and the dramatic choreography of another. If it isn’t Atticus Finch shooting arrows at the heart of your argument, it’s Jack McCoy indignant at this affront to justice. I lull myself into thinking that what looks easy in the hands of a master will be easy for me as well. Points marshal themselves into such seamless narratives in my head, and yet they are flawed in the execution. I deliver my opening statement and am reminded that I’m afflicted with nasal tonality and uneven breath. Curse these hollers and the dialectal havoc they wreak.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">Weeks have passed since the eight of us received our mock-trial-is-your-life mandate, and there is no overstating the truth. Classes, clerkships, research, ancillary obligation and all manner of physical and emotional need have been little more than distractions pulling our attention from The Case. Even an early final exam and, for some of us, a first try at the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam were only temporary sojourns from our new, all-too-real homes in imaginary Marshall City in the sovereign state of Marshall. We travel to Lexington for the competition this weekend, and I suppose we’ll find out who’s guilty and who’s not. Win or lose, I’ll post it to the asset column. If law school has taught me anything, it is that any argument asserted with authority is a potential winner, and that my capacity for shamelessness is greater than I ever imagined.</span></div>Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-43410534585930556162011-09-30T13:39:00.000-04:002011-09-30T13:39:31.607-04:00No River in Egypt<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal.dotm</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>712</o:Words> <o:Characters>4059</o:Characters> <o:Company>University of Louisville</o:Company> <o:Lines>33</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>8</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>4984</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>12.0</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“How’s law school?” she chirps into the phone. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“Not bad,” I murmur. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">What my friend doesn’t know is that I have partaken of too much law again and awakened with a throbbing head full of hearsay. The sun is still low on the horizon, but I’ve been up for hours already, gulping French Roast and struggling to recapture the flow of a judicial opinion that has unfurled with seamless lucidity in my sleep and is now so much nonsense in the morning fog.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I once confined these overindulgences to certain nights of the week in the name of maintaining balance, but the second-year slate of classes and clerking and ancillary obligation has run routines more disciplined than mine right off the rail. The odd thing is that, despite all the dense reading and the circular logic and the resume peddling and the schedule with the 30-hour appetite and the 24-hour budget and the unspoken mandate to conduct oneself like a lawyer, whatever that means, law school is, by and large, just as I told my friend: not bad at all. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Veteran accounts of the first-year experience are largely in sync: transitions of volume and pace, and adjustment to the notion that a law-school project is never truly finished, only tamped down to a smolder, for there is always a smaller nesting box to open and a tangential path to explore, all conducted against a background hum of fear that, despite your best effort, you will turn out to be more chaff than wheat. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">But year two is the year of the individual, the year of tailoring the experience to fit one’s own needs. Yes to this project, no to that one, try out for this team, let that one go, careful, now, your eyes are bigger than your stomach. It’s a convenient system for those who know where they’re going, and mildly disturbing for those looking to cut their suits to fit the cloth of whatever employer comes down the pike. This is also the point at which you let down your guard long enough to see that your colleagues have let theirs down, too – if indeed they ever had them up – and are transforming from fellow boots into fledgling counselors with their own agendas and idiosyncrasies, their own peculiar strengths and weaknesses. I’m of a mind that there will be a seat for most all of us at the table, for virtually every human endeavor is, at some point, a legal one. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Law school can be a place where wildly divergent worldviews find common ground, and the kind of lawyers we will be depends in some measure upon character bent and whatever cross-section of the populace we represent. You have your showy blowhards, your wise observers, your peacocks and your Pied Pipers, your unassuming scholars, your chameleons, your hybrids, and so on. On occasion, you have your petty flamethrowers whose incendiary rhetoric says more about a desperate desire for relevance than some vile and isolated window on the culture. But this is law school, no field of shrinking violets, and those rare shows of bigotry rarely go unchallenged, even where the speech is so pedestrian, so utterly devoid of fact that swatting it down is like shooting a gnat with an elephant gun. Say your peace and cut your path far and wide from the source. That sort of thing tends to foul its nest all by itself, generally sooner rather than later.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The point is that the law is another of those occupations in which the line between what you do and who you are is blurred at best. It’s a phenomenon readily apparent to those who have watched us go from well-rounded conversationalists to insufferable one-trick ponies. It starts with the casual exchange over the uncharacteristic Scalia dissent and escalates until there you are, at 3 in the morning, scrolling for a fix on scotusblog.com. You try to keep it social and convince yourself you can, until legalese is the only arrow left in the quiver of your vocabulary. The price of curry powder at Kroger is shocking to the conscience. The take-a-number, take-a-seat system at the DMV is arbitrary and capricious. It goes on and on like that, until the civilians in our lives shrink to the sidelines and seek solace in one another’s company while we votaries of the law crave our own one-dimensional kind. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">There are days when I think an intervention is in order. The trouble is that the people with whom I spend most waking moments are as much in need of one as I am. There has to be a 12-step program at the end of all this, with higher powers to acknowledge and some sort of amends to make. But all of that comes, if at all, after the bar exam, which is out there gathering force like a baby hurricane in the Atlantic.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">One of my professors suggested recently that J.D. candidates would righty undergo four years of full-time study rather than three. “There is just,” he says, “<i>so much law</i>.” There is so much of it and yet, increasingly, we find there is never enough. We still think we can put it down whenever we want. And we still think denial is a river in Egypt.</span><!--EndFragment-->Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-37560081805059690062011-09-01T17:13:00.000-04:002011-09-01T17:13:13.964-04:00All the Shiny Things. <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal.dotm</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>668</o:Words> <o:Characters>3808</o:Characters> <o:Company>University of Louisville</o:Company> <o:Lines>31</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>7</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>4676</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>12.0</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’ve read a lengthy Supreme Court decision that includes two concurrences and a dissent when I glance back at some notes I have penciled into the margin. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“He can’t be serious,” I have written, drawing a bracket around the comment and bisecting it with a bold arrow that encroaches onto the words of Clarence Thomas, who thinks a state should be free to make its own rules (or not) when it comes to things like guns in schools and animal cruelty. If you’re of a mind, then, to grab a puppy by its hind legs and fling it under the wheels of a tractor-trailer, better to be in Mississippi and risk a $10 fine and 100 days in jail than to face a Colorado felony.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I stand by the sentiment, but I’m startled at the violent nature of my own hypothetical. Such thoughts do not occur naturally to me. But all the reading has given me a green-apple bellyache that tampers with the temperament. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I dwell on it for only a moment, because it has randomly occurred to me that I’ve never been able to parse the distinction between an alligator and a crocodile. Best put aside the puppy and consult Wikipedia.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I think about law school and how it does roll on with a fullness that rises in the throat in a way that can mimic the sensation of drowning. Suddenly, I’m gripped with a morbid curiosity as to the mechanics of drowning. In just what order do the organs shut down and is it true that the last moments are not unpleasant at all? Google only knows.