Sua Sponte

2005-11-21T17:35:00.000-08:00

and the circle is complete

Thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thank you.

2005-08-31T10:43:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow my clerkship begins, which means that today is truly the last day of my law school odyssey. I will go to sleep an adventurer and wake up an ordinary working stiff, and this whole saga -- melodramatic and exhausting and ungodly long -- will be concluded. Full stop.

There were so few of us at the beginning: JuBu, Jeremy, WT, me, Mellow-Drama at blogspot, and Omer's original weblog. (I think those are the only survivors. Did I forget anyone?) A few advanced souls started at the same time as we did, but we were the first 1L class to blog. By the time we were 2Ls, the act of keeping a law school journal in public had caught on, and by 3L year everyone and their brother was doing it. But we were there in 2002 -- the first crew of 1Ls to conclude that the full catalogue of our law school experiences, from prelaw through the bar exam, were worth sharing with the Internets(tm).

I think we'd all agree that it was worth it. If you're considering keeping a weblog during law school, do. This may be the last time in your professional career that you can blog about same with impunity. And a blog can introduce you to some of the most priceless people you'll ever need to know in law school. Without Sua Sponte, I never would have met some of my greatest mentors and advisors. I wouldn't have written on to law review. I almost certainly would have failed in my quest to transfer schools. And at times when everyone and everything in my life felt alienating, without Sua Sponte I would have been a lot lonelier.

I'll leave the archives up, in case there's anything to be learned from them (aside from St. Daniel's Pennoyer v. Neff catechism). If you're wondering about anything here, you can always email me. If you took a bar exam this summer, I'll be sending waves that you passed. And if you've ever given me advice, alcohol, or any other form of support, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Parting thoughts:

Goodbye is never final; people invariably meet up again, where you least expect it.
There's always someplace where you can eat well.
Only if it'll still be worth it ten years from now.
Anything is possible with work and luck enough.
A good decision feels like one.
Try again. There's probably a way.
The prize is in your head.
No regrets.
Be happy.
Be happy.
Be happy.

2005-08-30T11:36:00.000-07:00

final thoughts on: work and vacation

It is starting to dawn on me that I'm going back to work this week. Not just a summer job, an externship, or any other short-term engagement that will conclude upon my return to school. This is real, honest-to-pete full-time employment. The kind of work you do when there's no more school to return to.

I think I'm ready.

This month has been the first vacation I've had in years. Imagine it: an entire August with absolutely nothing left on my worry-dar, nothing demanding any of my mental bandwidth, nothing whatsoever to do except whatever the hell I felt like doing. I could take a week and gad about eastern Pennsylvania and central New Jersey with my relatives if I wanted to. I could spend hours on end brain-dumping massive blocks of text onto my weblog. I could drink an entire bottle of wine in one evening while watching Hayao Miyazaki movies with my husband -- all with impunity.

It's been blissful. I think this is the definition I was aiming for, back last summer when Sua Sponte played host to the old vacation debate. Vacation, I'd submit, is not just being in control of your time or your labors. It's that plus an additional degree of freedom: having both the right and the opportunity to control whether you need to do something. On vacation you can either pick up the to-do list or walk away and forget about it. But there's nothing hanging over your head, nothing that has to get done without your consent.

This psychological liberty is key. This was the reason why I found myself unable to treat school as a vacation: there was always something needing done, every little thing mattered, and the whole experience was a one-shot deal. I went out of my way to seek out as many second chances as I could find -- transferring schools, writing on to law review, getting into my clinic off of a waitlist. Even so, taken as a whole, law school was my one and only chance to have the law school experience I wanted. If I screwed this one up, I'd be stuck with the fruits of my screwup. But if I got it right, the benefits would keep for the rest of my life.

Work has never been like that for me. I can't say that I've never gotten in over my head; it's entirely too easy for a personality like mine to get invested in my job. Of course there have been times when I failed to wipe my feet. (Once I even sleepwalked due to work stress. No kidding.) But no matter how much I found myself growing attached to my outcomes, there was never an exclusivity problem. You weren't banned from gainful employment if something went wrong. There was always another job, another way to succeed professionally if this turned out to be the wrong path. There was always more than one chance to do something right.

It'll be a relief to return to that universe. I may have never had a moment's peace in law school, but now, perhaps because of that peacelessness, I'll never be in such a position again. It's sort of like rock bottom for the stress-addicted: once you realize that things can't get any worse without impacting your health, you never want to get back on that treadmill. The alternative is just so rich -- to be able to work without worry, to enjoy free time untaxed by all the stuff you should be spending it doing. No matter how many hours it may take, or how tired you may get, you win if you can still go home and relax at the end of the workday. The pile of things on the to-do list doesn't need to weigh on your mood if you don't let it.

I've always been told that I take things too seriously: work, school, relationships, myself even. This is probably true. But telling someone like me to quit taking things so seriously is about as effective as swearing at traffic. Realizations like this, on the other hand, can be as edifying as being in the traffic accident yourself. Do your work, and then stop worrying about it when you're done. It's that simple. Holy crap, it's that simple.

Now to never worry about my to-do list again.

2005-08-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

final thoughts on: law school and relationships

I wonder what law school would have been like, had I been single.

I've been married since 1999. It's the first time I've ever had to try sharing my personal space: I grew up with divorced parents, no siblings, and a relatively small extended family scattered to the four winds. If I didn't like this guy an awful lot, there's no way in hell I'd put up with some of the more invasive aspects of marriage -- throwing his sweaty gym clothes into my laundry basket, for example, or "needing" the entire living room to sprawl across while he pursues a release deadline. But I do like him. An awful lot.

Still, I guess I started law school with the preconceived notion that marriage itself was hard enough. But then my husband surprised me: he turned out to be a tailor-made 1L companion. Unlike me, he never spent much time in college -- not a moment, in fact -- pondering his navel or trying to Find Himself. Instead, he worked himself to the point of physical illness. The illness thing was a drag, of course, but it paid off: there aren't too many people who, in the space of four years, can graduate MIT with a perfect GPA in two majors and a master's degree. He knew from brain-jam. I knew nothing, and was extraordinarily glad he was there to be my guide.