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">This bent to distraction is not uncommon among second-year law students. First-year assignments are so voluminous and one’s grasp of the art so rudimentary that there develops a hyper-vigilance against what could otherwise become a fatal flaw. But we are faster now, better at distilling our cases down to their vital components, and with that comes a slight loosening of the reins that must nonetheless be kept in check, lest the stamina wane and the once-rapid pulse slow to a belabored thump.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Generally, the biggest distraction in law school is law school itself. That is to say, one’s laser focus on dissecting the hearsay rule and its myriad exceptions is prone to the intrusion of a nagging sense that there is a missed deadline lying undiscovered, a research project in an upturned hourglass drained of its last grain of sand, a whole body of work potentially lost to an undefined but ticking statute of limitations. By and large, these are the necessary and useful distractions. The danger lies in the trivial pursuit, the pull of the intellect toward what is known in some circles as “shiny-object syndrome.” It’s the trail of useless knowledge that begins with the Washington Post link on the Facebook page and ends with a rundown of Vladimir Putin’s workout routine. If it’s not undue interest in the dust bunny behind the fridge, it’s whatever happened to the Season 1 Project Runway winner.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Should you find yourself in such a circumstance, it’s best to gin up a little of that first-year discipline. When the brain repels its steady diet of evidentiary rules and dense constitutional text, allow it to settle and devote the interim to identifying and improving your weaknesses. It may be law-school anathema to admit it, but we all have them. My verbal sparring, for example, needs work. I like to think I’m better on my feet than I was that Saturday in spring when we delivered the tremulous oral arguments that are a first-year rite of passage. The past 12 months notwithstanding, I’m still prone to the occasional stammer, to leap great synapses of logic and unleash a string of disjointed words in the hope they will coalesce on their own steam. Reading and arguing are the twin components of law school, and so there is no shortage of opportunity to practice. The idea is that you will be trained to indulge opposing viewpoints and become facile in your responses to those who would throw you off your game. In an occupation that demands frequent shape shifting, there is always another hand raised, another head shaking, a constipated grimace accompanied by an “I disa<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gree</i>,” and suddenly you’re in danger of folding like a two-dollar lawn chair. Sometimes I disagree with myself, sometimes in the same inner exchange. No matter. Symptoms of schizophrenia in one setting constitute self-assuredness in another. This, too, must be checked, however, as the swollen law-school ego invites puncture and the cocksure strut is the harbinger of death.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">By the time you reason through it all and strike your own delicate balance, it will be time to start reading again. Focus because you must, even though it isn’t always easy. There are so many shiny things.<o:p></o:p></span></div><!--EndFragment-->Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-16486925852903363282011-08-21T18:20:00.000-04:002011-08-21T18:20:07.050-04:00As Your Attorney, I Must Advise You. <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal.dotm</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>565</o:Words> <o:Characters>3224</o:Characters> <o:Company>University of Louisville</o:Company> <o:Lines>26</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>6</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>3959</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>12.0</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Negotiable Instruments and Secured Transactions,” he said, drawing bold red circles on my copy of the spring-semester course listings. “You need both. But do not, under any circumstances, take them in the same semester.” The attorney who gave me this advice paused for effect and drew his bifocals to the end of his nose. “You will die.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because he said it with the gravity of a pharmacist warning against a lethal cocktail of drugs, I recorded the admonition in my own shorthand: <i>Negotiables + Secured = Die.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">This has become my new pastime, soliciting advice from lawyers on how to navigate the remainder of my law-school career so that I might emerge, if not unscathed, at least with scars in places that don’t show. If I can cobble it all into something of a roadmap that will lead to my passing the bar exam on the first try, I reason, it will have been worth the effort. Were I able to assemble these shreds of wisdom into tangible form, I would fashion myself a shadow box like the one I once reserved for a collection of shot glasses, stand back and regard them as a whole in the hope that a singular truth might reveal itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Evidence!” my boss cried with no hesitation at all. “Most important class in law school.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yes</i>,” his new associate added urgently. “Pay attention!”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As second-year students, we are afforded an autonomy that still feels unwieldy to the grasp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our presence no longer demanded at structured study sessions and mandatory forums on managing stress, our movements no longer restricted to the conformity of the two-section pack, we roam the halls like nocturnal drones in a building that feels like nighttime even when it isn’t and the faint smell of first-year angst lingers like napalm on the air currents. The leash can feel long indeed, and I find myself craving direction from time to time. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I struck up a conversation with a lawyer while running errands at the courthouse. When I mentioned I was a law student, he leaned in as if he were about to give me the pass code to his online banking account and said in a conspiratorial whisper: “Trial Practice.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In his novel “The Trial,” Franz Kafka introduces his protagonist to a corn merchant who has risked everything on the outcome of a court proceeding, has retained five lawyers and is negotiating with a sixth. “I need them all,” the merchant replies gravely when asked why one should need so many lawyers. “I don’t want to lose my trial, that goes without saying. Consequently, I can’t afford to ignore anything that might help me.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">After a time, though, this begins to feel like an exercise with no discernible point, like recording license plates as you peel down the highway purely for the sake of compiling a list. Michigan, Indiana, Florida.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Show-Me State. Show Me What?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">When I regard that imaginary shadowbox and its odd collection of advisory knickknacks, what stands out is not a singular truth, but a cumulative generosity that grows from the willingness to share a whole set of hard-won truths bought and paid for with experience. What emerges, despite the adversarial nature of the beast and the incessant crossing of swords that powers the justice machine on a daily basis, is an overriding sense that, at this peculiar intersection of time and space, at least, we are all individuals, all rowing the same boat.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">That’s when I come to understand that success in law school is of one’s own making. You are handed the same tools of the craft as everyone else, but the sculpture you create will be your own, will bear little if any resemblance to the others. And there exists a certain comfort in the knowledge that it doesn’t have to. In the end, if a lawyer lives within, she develops independently and ultimately finds her own way. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">That’s not to be construed as legal advice, mind you. I am a second-year law student wholly unqualified to dispense such a thing. But I’ll accept it all day long.<o:p></o:p></span></div><!--EndFragment-->Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-40834879878433270512011-07-28T19:11:00.001-04:002011-07-28T22:58:58.382-04:00Dream, Baby, Dream<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In the dream, it is always exam day and I am hopelessly late or lost, if not both. I am slogging up from the Third Street lot, limbs leaden and breath coming in short rasps. Somehow, the pages of my outlines have become loosed and are fluttering in all directions. I chase one into the street and bend to retrieve it just as it flies out of my grasp. This goes on and on, me pivoting and bending and clawing at the air as the pages scatter more widely. In the strange illogic of the dream, it does not occur to me that it is too late for them be of use. I finally reach the law school and discover that my classroom is not where it was the day before. I duck into a warren of offices, one mute dean after another looking at her wristwatch and slowly shaking her head. They keep directing me into a byzantine brick hallway, where I spend the rest of the night looking for non-existent classrooms.