I didn't need much motivation. I knew I wanted to transfer law schools, so an insane workload was basically a foregone conclusion. What I didn't know was how to work smarter rather than harder. He did, though. "You're doing a lot of briefing," he'd remark, seeing the green database screen reflected in my eyeglasses. "You should be focusing more on exams." When I protested that I didn't know enough law yet to face down a practice exam without wetting myself in a panic, he proposed a solution anyway. "You should at least be taking what you know, or taking each new thing as you learn it, and asking yourself: now, how will this turn up on an exam? If I were writing exam questions, how would I test someone on this?"

He was right. He has always been right when it comes to matters academic. I spent too much time briefing and outlining, and not enough internalizing actual exam mechanisms -- and I tanked on half my first-semester exams. It was horrific, watching my dearest dream shatter into shrapnel before my eyes. For a period of about two weeks, I had trouble even speaking. But my husband, once again, proved his incredible worth. He didn't coddle me or indulge my rampaging depression. Instead, at the end of those two weeks, he sat me down and gave me the drill-sergeant treatment. "This is unworkable!" he shouted as I gaped at him, unable even to summon tears. "You can't live like this! So alright, you can't transfer. This is where you're stuck. That means you need to be at the fucking top of your class. And you'll never get there like this. You need to snap out of it!"

Again, as usual, he was right. So I did snap out of it.

Despite his faith in me, the top of the class was basically out of the question; to get there, I'd need far more intuition and legal talent than I possessed. But would it really be so bad, being stuck in-state? California was a perfectly nice place to live. My husband had a great job. If I cleaned up my act enough, I could probably find someone who'd hire me as well. We might even be able to buy a house. I decided to shelve my globetrotting dreams and invest my energies into going native.

Then, as if some giant fairy somewhere had checked off a box indicating that I'd learned my lesson, suddenly everything shifted with a great big jolt. Moot court not only worked out for me, but turned out to be a sparkling beautiful thing. My spring-semester grades put my fall ones to shame. And I did manage, after the dust settled, to transfer schools. My globetrotting dreams revived instantly. "We can go back to California next summer if you want," I giggled excitedly to my husband, "or even...to Boston."

He loved his startup, the reason why we'd moved to California in the first place. He'd been there since the beginning, one of the founders, and delighted in watching the company grow so large he no longer recognized people's faces. But he'd never forgotten the Ph.D. he started so long ago, before going on leave to try the Startup Thing. (Nor had I. The day after our wedding in New York, he was on a train back to Boston; the following day he began his first round of preliminary written exams. We still haven't taken an official honeymoon.)

Even so, he followed me to my ultimate law school without much enthusiasm. The startup, which thankfully appreciated all of my husband's late nights and foregone vacations, agreed to let him telecommute until I graduated. I thought this would be a terrific setup, since the guy would gladly live in his pajamas if he could. But while the pajamas thing was a fair success, being more or less housebound and working late into the night on Pacific time left him frustrated, stressed, and pacing like a caged lion. "We shouldn't be here. You should be at Stanford!" he'd yell, or "Harvard!" as his own dreams tugged him first toward one coast, then the other.

But he understood why we were there. And no matter how many times I offered to undertake a long-distance relationship so that he could return to his job in person, he refused. After a wake-the-neighbors row that probably had a lot to do with my diminished winter-quarter 2L grades, my husband and I finally made a deal: he would have the run of the apartment whenever he needed it during the term, but if I had an exam week coming up, he would arrange to be in California. This worked as long as it needed to; about two quarters, as it turned out. Ironically, the following quarter, when he timed his trip to coincide with my citecheck rather than exams, my grades came back just fine. Not that they particularly mattered any more. We'd already found a way back to Boston.

And here we are. And that's how we got here.

In retrospect the thing that wound up being most important in our relationship, especially through law school, was our respect for each other's personal space. My husband grew up an only child, just like I did; between that and his super-perceptive understanding of my required study schedule, he knew exactly how much I needed to be left alone to do my thing. I gave him the same courtesy, which made for some lonely late nights, but was the least I could do. When we can help each other, we do. But when we can't, the next best thing is to get the hell out of the way.

If law school is going to screw with a relationship, this is probably the reason why. You just can't be demanding of a person who's seriously committed to a course of action. People seriously committed to a course of action will understand what I mean: there's a certain amount of effort below which you may not dip without compromising your master plans, plans which ideally include your significant other as well. They'll benefit as much as you from your success. Wise significant others will understand this. Priceless ones will take an active part in helping you succeed. But if you're coupled with someone who demands your time when you can least afford it (or vice versa), yeah, that could be a problem.

At the end of the day, it's your call. Law school is an enormous weight on your time and your relationships. Even the most ideal match -- someone who shares your values and understands why you need to be in a certain place -- can still devolve into viciousness when either party feels slighted. And of course, it's just as easy to sacrifice your law school efforts for the relationship as it is to do the reverse. Only you can say which of the two will be more valuable for you to preserve in the long term. Just be sure that that's where you're focused: on the long term.

Because that's where the love should take you.

2005-08-28T21:46:00.000-07:00

final thoughts on: pursuing your dreams

Opportunism gets a bad rap. It's all too easy for the uninformed observer to assume that the act of wanting something other than what you've got is due to greed, or elitism, or problems with your self-esteem. From childhood we're taught not to want. Learn to be satisfied with what you have, the received wisdom goes; that's how you'll be happy. Be thankful for what you have, even. Think of all the poor people who don't have what you do. In the grand scheme of Haves and Have-Nots, there is no reputable place for the Want-Mores.

But there's so much to be said in praise of ambition. Wanting to be something other than what you already are, even if the comparative greatness is only in your own eyes, is something that ought to be worthy of encouragement. Why should you accept less than you think you're worth? Why should you settle for a trivial salary when you know that you can earn more? Why should you pursue a career path that doesn't inspire your enthusiasm when you could be doing something you'd love? Why should you be discouraged by the failure rate of other people aspiring to the same goal? When someone's telling you, however implicitly, that you deserve no better than your current situation, the problem is hardly with your self-esteem.