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Every law student has had the dreams, which generally crop up at exam time. An attorney I know whose bar card has been snug in his wallet for years vividly recalls a law-school dream in which he had been exiled to a remote outpost to take his Civil Procedure exam and lost all his time plodding through quicksand to get there. My own subconscious once conjured up a troika of professors in tattered Civil War garb, slowly twisting toward me on broken hips, heads swathed in bloodstained bandages. I chose not to delve too deeply into the pathology of that one. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">What puzzles me now is not that I have the dreams, but that they should resurface here in the waning days of summer, with classes not to resume for another two weeks. And then I remember the bar exam, which was administered in recent days and which has worked its way lately to the forefront of my thinking. For one thing, not all of those who underwent that grueling two-day process are faceless would-be attorneys, but people I actually know and root for. One called a week ago seeking the return of a study aid he had loaned me for a summer course. When I inquired after his state of mind, he responded in a thin voice. Of his jumble of unintelligible words, I could make out only two: “medical school.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">As you might expect, the format mirrors that of the law-school exam, for which a career in, say, journalism may or may not be adequate preparation. Where the news abhors redundancy, the law finds solace in its embrace. An effective law-school essay explains beyond all rational need for explanation, states the obvious and then states it again. The tapestry must be unraveled one fiber at a time and rewoven into a seamless analytical whole. Throw in a nuanced observation here and there. Be brilliant and original and thorough. Your time starts now. In the new dream, I am the Susan Lucci of the bar, more renowned for serial failures than for a single success.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The thing about the dreams, though, is that you wake up in the gray light with your life just where you left it and you discover that what you thought was true is not true at all. Such is the nature of law school.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">A year ago, we wandered around as the strangers that we were with our free highlighters and our flash drives and our fists full of popcorn and split into teams for an awkward round of Brandeis trivia. I reflect on the composition of that group today and recognize some folks I’m reasonably sure would help me hide a body without asking a lot of questions, in the unlikely event the need should arise, and I’d do the same for them. This is so, despite our disparity of gender, race, sexual orientation and socioeconomic background. Oh, and age. Intensity of shared experience overshadows the rest, I suppose. That, too, is the nature of law school. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The cliché goes like this: the first year of law school scares you to death, the second works you to death and the third bores you to death. I am months removed from the vision of the wounded professors and am no longer fearful, but I am hardly bored. Early in the summer, I would dash from a morning class to the car and head to my downtown job as a law clerk, a drive that conveniently matched the length of time it takes to consume a cinnamon-raisin granola bar. Nights and weekends not devoted to study fed the needs of a professor hungry for research assistance. Soon there will be more class work and a journal article to conceive and bring to fruition. Perhaps you, too, have spent a summer with one foot in the past and the other in premature apprehension of the future. We must now pull both into the present for what shall, absent a better suggestion, be known as The Year of Working Feverishly. We can be bored next year. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-87780345435639945162011-07-16T18:51:00.004-04:002011-07-16T20:53:06.271-04:00Net Operating Losses<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She was allotted more time than her contemporaries, so those who mourned her passing were mostly acquaintances of the second and third degree. They know her stories only through us, a clutch of middle-aged cousins who spent no small amount of time wedged shoulder to shoulder in the passenger seats of her two-toned Chevy. You should have seen her back then, breeze lifting the dark waves framing her Jackie Onassis shades, chin lifted at a dignified angle. Houses may always be cleaned tomorrow, but the carnival is in town just today.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That was my Aunt Edna, who introduced me to microwaveable meals and fake Christmas-tree snow and the rewards of low-maintenance pet ownership with her series of fungible goldfish. That was Edna, too, whose worried, angular face leaned into my peripheral vision every time I stirred on a sickbed, and Edna who procured for me both ear piercings and a 64-count box of crayons when I wasn’t supposed to have either.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That she was childless is nothing more than a technical accuracy, as she ushered the children of her six siblings into adulthood as surely as anyone who was ever biologically entitled to call herself a parent. We were the spokes of a rattling family wheel that would have shattered long ago if not for her presence at the hub.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She cherished her civil-service job on the Fort Knox switchboard because it was her ticket out of the tobacco field, and she never lost track of technology when it came to telecommunications. It was easy to deem her calls too frequent and her inquiries too probing until the day she could no longer make them. Perhaps the only thing that pleased her more than the telephone was to be taken for younger than she was, which is the reason her medicine cabinet was stocked to the day she died with L’Oreal hair color, shade 6½-G.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That was Edna, who says “are you all right” and who means “are we all right,” because we are of the same stuff, you and I, and my contentedness is conditioned upon yours.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She was beyond the age at which death can be called unexpected, but losing her turned out to be the first blow of a double punch. The second I never saw coming.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Advances in medicine have lulled us into believing even delicate surgical procedures eminently survivable. And so, when a friend contacted me a few days before he was to undergo heart surgery, I followed his lead and deemed it a low-level threat, a surmountable barrier to be anticipated in a guy with bad genetics and a lifetime of bad habits. I realize now he might have been spinning the truth, a skill he honed to a fine edge, thanks to a lengthy career in public administration. He told me he was thinking of a simultaneous hair transplant and sought my advice on whether he should go Elvis or Fabio. Setting aside his near-unhealthy obsession with white-jumpsuit Elvis, I recommended a circa-1978 Meat Loaf and he seemed to love the idea. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">If he knew it was goodbye, he didn’t let on. Had I known, I might have offered something more profound than thoughts on Meat Loaf’s locks. Then again, I might not have changed a thing. This was Charlie, after all, who knew as much about the Chinese Boxer Rebellion and the Rocky Horror Time-Warp dance as he did about land use and economic development. This was Charlie, whose prized possessions once included a Washington Redskins jacket he got from a street vendor for fifty bucks and who is indirectly responsible for my having added to my DVD collection a copy of Plan 9 from Outer Space. He may also have been the least pretentious man I ever knew. When Charlie the corn-fed Midwesterner migrated to South Florida to live among the polo players and manage the tony village of Wellington, he promptly called to report his self-conferred status as the ugliest man in town. He endeared himself to every journalist he ever worked with, not least because his city halls leaked like sieves. It’s an effective strategy when your employment is subject to the whims of bickering local officeholders. “Sunshine is the best antiseptic,” he’d grin, handing over a sheaf of papers. “This one ought to blow up good.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">To differing degrees, each of these people occupied the margins of my life in recent years. Losing them renders me untethered in different ways, stripping the structural supports from different rooms of an emotional house. My tax professor says the books must always balance. But such absolutes seldom hold when life meanders off the black-and-white ledger and into the gray. My account with Aunt Edna is especially unbalanced. It always will be.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">If I’m to relate these events to law school, it’s to offer a reminder that no journey proceeds without its potholes. A law student’s cloistered existence is still prone to interruption now and again. With luck, it will be nothing with the gravitas of death, but it will be something, more likely an intermittent series of minor setbacks that spoil the concentration like sour notes in the symphony. Fractured relationships, professional miscalculations, mechanical or physiological failures all intrude to remind you that, despite all the sympathetic nose powdering a law student attracts from his loved ones, life is not necessarily all about you. The key is to keep your back to the wind and keep moving. Adopt a platitude if it helps -- n with the positive, out with the negative, or something along those lines. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">If the New Age theorists are right and the release of energy that accompanies death somehow shifts the balance in the universe, then the axis tonight is tilted toward uncommon love and generosity of spirit. Somewhere the phones are ringing again. The department-store shelves are relieved of L’Oreal 6½-G and the spirits are doing the Time Warp.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-82231448486705015632011-05-30T14:54:00.004-04:002011-07-16T20:50:12.680-04:00Dear 1L:<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;">Maybe you’re out there the way I was, thrilled at having been admitted to law school and daunted by the gaping unknown maw. Maybe you harbor a dangerous sense of entitlement and view law school as a mere tollbooth on the road to destiny. Either way, congratulations are in order. Either way, they’re ready for you. Or, I should say, we are ready for you. Yes, the material is dense and the pace demanding. Yes, first-year students are subjected to a sort of low-grade hazing inherent to the weeding-out process. But you have the benefit of a first-class faculty and staff whose collective goal is to see you succeed. Moreover, you have those of us who just stepped out of your boots. Don’t think of them as hand-me-downs. Think of them as fragrant heirlooms. We’ve covered a lot of distance in a short period of time, but the creases are soft and the leather still good. We’ve dodged a landmine or two, thanks to those who preceded us. We repay our debt to them by offering our support to you. Law school is an intensely personal journey, but it’s possible to benefit from another’s experience. Call my contribution the Seven Commandments of Law School: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16pt;">Thou shalt have no false expectations</span></b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;">Well into your first semester, after the deadline for requesting a tuition refund but before you understand that there may be instances in which you are not the smartest guy in the room, someone will circulate a New York Times account of the dire employment prospects awaiting a crop of newly minted lawyers. It’s a grim prediction that routinely works its way through the news cycle in no small part because it glosses true. The economic crisis has spared the legal community no more than any other, meaning, for example, that jobs once reserved for lawyers are now farmed out to paralegals and accountants who can perform some functions on the cheap. And while projected job growth for lawyers is about the same as for other professionals, the greatest potential gains lie in specialized practice areas like intellectual property and environmental law. This is not news, nor is the fact that the job market is an elastic concept that may or may not hold its shape for another three years. The point is that you should be prepared to retool your expectations, particularly if you’re of a mind that only the top 10-percent class ranking and the six-figure job will do. Competition is keen. The prettiest girl in Ottumwa is just another waitress on West Palm Beach, and your 4.0 GPA from undergraduate is no placeholder in law school. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16pt;">Thou shalt not commit assholery<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;">This is one of those intangibles covered in the Honor Code only by implication but emphasized with regularity here at Brandeis. Entire courses are devoted to the concept, as are intermittent forums on the myriad ways in which a less-than-vigilant attorney might sink his own ship. You must, in fact, demonstrate an ability to navigate ethical pitfalls before you will be allowed to sit for the Kentucky bar exam. There are rules peculiar to the practice of law: Don’t cook the books. Don’t spend your retainer at Wal-mart before it’s earned. For now, you are held to more general directives: Treat your colleagues with respect and your time like dollars and cents. Don’t let the booze get the better of you and don’t rely on grades as a measure of your worth. Run the Facebook status through the discretion filter. Like Justice Stewart’s shifting standard for what constitutes pornography, it’s the kind of thing you know when you see, and an error in judgment can follow you around like a bad debt. As a rule of thumb, if it sounds like assholery, it probably is.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16pt;">Love thy gunner …<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;">Every incoming class has at least one gunner, a figure both revered and reviled and in large measure unique to the law-school setting. The gunner reveals himself early in the semester. He is the student with one elbow planted in the other palm, blood draining from the forearm and hand waving like a flying jib. The gunner cannot, indeed should not, be deterred, running on iced latte and a deep blue flame of motivation. There is no remote pocket of law to which the gunner might not offer insight, no complex hypothetical upon which he might not cast his own arcane spin. He may alternately annoy and amuse, but the point is this: embrace your gunner, boys and girls, if for no other reason than that he is yours.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16pt;">… and Honor thy Marcosson <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;">The letter came a year ago, tucked inside a slick folder. Scrawled in blue ink in the margin was a personal note from the admissions chair, the professor whose Criminal Law exam I would later blame for an ungovernable twitch at the corner of my eye and who, at this moment, is rolling his copy of the U.S. Constitution into a baton with which he intends to beat me bloody in August. Your Marcosson will not necessarily be my Marcosson, but will be the professor who does not gaze thoughtfully into the middle distance as your flawed argument unfolds like a crippled origami swan. Your Marcosson will look directly into your eyes and smile broadly, as though the depth of your naivete is too delicious to be gulped, but must be allowed to linger on the palate. Your Marcosson has much to teach you, not least of which is an ability to advance your best argument even as he flicks it off his Yale-educated shoulder. In the weeks leading up to his Criminal Law exam, I imagined the professor huddled in his garage under a flyspecked light bulb like a malevolent character from one of his own hypotheticals, gleefully cobbling murder, conspiracy and extreme emotional disturbance into a Frankenstein’s monster of a test just so, come exam day, he could touch together two exposed wires and watch his students explode. And it happened just that way.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16pt;">Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s binder</span></b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;">It is an oft-repeated truism that the individual student must find the study method that best suits his or her learning style. The search for what works for you can be an elusive one riddled with trial and error and sometimes derailed by failed experimentation. What makes life easier for one might be a source of anxiety for another. One student clacks out copious notes on a laptop, while another makes meticulous marks in a massive three-ringed binder. Many arm themselves with an arsenal of highlighters, a different color reserved for each of the elements to be drawn from an assigned reading. I tried this and found myself distracted by the potential chaos that could arise were the lavender marker to run dry before the blue. Your approach, like mine, will evolve over time and likely remain subject to periodic tweaks. The point is to find your own.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16pt;">Remember the multistate bar exam and the fact that it is unholy.</span></b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;">When you’re still trying to find the restrooms, it’s easy to forget that this is all boot camp for the bar exam, which is out there on the horizon doing pushups as we speak and upon which I prefer not to dwell.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16pt;">Enjoy thy summer</span></b><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;">Early last fall, a friend compared being in law school to being in the army. Ten months on, it’s still the best analogy I know. Soon enough, you will find yourself entrenched alongside people whom you do not know and whom, a year from now, you will not remember not knowing. You will come from widely disparate walks of life, damaged in peculiar ways and motivated by varying definitions of success. You will be exposed to the pitch and sway of one another’s moods under conditions that do not always lend themselves to dignity or humility. Enjoy your summer not least because you will, over the coming year, occasionally have to dig deeper, try harder, keep going a little longer. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt;">Then again, I might be guilty of hyperbole. The young attorneys for whom I clerk at the moment recall past summers toiling in hot tobacco fields and hoisting sticky bales of hay onto idling machinery. “<i>That’s</i> work,” one said the other day. “Law school is just a lot of reading.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 19px;"><br />