Sure, there are basic needs you'll need to cover. You don't want to be in your thirties and still hitting up your folks for rent money. But there's no reason to invest your finest energies in the pursuit of paying bills. My husband and I have not stuck by each other through move after vertiginous move just to establish ourselves as small-town tradespeople (even though we may wind up doing just that, if that's what we want, at the end of our adventures). We both dream of how it must feel to stand shoulder to shoulder with the truly incredible people in our respective professions, which is why he supported my transferring law schools halfway across the country, and why I support him finishing his Ph.D., even though it means losing out on the income that supported our fancy restaurant and B&B habits.

It's hard to walk away from apparent success when what you really want is something different. The naysayers will reliably gasp in wide-eyed chagrin and howl that you're making a mistake, that you were doing great and there was no reason to want anything different. And those naysayers may even be in your own head. "I should be providing for us," my husband worries. "No," I tell him, "now is the time for you to be chasing your dream!" We have enough of a financial cushion that neither of us will have to be a Wal-Mart greeter this year to make ends meet. My clerkship pays more than I earned in my last full-time job, and my husband earns a stipend as a teaching assistant. I'm already thirty; he'll be there too come March. We can afford this now in a way we may never again.

Aspirations are a double-edged sword, of course. They can stalk you and drive you to madness. If you dream of something beyond your means, it can become a nasty fairy that taunts you repeatedly. And if in the pursuit of your dearest desires you yourself are found wanting, that can be more of a heartbreaker than anyone's initial suggestion that you didn't deserve the good thing to begin with. It is hard as hell not to shatter to pieces when faced with the reality that you simply can't achieve the object of your dreams. Disappointment can be crippling, if you let it.

But don't let that stop you. As important as dreams are, they're also fungible. My mother did not spend her entire career as a software engineer dreaming of running a horse farm, and yet, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, it became exactly what she wanted to do with her life. Most aspiring stand-up comics don't succeed, so the odds are against my cousin; but even if he doesn't wind up being the next Seinfeld, he'll still have won a bunch of competitions and made hundreds of people laugh, and at the end of the day he'll still be happily married and gainfully employed in his favorite city. My husband may decide to quit the Ph.D., and I may go back to California with him, and things may turn out as though we'd never taken any extraordinary measures to pursue our dreams at all.

Except they won't, because we did. We went to Chicago. We went to Boston. We were both devoted practitioners of the art of extreme education. Even if that doesn't catapult us to the nosebleed heights of our chosen careers, we will still have taken our chances at doing so. Because it's not just the fulfillment of the dream that matters; it's crediting the dream itself. Don't just tread water somewhere because it's passable, workable, good enough. Respect your own aspirations. Let no one convince you that you don't have a right to wish for something else. Chase any butterfly you choose, because that's the only way to catch one.

Ten years ago, in a cute movie you've probably never seen, Al Pacino played a dying grandfather during the Great Depression. He had a quarter. His grandson needed one. Al Pacino told the grandson that the quarter would be his after he, Al Pacino, died. The grandson eventually felt guilty that he lusted after that quarter (and therefore his grandfather's death) so badly, but with grandpa Pacino's dying breath, he gave the grandson one word of advice:

"Want."

2005-08-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

final thoughts on: the three years of law school

Recently noise has been made debating the (f)utility of a third year of law school. (See also wide-ranging discussion at Volokh and a non-starry-eyed perspective at Sapere Aude.)

I loved my third year. Like the corporate lawyer cited in the MSNBC article, I can happily say that 3L was perhaps the best year of my life. Even though I spent much more of it on journal and clinic stuff than on beer and softball. Even though I wound up doing far more work than was really necessary. Even though I didn't blow it off, 3L was the time of my life.

Whenever anyone challenges the purpose of a third year of law school, my first response is always selfish. If law school hadn't been three years long, I never would have gotten to have the fun that I did in my second year at my degree-granting institution. If law school weren't three years long, no one would even be able to transfer. We'd basically be MBAs. And while it's debatable whether we already are just a different breed of MBA, I'd rather believe that we're not.

At the very least, for a proposal to eliminate 3L to be reasonable, 1L has to be made a lot more humane. I understand that not everyone's first year was as nightmarish as mine, and the principal reasons why mine sucked so royally were my own fault. But, just as with bar review, some aspects of the present first-year model are just so inherently rotten that they'll weigh on the experience of even the most satisfied and optimistic 1L. Getting rid of these would unload a lot of the nastiness of law school, which, at least in my view, would obviate the need for subsequent niceness to balance it out. There you'd have it: two years of not-unpleasant education, culminating in a trade credential. If you're going to dumb down law school until it becomes business school, then make it be business school.

Having said that: don't make it be business school. As tough as 1L is even for the people who love it (and, obviously, for the people whom it eats alive), it's a feature of the profession whose value is seldom disputed by actual practitioners (much though it may be vilified by its current and recent victims). It's what makes us lawyers. And even if becoming a lawyer isn't the only reason to go to law school, it remains the best one.

My second year of law school, my first at the school that gave me my J.D., was a peculiar blessing. Starting afresh with a blank transcript meant that I'd been given the much-desired chance to do 1L over again -- only this time with a clue. I could redeem everything from my Torts grade to the depressing return on my first round of law school applications. I could reinvent myself as a successful law student instead of just a lucky one. I needed that year, to wrestle my demons to the mat once and for all. After such an effort, my third year was a gift.

Maybe it's different if you stay in one place, particularly if it's not a place that ever inspired you to wax rhapsodic. But it doesn't have to be that different. I've got to imagine that it's possible to spend your 2L year working out all the kinks in your 1L performance even if your grades haven't been zeroed out -- and that once you've done so, a year to sit back and savor what you've learned is still more valuable than immediately rushing out to chase dollars and ambulances. We came here to be lawyers, yes, but let's leave the job of insulting the profession to people who aren't members of it.