</span></span>Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-41982389010218855932011-04-14T22:02:00.007-04:002011-04-16T07:12:08.392-04:00Excusable Neglect<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">What started as a light pulsing at the jaw line had devolved into a dull throb. The trouble was a swollen red pillow shot through with a jagged black streak in the spot that had once accommodated a wisdom tooth. When it ruptured into a bloody river filling the gulley between my cheek and gum, I called my dentist, his vacation notwithstanding.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“I need antibiotics,” I announced. “I’m in law school.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I’ve taken to punctuating virtually every sentence with that statement and have found it useful in a number of settings. Miss a wedding? You’re in law school. Late turning over the rent check? Law school. I passed you on the highway and you didn’t even wave. For God’s sake, man, I’m in law school. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The semester is drawing to a close, the staccato pulse of the study routine quickening every day. Review sessions for final exams are largely on the books. Our white board is streaked, our professors down to the red marker, having drained the ink from the black, green and blue. If we turn to this always versatile, dog-ate-my-homework, mother of explanations for curious behavior over the next couple of weeks, I say we’re entitled.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Law school can be an exercise in self-discovery, a series of triumphs as you push yourself beyond what you thought were the limits of your capability. Just as often, it’s a self-gathering force threatening to spin off its own axis. In those moments, some of your own marginal needs – and those of others to whom you would be obligated -- necessarily fall away.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We’re preparing for five exams, as opposed to the four we faced in the fall. We’re trolling thin summer job markets. We’re seeking membership on law journals or moot-court teams or one of the myriad other resume-building activities open to upper-level students and application deadlines are nigh. We’ve completed the intricate fall-registration process, exercising the new latitude we’re afforded as soon-to-be rising 2L’s. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Where the first-year curriculum is standard-issue crew cuts and fatigues -- basic research and writing skills, coupled with two semesters of fundamental doctrine -- second year allows a measure of choice. We can appreciate the flexibility, even if the strategic nature of crafting a schedule makes us lonesome for the days when they told us what to do. We’re sleep-deprived and we smell like a combination of fear and our too-familiar classroom, whose temperamental thermostat is governed by some faceless force in the ether. The stakes are high and the flashpoint dangerously low.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But keeping your head in the midst of chaos, filling in the fissures in the emotional façade, is part of being a lawyer, and there are as many coping mechanisms as there are law students. Some turn to yoga and some to chocolate. Some chant life-affirming slogans and arm themselves with talismans. I personally adopted an unsettling and mercifully short-lived habit of referring to myself in the third person: Sharon thinks the Supreme Court is entirely off the mark in this case. Sharon has nothing to add to this analysis of the summary-judgment process. Sharon is going for coffee now.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I can’t explain it, but maybe I don’t have to. I am, you know, in law school.</span>Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-74233196105007181292011-03-26T18:11:00.001-04:002011-03-27T05:28:19.585-04:00Judges and suits and ties, oh my.<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We had what is known in legal lexicon as a “hot bench.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The term refers to a judicial panel that peppers an appellate attorney with overlapping questions, interrupting her carefully calibrated roadmap for a detour into rocky hypothetical terrain and then dumping her back on the highway with a flat stare.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">When it was over, I sat down and glanced across the aisle at opposing counsel, who flashed an encouraging thumbs-up sign. The judges were bent over their scoring sheets, writing and writing and writing. I looked down at my four-page argument with its color-coded bullet points, fabulous points asserted with authority in a practice setting and then desperately abandoned in the heat of inquisition. Eyes back to the bench. God, please make them stop writing.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Lose the pen,” one advised. “It’s distracting.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“When your time is up, stop talking.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Less swaying at podium,” wrote another.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">This third criticism I’d heard once before, from the third-year student who presided over our practice round last week. I like the podium. I feel it anchors me. By all accounts, however, all I’m missing is the pianist and the three-quarter time.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Oral-argument day is a milestone for first-year law students. The psychological pressure to perform well is wholly out of proportion to its pass-fail worth, but the idea is to expose students to a setting that mirrors the environment in which they would argue on behalf of real clients with real liberty and prosperity at stake. For purposes of this exercise, we were advocating for the parties to a fictitious stalemate in which we have invested months of labor and which formed the basis of a brief that accounts for 70 percent of one’s final grade in Basic Legal Skills. For our clients, the whole thing ends with a question mark. For us, it’s an exclamation point.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">My opposing counsel and I were assigned to what we later learned were three of the more heavily credentialed panelists of the day, their resumes thick with achievements in oral advocacy, and I’m glad it worked out that way. A hot bench can expose your weaknesses, but tearing tissue is what builds muscle. And it’s valuable instruction for someone whose traditional approach to argumentation is a three-step process that goes something like this: 1) prop feet on nearest table, 2) roll eyes at opponent’s ridiculous position, and, 3) cut opponent off at knees with sarcasm. You have to presume that judges who find ballpoint pens distracting will not take kindly to that sort of thing.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">For good or ill, Basic Legal Skills is finished. The only thing standing between me and my yet-to-be-secured summer employment is a month of lockdown studying for five final exams.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">Feels good. </span>Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-57731816032514951872011-03-20T21:31:00.003-04:002011-03-21T10:45:37.043-04:00Spring Break & Oral Fixation<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> You could say a law student on spring break is not unlike a firefighter who is momentarily without a fire and so collapses in full gear to nap in the bunkhouse. You could say it, but it wouldn’t necessarily be true. Whether you retreat to cerulean coastal waters or labor to recover ground lost to the all-consuming spring brief, the law-school blaze is never really extinguished. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> Much of my break went to corralling notes that, upon review, reflect some early cohesion, but grow more fragmented as the deadline for the brief approaches. Scrolling through the pages, I recognized concepts I will be expected to apply with some authority in coming weeks, but which now trigger only a vague memory of fingers and keyboard thudding out words. Torts, for example: <i>Should oysters be the same as fish, for legal purposes?</i> Or, Contracts: <i>Think of botched nose job</i>. It once made perfect sense. In Criminal Law, rape is interrupted by spring break and presumably resumes on Monday. Otherwise, I found my thought process disrupted by the slightest stimulus, my brain a scratchy FM radio scan of Japanese nuclear reactors, Libyan air strikes, Charlie Sheen developments and, once, a brief consideration of just how many Walgreens stores one city needs before it reaches critical mass. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> And yet I am possessed of an odd tranquility. It could be the milder climate and the reappearance of the sun. Just as possible is the notion that one can sustain a state of apprehension for only so long. At some point you cross into that realm Pink Floyd called comfortably numb. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> The brief is done, but not really behind us. Behind are the research, the composition, the painstaking adherence to citation rules and the Machiavelian quirks of Microsoft Word, without which human communication by all accounts would come to a halt. What still lies ahead are the oral arguments we must make in support of our fictitious clients, who are embroiled in an all-too-plausible legal clash. The last time I spoke in a public setting, my audience was a classroom of 12-year-olds who were easily impressed and not at liberty to question my reasoning. Nevertheless, it remains my policy that, if you are to fail, you must fail spectacularly. There must be none of this tentative, what-will-they-think reticence. You must fail in such a way that the sheer magnitude of your failure becomes its own legacy and eclipses the boring deficiency of your performance.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> Call it your parting shot at winter.</span>Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-32296965547083752882011-03-05T19:07:00.000-05:002011-03-05T19:07:15.469-05:00Just Briefly<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Question Presented:<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> Is a middle-aged refugee from the decaying empire of American journalism entitled to recover for emotional distress sustained in pursuit of a law degree?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Statement of Facts<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> Claimant once reasoned that telling true stories was a more or less unobjectionable way to make a living and spent a number of years telling stories of tragedy and corruption and natural disaster, greasy summer festivals and farmers whose gardens occasionally yielded a turnip that looked like either Jesus or Elvis, depending on the light. And then two things happened. First, claimant grew weary of telling the same stories with interchangeable names. Next, people who used to buy expensive newspaper ads recognized that one could read about senators and mutant turnips in a digital language of ones and zeros without paying and without getting ink-smudged fingers and could sell their bicycles on Craigslist for free. Claimant concluded that if one is to recast oneself from a role of casual observation into one of genuine advocacy, one had better do so while one still has some daylight.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Argument<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> Claimant has worked pretty hard on a brief, which is not merely a brief, but is The Brief, the unholy badass of the spring semester and the basis for a hefty percentage of a first-year student’s final grade in legal writing. Claimant has consequently suffered distress. Severe distress. Emotionally, that is. To send her away empty-handed would shock the conscience, would violate society’s evolving standard of decency and be altogether unreasonable. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Conclusion<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> Inconclusive.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">* * * * * * * * *<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> That’s a truncated and highly imprecise illustration of the way in which I communicate these days. As it turns out, a legal argument is a story told according to formulaic construction, conveyed in a language of buzzwords handed down from high court to low and repeated only with precision. The perfectionist who normally dwells within me (but with whom my relationship is now estranged) likes that part of the law, the recognition that no two words mean exactly the same thing or evoke the same visceral response. In a non-academic setting, you might call it plagiarism. Around here, we call it research.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> The aforementioned brief has consumed our lives in recent weeks. The doctrinal professors have indulged our inadequate preparation and our lackadaisical class participation with knowing nods and transparent stalling techniques so that we cover less material than we ordinarily would. The legal-writing course with the deceptively simplified name of Basic Legal Skills spans a full year. In the fall, you write memos predicting what a court is likely to do under a given set of circumstances. The spring is devoted exclusively to the brief and is your chance to unleash your inner, pre-disbarred F. Lee Bailey and try to convince the court that the only just result is the one that favors your client.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> For a conceptual thinker like myself, the meticulous work of ensuring the accuracy of the citations, merging roman and Arabic numerals in the same document and taking care to italicize the word but not the comma has been as difficult as crafting the argument. It is also instructive to know that, in the practice of law, a deadline really is a deadline. There will be no vaguely frustrated judge to rip the document out of your queue 20 minutes after the deadline has passed and no law clerk whose job it will be to fix your mechanical errors. It’s hard out here for a would-be lawyer.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> There were last-minute printing errors and technological gaffes, but I’ll spare you the details. Before I turned the thing in, I told it I had done all I could for it, that it would now have to go forth in this Rand Paul-icized world and either stand or fall on its own merits. When the professor took it from my hands, she gleefully pronounced it a rite of passage.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> I went home and poured myself a drink.</span><!--EndFragment-->Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-41201775629055325322011-02-06T14:02:00.001-05:002011-02-06T14:02:40.621-05:00Buddy, Can You Spare A Lawsuit?<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I used to know a lawyer who had money displayed on the wall behind his desk.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I don’t mean money in the abstract, commercial sense you would have with, say, a valuable work of art, nor do I mean one of those quaintly framed dollar bills you see on the wall in mom-and-pop stores. I mean the guy had a broad still-life portrait of U.S. currency – stacks of coins and bills in all denomination -- suspended above his head. If you could get past the decorum issue and the depravity of it on the whole, you had to admire his candor. If I’m suffering at the hands of a deep-pocket insurance company, I know right off the bat he’s in my corner. If I’m suing the dog groomer for giving my emotionally traumatized poodle a bad haircut, I’m at least afforded the dignity of giving myself the bum’s rush.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I like money, too, or, rather, I imagine I would, in the unlikely event I were to acquire it. I toiled for some time in an industry that placed a lower premium on my time and emotional stability than I did, so my definition of success is to keep the lights on without playing that endless round of bill roulette we refugees of journalism have come to know. That’s why the altruist yields to the establishment when the loans fall due. It can be a tricky balance to strike. A lawyer’s got to eat. But a lawyer’s got to sleep at night, too. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I’m not sure what brings all this to mind. Maybe it’s the cynic who lurks within, and, despite my efforts to keep her tranquilized, rises up now and again to cast her gloss all over my landscape. It could also be the spring rites of law school – the feverish preparation for on-campus interviews, the mass purchasing of black suits and wristwatches, the subtle sabotage of the scurrilous few who seem harmless enough but who leave you with the vague urge to check your valuables. Then again, it might be that the second wind many of us have been expecting since classes resumed a month ago has yet to kick in, except in a savage, literal way. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The law-school beast is always hungry. It wants and wants and wants, and then continues to impose designs on the time you would spend fulfilling its needs. But time rolls on with or without you and sometimes you just have to latch on and let the self-analysis wait.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In terms of workload, the fall semester in retrospect seems like a practice round. Law school is extinguishing one fire after another and time is a luxury we’re rarely afforded. I don’t have time to nurture old friendships. I don’t have time to stock the pantry. I don’t have time to write this sentence. The twin fires ablaze at the moment are the requirement to complete a 4,500-word brief and the search for a summer job that bears some resemblance to the practice of law. All money-grubbing jokes aside, the reality is that paying gigs for first-year students are hard to come by, especially if you’re expecting top dollar.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Against this backdrop, even the logistics of getting to class have devolved into anarchy. The University of Louisville employs what appear to be the only construction crews in civilized society that do not suspend work in the dead of winter. The worksite at the corner of Third Street and Eastern Parkway has mushroomed into what the Kentucky League of Cities might consider a fourth-class municipality. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">For several weeks, we pedestrians relegated the sidewalk closure to suggestion status, snaked around the orange cones and just kept going. I’m not your traditional college student, but I can adopt a pack mentality when circumstances dictate and proceed on the prevailing theory that a single wayward vehicle won’t kill all of us, even if the margin of error is reduced to virtually zero. But now the school has put its foot down and offered us two alternatives. One is to take a more circuitous route, which extends the journey considerably and demands an up-hill lean into a high-level wind shear and a gamble as to whether an extra 40 pounds of book weight will equalize the competing forces of wind and body mass. The other requires a double jaywalk across four lanes of traffic. To its credit, the university has fashioned something of a crosswalk at the entrance to the Third Street parking lot. The rub is that it consists of white slashes of paint with no corresponding signal, which is really the key feature of a crosswalk.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Not to belabor the point, but creating an additional obstacle for a first-year, second-semester law student seems a little like gilding the lily.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And now I return to the aforementioned brief, which is not brief at all and which feeds on the flesh of little children and fuels itself on my tears.</span><!--EndFragment-->Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-5005831837374906592011-01-22T15:52:00.000-05:002011-01-24T06:42:59.873-05:00Long Division, Look at Me Now<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Conventional wisdom has it that law school attracts the sort whose brain is weighted to the right hemisphere, whose thought process runs to the abstract as opposed to the linear and who might have pursued a lucrative career in medicine, had it not been for that organic-chemistry thing. It’s a self-deprecating joke that enjoys its share of play around here, and, like many clichés, might contain a fiber of truth.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I don’t mean to paint with too broad a brush. Yes, I know lawyers who need technological help to calculate the tip at Applebee’s, acumen for instant computation of a 30-percent contingency fee off the top of any given figure notwithstanding. But I also know that certain of my classmates possess equal facility in the realms of art and science. I am not, however, among them, and I make that observation so that I can make one more: we have turned a dangerous corner.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">As if to counter the oppressive weather conditions under which we trudge to class these days, our lectures have strayed from the gray dimension we were promised, spinning off the “it depends” axis into territory that demands black-and-white analysis. In Torts, we are no longer concerned with the aisle-sweeping schedules of supermarkets and the sequence of events that led to the presence of the squished grape on the floor. We’ve moved on to the mechanism by which the downed customer is to be compensated. Contracts class is a variation on the same theme, a study of the pecuniary consequences of broken promises. In other words – <i>spoiler alert</i> – it’s about the money. It turns out that restoring an injured party to pre-injured status involves a determination as to who pays how much and by what equation the dollars are divvied up. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">As I said, this is challenging turf for some, especially those of us accustomed to scanning statistical evidence for the sole purpose of spotting subjective trends. If this were a courtroom, I would want to elicit the testimony of one Mrs. Cunningham, who once tried to teach me long division and induced a fourth-grade meltdown that for a time was the stuff of lore at Burkhead Elementary. I suffered a flashback last week when my Contracts professor listened to my overly analytical approach to computing expectation damages and looked at me as if I were a rat building its own maze when all she wanted was to hand me a gift-wrapped wedge of cheese. As an aside, I have to hand an honorable mention to her marvelous hypothetical contracts between Aunt Bee and Floyd the Barber, notwithstanding their inherent flaw, namely that Floyd would never breach a contract.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">All right, if you have to know, it’s a fairly straightforward formula – subject to permutation and human touch, but straightforward at its core -- and I’m beginning to catch on. I exaggerate only because one who undertakes a courageous endeavor like law school has to maintain a sense of humor. And I’m sticking to my account of the long-division incident, not least because Mrs. Cunningham, who was in her early hundreds when it happened in the 1970s, is unlikely to refute it today.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Speaking of turning dangerous corners, I do have a couple of thoughts with regard to the construction projects that have rendered the law school virtually inaccessible by any means other than snowshoe or helicopter, but I’ll have to save them for another day. Suffice it to say that traipsing over snow-covered lengths of rebar on the way to school, while not the safest of endeavors, did engender a sense of triumph in those who survived to tell the tale and was definitely fun while it lasted. I’ll only point out that we are lawyers in training and we know a case of negligence when we see one. And we armed with calculators.</span>Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-89217648145030121602011-01-11T20:27:00.000-05:002011-01-14T14:44:58.836-05:00Long, Cold Winter<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Winter is not my season. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I see snowdrifts and envision not postcards but ominous possibilities of famine and isolation. Ice is not the thrill of the frozen pond on the back forty, but a harbinger of bruised tissue and fractured bone that complicates my already marginal driving skills, which, incidentally, are legendary in some circles. Above that, I chill easily and tend to lose gloves.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Spring semester at Brandeis is under way, but it bears none of the characteristics of spring. Classes resumed for the most part days ago, although some of our professors canceled to attend a conference scheduled sufficiently early for most law schools but without regard to the uniquely Louisvillian mindset that all human activity must be coordinated to accommodate the Kentucky Derby.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And so, as it happened, the first snowfall of the semester coincided with the full onslaught of a loaded schedule. First-year students attending full time are up to 18 credit hours now, thanks to the addition of a fifth doctrinal class. The legal-writing class, the single course to span a full year, is now devoted solely to crafting a brief supporting one side or the other of a fictional lawsuit and advancing oral arguments in a setting designed to replicate an appellate courtroom. I’ve drawn what is, in my view, the honorable side of the issue, but is also the side with arguably the steepest uphill trudge in terms of existing state law. There is much work to be done. </span><br />
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</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And yet, while I can’t speak for my classmates, I’ve been slow to embrace this second round. My reflexes are slowed, like some sea creature that drifted to the ocean floor and burrowed into the mud over Christmas break and now must be stirred into action again. At this moment, law school and I have settled into the cordiality of companions whose faces have grown too familiar, whose once-charming habits are, on certain days, not all that charming. That’s the nature of law school, though. It’s a virtual game of table tennis in which you’re constantly scrambling to return your own serve, and the patience can thin. It could be what one of my colleagues called the life of the mind, a strange measure in which one scales great longitudinal heights without covering much latitude at all. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It could also be that we’re resuming this journey in a climate that has grown temporarily oppressive in ways that have nothing to do with the weather. Politicians that would have been late-night punch lines even to conservatives a decade ago have somehow achieved a dangerous mainstream acceptance. We choose our representatives like we’re casting an episode of The Jersey Shore and then are chagrined when the fringe element interprets their examples to be baseline models for acceptable conduct. On a personal level, I have swaths of pain that run the length of my scapular muscles and don’t know whether it’s the book bag that is slung over my shoulder or the one that rattles at my heels like a toddler’s pull toy.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That being said, we here at 1L blog headquarters – and by that I mean the laptop and the coffee pot and I – try to maintain a policy of placing a positive spin even on the frustrating moments. To that end, I remind myself that I am exposed to challenging material and brilliant professors by virtue of an opportunity not extended to everyone. I love the new core class, Criminal Law, not least because our recent discussion of <i>actus reus – </i>the Latin term for the wrongful act that justifies societal punishment – reminded me to put the Johnny Cash version of “Johnny 99” (along with its reference to taking a man’s life for the thoughts in his head) back into the I-pod rotation.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Yeah, I anticipate an upturn in the collective disposition when the new semester’s engine is fully engaged. And spring is just around the corner.