That's not to say that 3L couldn't be made a lot more practical. People have proposed an apprenticeship-type model, where you spend more of your third year practicing than in class. My clinic effectively made this happen for me, and based on my experience, I wholeheartedly support such a proposal. Even if I didn't worship the judge who supervised my clinic, even if I'd never actually gotten to stand up after a U.S. Attorney and extemporaneously debunk what he'd just said, the practice of drafting and filing motions alone taught me more about actual federal practice than an entire term of Advanced Trial Advocacy. I can see a judicial externship serving this same purpose, or even a term-time placement as a clerk in a law firm. You'd not only practice, you'd network. And ideally, you'd find work, which is still a concern for 3Ls in most of the law schools in the country.

If another year's worth of tuition is truly an unfair burden for grudging third-year students, firms could offer partial tuition fellowships to the kids they hire through the apprenticeship program, or fund clinic stipends, or something of that ilk. Mitigate the opportunity cost of another year spent learning in a controlled environment, if such learning really creates better eventual lawyers. Let the profession kick in some money to fund the third year if it's truly that valuable to the profession. It would seem like a better investment than funding happy hours, at any rate. Because law students will always be quite happy to fund those themselves, without complaint.

2005-08-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

final thoughts on: who we claim to be

Every time my dye job starts to grow out for real, I'm reminded of how gray my hair actually is. They spring up from my scalp like angry little white wires, stiffer and wavier than the hair I grew up with. They appear no happier to be there than I am to see them.

Periodically I ponder letting it grow out and just going natural. Maybe I could be one of those women who wears gray well. Or maybe I'd just look funny. Old before my time. When your hair is brown and razor-straight, there's seldom a way to make short grays poking straight up out of your scalp look like they belong there.

So I dye. And I go to the gym, as though that will bring about anything more than a superficial sheen of health over the same slothful flabby core that has always been me. "Your heart rate should NOT be going over 170!!" my husband snaps in alarm. "It's not doing you any good up there!" And yet, after three years of devotion to the elliptical trainer, conventionally-defined Cardiovascular Fitness(tm) eludes me still. "Of course it is," I snap back at him. "You like to pretend that there's some point to this endeavor other than physical pain, but we both know that that's the whole point." I go hiking in California, as Californians are supposed to, and silently curse my escalating pulse. Doesn't it know what state we're in?

I have passed for Californian, as well as I could. I have passed for French in Paris, happily giving directions to the Quai d'Orsay to the Americans who used a phrasebook to ask me where it was. I have passed for a social conservative, declining to share my views on homosexuality and abortion on the floor of my debating Society. I have passed for a full-fledged liberal, helping to found the most far-left journal at my 1L school, appealing the sentences of convicted criminals in my 3L clinic, and otherwise keeping my head down at opportune moments. If you put me in water long enough, I would find a way to pass for a fish.

It gets tiring, taking a turn at being everyone.

But it's amazing. It's so much more fun than just being me, answering to one name only. Nor does it have to put you in the bad place, if you're in control of what's at stake. Imagine seeing the world from the opposite perspective of your own. Imagine the things you learn about people, the stories you collect, when you drop your barriers and are willing to give someone else's existence a try. Imagine walking so many miles in another man's moccasins that they become as comfortable as your own, and then repeating the process with someone else's, until you can slip on any set of shoes you find and still dance.

I love liberals. I love conservatives. I love Californians. I even love French people. I love fat people who eat dessert without shame, thin people who run circles around me on the ellipticals, miserable law students and jubilant ones and the woman whose kid wouldn't quit squealing last night in the Greek diner while my husband went white-knuckled with annoyance. I love people who have survived tremendous awfulness, and people who will never have to. Because I can imagine being all of these people, and being happy.

And not faking it.

2005-08-25T17:57:00.000-07:00

final thoughts on: the things we carry

I.

A package came in the mail last week, one which I'd been half hoping would get lost. Immediately after the bar exam, I realized that there was no way in hell that I intended to shlep my stack of bar review books around California until we got home. So I threw them in the mail to myself, bookrate, figuring that by the time they made it back to Boston I'd be over my disgust of them. And here they are, uniformly green and evil-looking, with the even-nastier PMBR Blue Book sticking out like a sore thumb.

They still disgust me, as it turns out.

I sat down with the stack on my living room floor, dumped out the Rubbermaid tub in which I kept the rest of the Barbri books, and sorted through them all together. The multistate ones I knew I'd have to save for my next go-around with the National Council of Bar Examiners in February. But the California ones, ahh, those were destined for eBay immediately. Er, as soon as possible. Er, that is, as soon as I find out that I passed the California bar.

Which might take awhile.

I found myself swearing quietly. I wanted rid of these monsters so badly, but the chance was just too great that I might need them again. There was nothing to be done but pack the books back up -- multistate ones back into the Rubbermaid tub, California ones crammed into the bookrate box. They're still in the living room. Some day soon my husband will ask what they're doing there, and I will have no good answer.

II.

My husband didn't recognize the origin of the message on our answering machine, but I did. "It's the framing shop," I told him as I deleted it. "The diploma's ready."

And was it: maroon-matted in a mahogany frame that still cost less than the crappy ones they were plugging at the university bookstore, monstrosities with the school name in Gothic gold leaf on the mat. The framing-shop guy briefly pulled the completed work out of the padded sleeve to show me, and it was beautiful, warm like a hug. My law degree. I'd had little time to ponder it, between dashing to Boston and bar review and moving house and more bar review. But there it is: the sum of all my efforts. I went to law school, this law school, and now I have a law degree. This one.

With a mite of regret, I realized that it was time to take my final transcript down off of my refrigerator and file it away. The 'script was the only piece of paper I brought home after graduation, since I'd had to give my original diploma back for reprinting. Then it had been talismanic during bar review -- past evidence that I was capable of passing tests on nearly all of the subjects I was bar-cramming. But now it was just an old piece of paper full of numbers, meaningless to anyone outside my law school. And the warmest fuzziest part of it -- the part that read "Degree granted: Doctor of Law, Honors" -- had been supplanted by the real thing.

"Where do you want to hang it?" my husband asked.

"In my office," I told him.

But as a state court clerk, I'm only going to have a cubicle. At least that's what my predecessor had when I came to interview last fall. Even so, for reasons I can't rationally explain, right now I want that piece of paper near me while I work.