</span>Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-11079195772076939332011-01-04T22:34:00.000-05:002011-01-05T07:40:06.163-05:00Crime, Punishment and Christmas Break<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We’re standing on the 26</span><sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">th</span></span></sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> floor of the Brown & Williamson Tower in downtown Louisville, two floors above the suite accessible only to the real lawyers and then only with a kind of credit-card key.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Donald Vish, death-penalty abolitionist and professor of Law & Literature at Brandeis, is pointing out the tobacco-leaf motif in the carpeting and the silver sconces on the wall. “They told us these were sterling silver and we said we were glad to hear that,” Vish laughed and ran his hand along the dull finish, “because we wouldn’t have accepted anything less.” It is his way of telling us this is all window-dressing and that we are here for a purpose that transcends the trappings of success.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We are a half-dozen law students with not a day of Criminal Law under our belts, far removed from any circumstance in which another’s liberty – much less his life – would be entrusted to us. We are distracted by the imminent release of first-semester grades, too timid to touch the pretzels and cashews arranged for our benefit and vaguely concerned that the soles of our shoes might leave imprints on the tobacco leaves. But a man who asks for volunteers takes what he gets, and we are what he has got.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Brandeis students are required to complete a minimum 30 hours of public service and we have volunteered to spend a portion of Christmas break crafting an amicus brief urging the state’s highest court to reconsider the death penalty. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">You need not be an abolitionist to be an acolyte in the Vish cause. My own stance undergoes scrutiny from time to time. But, having come closer than comfort allowed to being drafted to witness the last electrocution the state of Kentucky carried out, I have an interest in dissecting the rationale underlying what seems to me a primitive practice. Too much is left to officeholders whose fates rise and fall on the shifting tide of public opinion and Bible-Belt juries empanelled by virtue of a willingness to dispense frontier justice, as long as they are safely removed from the distasteful mechanics of it. I know why people embrace it in theory, but I still say capital punishment in practice is a gruesome lottery nobody really wins. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In any case, we finished the work and, while I’m reasonably certain the experience will prove to have been of greater benefit to us than to our generous taskmaster, I’m richer for having had the experience. Vish has achieved that mark to which all great educators aspire, striking that tenuous balance between destroying the spirit and inflating the ego, leading the student to believe success is not within his grasp but is dangling just beyond.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I spent much of the remainder of my break reading, not in the indulgent way I typically read, but with urgency of one who is allowed candy for a fleeting moment and can’t choose between the coconut macaroon and the caramel chew and so swallows both of them whole. A law student on break has a dwindling account of hours and his choice of how to spend them suddenly takes on great import. I spent three of mine of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.That’s when I wasn’t napping, and I napped a lot.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The day before classes resume, I am still half-asleep, having been stirred awake on the sofa to the TV blaring an advertisement for a personal-injury law firm, the one where the blond attorney morphs into a raging tiger and bares her claws at the uncooperative insurance executive.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Perhaps all this conflicting exposure to crime and punishment and the wildly divergent approaches to the practice of law will acquire more clarity tomorrow when that Criminal Law class convenes for the first time. If our syllabus can be trusted, the first two cases up for discussion involve shipwrecked cannibals and the social value of confining sexual predators not for what they have done, but for what they are virtually certain to do.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I’m frequently reminded of a moment last fall when a classmate of mine sent his attorney brother a text message grousing about the inhumane pace of it all. His brother dispatched a reply containing just two words: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Gets worse.”</span>Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-638229328925738936.post-15035759999442227042010-12-14T19:31:00.000-05:002010-12-15T07:05:56.582-05:00Sounded Like a Train<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;">Sirens were blowing, clouds spat rain.</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;">And as the thing came through, I swear, it sounded like a train. -- Drive-By Truckers</span></i></span><br />
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</span></i></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I once toured what was left of a neighborhood in the aftermath of an F-5 tornado.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I mention it only because it’s not wholly unlike the brief respite that follows one’s first semester of law school. You swing open the cellar door and, yes, everything looks like hell, but the sun is shining, the birds are chirping and the shops are transacting business as always. You’re disoriented, but you think with a few adjustments, a little paint applied here, a little chainsaw there, you might restore your own version of order and resume your place for a time among those whose noses are not buried in weighty texts of 19<sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">th</span></sup>-century judicial opinions.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Still, you’re aware of a fundamental shift in the chemical makeup of the atmosphere. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">With the fall semester behind me, I can allow myself a guiltless stroll through the mall, but not without wondering whether the man selling homemade soap from a cart is there by virtue of license or lease and what recourse might be available were he forced to trade his spot outside the sporting-goods store for one in front of Bath & Body Works.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Back at home, I draw a two-month-old issue of Vanity Fair from its shrinkwrap and start to read an excerpt from a book about the NBC debacle involving Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and the showdown for dominion of late-night television. The whole hostile mess centered on shrewd contractual provisions and costly reliance on withdrawn promises. Hey, I think, newly energized, that’s a clear case of promissory estoppel if I ever saw one. I have four entire months of law school under my belt and, by golly, I think I could really <i>do</i> something with this.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">All right, I’m kidding about that last part, although it wouldn’t have surprised me had that turned out to be one of the pitfalls of going to law school. Gain a hard-won shred of knowledge and suddenly think you’re Clarence Darrow. Mercifully, though, I’ve witnessed little, if any, of that. We are a fairly grounded lot on the whole, grounded enough to recognize that our ostensible grasp of the law at this point bears direct relation to the ease with which our friends and family are confounded. These are the people who are compelled by holiday spirit to take us in, remember, assuming we don’t bore them to death first.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Anyway, I have more stories, but I’m plagued by a vague sense that something is left undone, a gnawing perception of an undefined and yet unfulfilled commitment, a faucet left running or some burner left aflame.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Oh, yeah,” chuckled a friend, reliving his own law-school experience. “They didn’t tell you about the postpartum depression? That’s next, all right. You won’t know what to do with yourself.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> I wouldn’t call it depression, just an unshakeable sense for the past several days that wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, I should be somewhere that isn’t there, doing something that isn’t that. And then it occurs to me that perhaps the tornado has formed not outside the cellar but within. Old thought patterns are stripped from the hinges, ingrained approaches to analysis twisted out of the mud and exposed at the roots. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Before long, it will be time to shut the door again and resynchronize our internal timing mechanisms to operate on accelerated law-school time. For now, though, we are suspended in a halcyon moment of post-exam, pre-grade posting satisfaction at having cleared a significant hurdle. I’m thinking I might mark the occasion with another trip to the mall, where I will march past the man with the soap cart and shop for a pair of boots. That’s right, boots. A nice, sturdy pair, especially suited to weathering tornadoes. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Sharon Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16541828630063359638noreply@blogger.com0