Oddly, last night I dreamed that I was working at a law firm and hung the diploma up (unframed, in its leather portfolio, as could only happen in a dream) in an area that turned out to be shared. I got in mild trouble for this, but worse, someone took down the diploma and I couldn't find out where it had gone. I woke up, rolled over, stared at my pillow and thought: things are meaningless. things are stuff. stuff weighs us down when we move. stuff can be replaced.

Perhaps I give it too much credit. This, too, can be replaced.

III.

At 855 square feet, our current apartment is the smallest we've ever shared. (Last summer's temporary abode came close at 810 square feet, but since we left all of our stuff back in our principal residence, it wasn't as problematic.) Accordingly, my husband decided that our routine purging-of-chattels -- which happens whenever we relocate, both before and after the move -- was going to have to cut a lot deeper this time. Specifically, no storage space in our new apartment meant that the stuff we'd previously kept in storage was going to have to go.

"We need to clean out these old boxes of files," my husband concluded.

By "clean out" he meant "shred," and I could hardly object. Of course we were never going to look in the lion's share of these files again. But as we fed page after page into the rotating jaws -- electric bills from 1996, pay stubs from my first real job, records from the first credit card for which I was ever approved -- I started to feel lightheaded. I was bleeding out all the most basic accomplishments of my adulthood: surviving on an entry-level liberal arts major's wage, paying my rent and my bills, building up my credit, paying off my debt. I was hemorrhaging history.

I mourned the several dozen bags of paper-bits we hauled down the hallway to the giant recycling bins, filling one after another with the remains of the last decade. It was true: I was never going to look in those files again. What sense did it make to derive comfort from their existence, then, when it was obvious even without them that my affairs were in order?

IV.

It is so easy to confuse object with meaning. Particularly if, like me, your superstitions tend to endow objects with powers independent of their form. There is a danger in investing *too* much meaning in an inanimate object, particularly when the truth it represents does not depend on its existence.

The hardest thing to remember, the most Buddhist thing even, is that the meaning will almost always exist independently of the object. You'll know if you're ever going to open that book again. You'll know if you reached a certain stage in your life without a zillion little pieces of paper, or one big one, to tell you. And you alone can decide how lightly you're going to need to travel through life, how much you can carry.

2005-08-24T07:53:00.000-07:00

Vegan Avocado Milkshakes

In your blender, toss in

1/2 super-ripe avocado
1 cup vanilla soy milk
Enough ice cubes to move the liquid level up to the 2-cup mark
A healthy shaking -- maybe a tablespoon or two -- of your favorite sweetener (I like almond-vanilla flavored powdered sugar)

Puree and serve immediately. Makes two coffee-mugsful. We like these for breakfast.

2005-08-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

final thoughts on: transferring law schools

In the two years since I transferred schools, the market for doing so has changed. Previously there was little to no real information on the process to be found. DeLoggio had a page of old rumors, the Princeton Review had a few words of nonadvice, and one lone transfer student had recounted her experience on a now-defunct AOL home page. But now, with the advent of incredible resources like the transfer applicants' Yahoogroup, a real supportive community has come into flower for people pondering the lonely road.

This is terrific. But with it has come a level of animosity which, while probably ever-present, I never had the misfortune to encounter when the T-word was a topic avoided in polite company. Now, apparently, no holds are barred: on the boards where our peers' true feelings are laid bare, their distaste for transfer students turns out to be surprisingly sharp. If transfer students can be open about our aspirations and communal progress, so too, it seems, can our newly-acquired colleagues resent us openly because we "essentially coasted at easier schools and yet receive all the benefits the real [top school] students worked so hard to get."

Rumor feeds on anecdote, but there's really very little to say in response to this. You know how hard you worked as a 1L. Employers do too. In reality, the only people who assume that it's easier to do well at a lower-ranked school where jobs are scarce than at a top school flush with recruiters are those law students whose career options have never been an exclusive function of their class rank. And fortunately, they're not the ones making either admissions or hiring decisions.

But there are transfers out there who will probably feel threatened by this, folks who might now worry that the stigma of a resume with two law schools on it (which isn't as bad a stigma as you might think, but isn't trivial, either) is bad enough without having to confront the active resentment of the industry. If your interviewers were newly-minted 2Ls once, and most were, who's to say that they won't also harbor this illwill toward perceived trespassers on their hard-bought prestige?

Fear not. They won't. While the legal profession is a good deal more prestige-driven than serves it well, in this case it doesn't hurt you: if anything, you've probably increased your prestige by transferring, a move for which you are credited. Nor does the fact that you completed 1L at a different school necessarily doom recruiters' opinions of you. Among all my screening, callback, and clerkship interviews, I never once encountered a lawyer who overtly assumed that my prelaw numbers were unworthy of my degree-granting institution. And even if they implicitly felt this way, it didn't influence our conversation. Frankly, it never came up at all. By the time you've made it to 2L recruiting, your prelaw numbers (with the possible exception of topical undergraduate grades) are all but irrelevant.

The toughest industry bias you'll face as a transfer student -- and be relieved, it's not that tough -- is the thinking most recently explained by Alex Wellen in the New York Times. Wellen observes that, like part-time programs for students with low prelaw numbers, admitting "weaker students" as second-year transfers is an easy way for law schools to fill out their classes without affecting their USNWR rankings. As uncharitable as this sounds, though, just keep in mind that if you've successfully transferred, this is a problem you've already solved. A good set of transferworthy 1L grades will instantly dispel any recruiter's fear that you might be "weaker" than your peers (particularly since nobody looks at your prelaw numbers). Moreover, interviewers will often kindly assume that transfer students were at or near the top of the class at their ex-law schools. And even less generous recruiters know that top-flight grades at any law school are not earned by coasting. Don't worry. You'll do fine.

But if you're like me, negative expectancies trouble you more than laughable generalizations about the ease of doing well at lower-ranked schools. You don't want to be a Weaker Student, particularly when this label seems to precede you. So you fight it. After transferring, when most post-1Ls gratefully embrace the license to cool it, I beat myself up workwise long after I should have slowed up. I craved opportunity, yes, but also couldn't shake this itching desire to vindicate myself. Sure, I wanted to earn things like law review because those things would be assets for the rest of my career. But I also wanted them as warding talismans, crosses I could thrust in the face of the insidious vampiric fear of my own Weakness.

I got lucky. With the exception of moot court, I reached every law school milestone that I set for myself. My CV is now exactly what I'd hoped for. But while I was busy chasing all these butterflies, I noticed that most of my peers were not. And they didn't need to be. It's nice to acquire bells and whistles for the ol' resume ("transcript bling," our old registrar used to call it) but, and please take my word for this, you don't have to. You are not a Weaker Student if you choose not to pursue every damn thing you possibly can. Curbing your greed and learning to define your strengths independently of the conventional wisdom are enormously valuable takeaways as well. Debunk the negative expectancy in your own head first.

I'd like to say that these were lessons I learned in law school, but in all honesty, I'm still working on internalizing them. I think I'll always relish chasing butterflies, just because it's fun. But my goal now is simple: to have just as much fun even if I don't catch any.

2005-08-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

final thoughts on: the bad place, and how to avoid it

The strangest part of my bar review experience was how anticlimactic it turned out to be. A whole crop of bar bloggers sprang up after graduating, venting and sharing all of the upset and nervous angst that I recalled so well from 1L. I joined the circle and waited for the panic to hit me: I am long familiar with Anxiety Issues, and if so many of my peers were clearly in the bad place, I could hardly expect to be immune.

And yet it never happened.

I never had a single panic attack. Bar review was nothing more than grunge work: weeks and weeks and weeks of horrendously boring exercises in memorization and test-taking. I had a few demoralizing setbacks, and on the whole I'd say that bar review was basically a negative experience, but it never actually became the bad place that I feared it would be -- the place where so many other people, all around me, were truly, madly, and deeply freaking out.

Even the bar exam itself was surprisingly fear-free. It was excruciatingly long and grueling, and the Calbar people should not be forgiven for banning foodstuffs and water bottles from the exam room. But it was not the bad place. At least not for me. I saw people standing up and pacing, watched eyes bug out and lips get chewed, and felt as much surprise as relief: I am so lucky. While my peers and neighbors were having kittens, the biggest downer sentiments I could muster were hunger, exhaustion and boredom. I was bored! Hallelujah, there was truly no fear left!

Compare this to my first year of law school, which has now been retired to the top shelf of the trophy case where the Worst Experiences Of My Life are on display for future reference. In retrospect, 1L should have been boring, at least in part. Based on other folks' 1L stories, a normal person's first year of law school should be entertaining, periodically exciting, a surprising amount of work, stressful at times, periodically dull, and, in sum, just another year of school. It should not be the crucible in which your entire future is forged, where everything depends on everything and the slightest mistake can damn you and oh yes, the outcome is largely beyond your control.

I sympathized with people who felt this way about the bar exam, because I remembered being there. The only difference was that, as so often happens, I happened to be there out of synch with everyone else.

In my defense, I was never one of those self-aggrandizing gunners so disliked by the law school masses. I was an opportunist. My goals were clear: I needed mobility, which meant I needed law credentials with bicoastal street value, which in turn meant that I had to transfer out of my California law school. No matter that it placed brilliantly in California. The state itself had become almost like an abusive parent, gripping my chin and forcing me to look it in the eye while it berated me: Look around you. Look at all the healthy and athletic and blond people who love the summer and are comfortable in flip flops and go hiking for fun. What are *you*? How can *you* claim to belong here? You are so different, so unlike us. A cheap import. An out-of-towner.

On good days, I felt like a spy in my 1L class, a secret foreigner moving with relative ease through a community of full-soul Californians. But on bad days, I felt like a fraud. I worked on a journal where no one would have even been on speaking terms with me had I been forthright about my politics. Many of my friends, and 100% of my professors, would probably have found me equally distasteful had I not kept my worldview to myself. But I needed to do well enough in law school to transfer, and if that meant not only working myself to a pulp but also living on the down low for a year, then I'd do what I had to. I'd go to office hours. I'd walk the talk on exams. I'd pretend to fit in with any group that would have me, because that was my way out.

"Was your school really that awful?" a reader once asked me at our first face-to-face meeting.

"I made it worse," I told him.

This is why 1L was such a bad place: not because my law school wasn't a good school (while I obviously didn't fit in there, the school itself is great, far better than the rankings would have you believe), but because I was a square peg in a round hole, and had to fake it mightily to pass for round. Maybe I could have played it differently -- been an honestly disagreeable bitch instead of struggling to feign agreement with the strange perspectives everyone else seemed to share. But I don't think that would have made me any happier; I'm just the type that prefers subverted disagreement to open conflict. And I did succeed in transferring, so now I suppose it's all water under the bridge anyway.

But all this, on top of the regular 1L stress with which any first-year law student can identify, was what made it such a bad place, and why I still can't look back on it with full objectivity. This was the price of getting to where I am now: in Boston, bearing law credentials with bicoastal street value, exactly as I'd hoped. I've never been happier or more satisfied in my life than I am right now, so it must have been worth it. But I think it'll always hurt to look back and remember how miserable I felt, how frustrated, how powerless, how afraid.

But other good things have come of it too, in addition to my desired outcome. For one thing, I've got religion now, at least comparatively. I no longer feel stalked by the physical superiority of native Californians, even though I do still go to the gym. But most importantly, I've lost my fear. I didn't panic at the bar exam because there was no reason to. Big Life-Changing Things may still upset me, but my definition of those has changed, and less significant things (which most things now are) no longer have the power to send me into night terrors. I have better uses for my excess energy now, and as long as I can control it, it will not be expended on fear.

And for that reason alone, I think the bad place may be a thing of the past.

2005-08-21T21:13:00.000-07:00

Summer Pesto

Leaves of 3 stalks basil
1 clove garlic, put through a press
1 handful parsley (curly parsley, not the flatleaf kind)
1 handful pignoli nuts
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese

Whirl all of these in your food processor. Add olive oil, roughly a quarter cup, until sauce is smooth but not runny.

Toss with pasta and serve at room temperature or cooler. If you can get good summer tomatoes and fresh mozzarella, those are excellent on the side.

2005-08-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

final thoughts on: exams and grades

First and foremost, I'm glad they're over. I'm thrilled that I'll never have to take a law school exam again. They are like no other exam I've ever had before, not even the bar. And despite the contrary message that my paper credentials kindly broadcast, I never did quite figure out how they worked.

To this day I cannot explain why I did so poorly in Torts, which I knew fluently, and at the same time aced Contracts, which I did not understand. My preparation for exams at my degree-granting law school, after I'd ostensibly found my groove, was more or less constant -- but my grades were anything but. I did nothing different to learn Con Law IV than I did when studying for Con Law III, but the grades are spread so wide, you could drive a truck between them. I have a dozen similar comparisons. I even got the same grade in Legal Profession, the one class for which I actually did no work, as in Copyright, for which I did quite a lot.

The best I could conclude, after three years of labor unequaled, is that the correlation between work and grades is only sort of random. Every so often you'll get an aberration: a superhigh or superlow grade that's clearly unwarranted. But most of the time, a constant level of work invested will lead to outcomes that usually stay above a certain floor. And the magical flashes of brilliance? Sorry, those I never did manage to reverse engineer. But anyone who tells you that you can get them simply by working hard enough is either lying or unaware of their own talent.

So what the hell is the point? an ordinary person might grouse. Short of dowsing through the law student community in search of those intuitive professors-to-be who just get it without trying, why do we bother with these stupid exams? To those of us who lack the Magical Exam-Grokking Superpowers, they're at best a mechanical recycling of issues already retreaded to death in class, and at worst a politically-motivated exercise in contortionism which compromises either the victim's GPA or personal integrity, take your pick. Either way, it's lose-lose.

Well, yes. And no. Like I said, it's not so difficult to mechanize your process to insulate yourself against nasty surprises. A transcript showing hard work and solid, if not uniformly beatific, performance will still stand you in good stead. I bet it's a lot more fun to approach exams holistically, unrehearsed, relying solely on your intuitive sense of The Law. But by choreographing my exam answers in advance I learned a hell of a lot of law, which some might argue is the point of studying. And my grades did not dip back into shock-and-awful territory after my 1L year, so something must have worked.

Here's what I did. Or, at least, what I meant to do; my investment in the system obviously waned over time, as anyone's would. (Much credit goes to my husband, who schooled me in this way of thinking.)

Mechanically: I did the reading. I never used canned briefs, but *always* got the Gilberts. I did not practice on E&E books or hypos. I hated them, and still do: they always seemed to involve rules that I didn't know, because nobody had friggin' told me what they were. Blessed Gilberts did. Gilberts outlines are the one type of book you'll ever buy in law school that's actually worth what you'll pay for it.

I kept a case briefs database in Microsoft Access, but did not actually write my own briefs. Instead, when a professor would spend class time discussing a case, I'd take notes in the relevant database fields -- issue, rule, analysis, holding -- instead of in my word processor. I'd then fish through my database entries in the "rule" field when making my outline, which was otherwise based on class discussion. (Not to mention other people's outlines, when I could get them. I always made my own, but would never say no to a second opinion.)

From the outline, and with plenty of help from Gilberts, I'd cook the main issues down to either a checklist (for checklisty type classes like crim law or evidence) or a flowchart (for process-oriented questions like civ pro or con law). If there was a relevant statute or set of rules, those would go in a grid of their own. We did not use exam software at my school, which meant that on an open book exam (which most were) you could have a dozen different documents open while you wrote your answers. On any given exam I'd have a basic toolkit of minimized windows: outline, checklist/flowchart, rules grid, case briefs (although these dwindled to nil as 3L wore on), and Gilberts. Also key were lucky charms, lucky clothes, a bottle of water and a Luna bar.

Once the tool chest was full, I'd get a bunch of old exams and A answers -- but I soon stopped trying to write A-level answers myself. I found it more valuable just to outline the answers before even trying the question, at least for the first few. Those wacky intuitive people come up with all sorts of nifty ideas that I know I'd never think of in an exam situation. (I still owe a big chunk of my property grade to the dude who suggested that a constructive trust could be imposed when the adverse possession test fails. Thanks, whoever you are.)

Mentally: My husband's method requires getting under the skin and inside the head of the professor, from which vantage point you can predict how they'll write an exam. Professors are people not so different from us; most of them write exams much like you would in their shoes. They'll emphasize what's important to them. From this perspective, the professors whom you find most politically distasteful in class are giving you a gift: naked agendas make for easily-scripted exam questions, and answers. Any fascination that the professor makes clear in class will likely influence the way they draft the exam. Mark it.

Look to the old exams for this as well. Frequently you'll see themes recurring -- not just the fact that every contracts question involves some sort of breach, but more detailed stuff, like the way your property professor always works in a particular puzzle about joint tenancy or a lease implied in fact. My Corporations professor loved to mine the fact patterns of actual cases -- at a level of detail the casual briefer would miss -- for exam questions. Knowing stuff like this puts you in a much better position to prepare for what's coming. The ability to anticipate blows is just a bit of labor away from the ability to parry them.

Most importantly: you must not fear. fear is the mindkiller. If you spook, there's a real danger that you'll waste all that preparation. But you shouldn't have to spook. You've done this before, over and over in your living room, reviewing old exams and your outline and all the work you did all term long. Just drink some water, breathe, and stay calm. This is stuff you know.

At the same time, don't get carried away. Don't flag an issue and squeal I know this! to yourself and then go soaring off-topic; this will almost certainly lead you to miss other issues. High nerves can derail you just as quickly as plummeting nerves. Stick to your checklist. Follow your choreography. If anxiety has no place on a law exam, neither does euphoria. Never abandon sensibility when they're grading you on it.

Examtaking in this mode feels like a robotic grind, because it is one. By the end of law school you will almost certainly be as sick of it as I was. But it'll get you to the end of law school, most likely in decent form. And then you'll never have to take one of these godawful nightmare things again, never have to touch the briefs database, never have to crack a casebook again for the rest of your long and successful career.

From this end, I can assure you that it feels as good as you're hoping it will.

2005-08-19T20:48:00.000-07:00

Well, crap.

I had great plans for August. This blog was going to ride ever so elegantly into the sunset, scattering petals of wisdom in its wake. I would regale all of the readers who had survived the ordeal alongside me with everything it had taught me.

Then Grandpa A. passed on, and after the funeral I was possessed of an urge to reconnect with my own side of the family. I spent a few days in sweltering Allentown, Pennsylvania, where my Poppop is now in assisted living (and my Nana is too, although she doesn't require any assistance; she just prefers to stay with Pop). My mother flew up from Florida and we camped at a Ramada near their place, where we were joined by Mom's two sisters and even one of my cousins. These are people I never see. I spent the time with them rather than trying to get the hotel wifi working. (Ye Olde Blacke Boxe is still kaputt, although a new power cable is on the way, which my husband thinks will resolve the overheating problem.)

From Allentown I drove back up through my ancestral homeland in New Jersey, stopping off by my stepmother to go gymming, outlet shopping (oh, the leather coat I found! the deal I got on it!), and then for a cup of tea with my other remaining grandmother. This one, my stepmother's mother, had recently done me an enormous honor: she donated a whole Sunday's worth of church flowers in honor of her granddaughter's graduation from law school. "JCA follows in her Dad's footsteps," read the worship program. This was not a time to excuse oneself to go blogging. This was a time to steep in one's family like a tea bag in hot water.

I composed a big long blog post in my head on the trip home to Boston, all about family and footsteps and getting older, and the things you learn at funerals and assisted-living establishments and over tea with grandparents. But when I got home, I could barely stay awake long enough to change into my jammies.

And then Movable Type died.

My ISP is a terrific little organization, a handful of guys who were once a consulting client of mine. One of them had emailed me several months back to warn me that my MT install, version 2.64, had some security holes; I should, he suggested, upgrade it promptly. This I never got around to doing. Now, finally, he'd upgraded the entire server, causing MT to freak out. I could no longer read comments. Then I could no longer log in at all. To date, no one is quite sure why. And frankly, it seems sort of silly to spend effort sorting through MT problems when the curtain is still scheduled to fall on this blog in scant few weeks (on or about September 1, to be precise).

So it's back to Blogger for now. I'll find a way to get the archives back up soon, but for now, the Month Looking Backward should resume its regular programming right here. Slightly accelerated, but hopefully intact.

Thanks for hanging in there with me.

2005-08-18T05:26:00.000-07:00

Test post to make sure that Blogger, unlike my MT install, is still willing to play nice with me.

2005-08-09T22:10:00.000-07:00

The Month Looking Backward, which should have been chugging along at full speed by now, has been delayed by a family funeral.

We'll be back before long. In the meantime, the prayerfully inclined are welcome to send a few good words along after my husband's grandfather. His name was Joseph.

2005-08-07T19:29:00.000-07:00

final thoughts on: law firm recruiting

Commenter "please (help@me.com)" proposes the following kickoff topic for the Month Looking Backward:

a suggestion for a timely retrospective topic: OCI. some of us Tier 2'ers who did well but chose not to trasnfer have a billion interviews next week, and any advice would be MUCH appreciated!

Congratulations on doing well enough to have a lots of interviews! We aim to please here at Sua Sponte, and are happy to take other retrospective requests as well.

I experienced Oh See Eye at two law schools. First I was a spectator, bemusedly watching the 2Ls a year ahead of me squirm in their black suits. My 1L law school was in California, not a place where people tend to be particularly comfortable in courtwear when there are flip-flops and board shorts to be had. I smiled to myself, finding it all very humorous and hoping that I would never be in such a position. Not that I knew what to hope for instead: a court job, maybe, or something in government. Even so, whether out of sour grapes or just sheer ignorance, working for a law firm was not on my to-do list as a 1L.

A year later I was a participant, freshly transferred to a school way the heck outside of California and awash in euphoric disbelief that my luck had taken such an astounding turn. Suddenly firms wanted to interview me. I couldn't believe how many screening interviews I had. Unlike Please, I did not do that well as a 1L. Or rather, I did fine except for one train wreck grade, which then protruded from my transcript in a way that was hard to ignore. And yet it wasn't held against me. I was amazed.

Here is what I learned. The standard disclaimer applies: your mileage may vary.

Be prepared. Checklist here.

Grades matter much less than you think. Look, all these on-campus interviewers are lawyers. They went to law school too. They know what law exams are like. They probably got a B or two or nine themselves. It's something you have in common, more likely than not. Frankly, a somewhat variegated transcript gives recruiters something to talk about during the interview (which -- put yourself in their shoes -- can get excruciatingly tiresome after eight or nine in a row). "Good job last year, but what happened in Torts?" was a common question in my interviews. In truth, an albatrossy grade -- particularly in isolation -- doesn't have to sink you if you aren't afraid to acknowledge it. Don't try to hide it or project the blame on a bad professor. Admit you screwed up. Then explain why (again, do not redirect fault here; however true, it doesn't play well in interviews). Then explain how you solved all those problems. Recruiters like people who solve problems. Less-than solid grades are much less of a handicap than you might think, so long as you play fair with them. Really, don't worry about your grades.

Your school matters enormously. By this I don't mean the degree of prestige associated with your school (although if you go to Harvard, sure, expect to have offers thrown at you like it's going out of style; if you don't, read on). Rather, I mean the connection your school provides you to your interviewer. Maybe they're an alum, hoping to recruit more alums. Or maybe they just appreciate the school's local reputation. To this day I'm convinced that every job offer I got while in law school -- from my 1L externship, to my two 2L summer offers, to my clerkship -- was due either entirely to my school, or *far* more to my school than my grades. And yes, I'm talking about both schools in that statement. It's not the "whoa" factor, it's the "ah yes" factor. People who went to your school, who understand where you're coming from, who can appreciate everything you've done thus far. I can't overstate the importance of this. Your school is money. Not the name of the school, but the school itself.

Bid deep, not wide. The career services folks who advise you to pick a location or two and concentrate there are correct. Choosing too many cities in your lottery picks may result in some absolutely killer callback trips, and you MUST be alert and awake for your callbacks (I lost a good half dozen offers by being too tired, jetlagged, or otherwise unexciting to the firm in my callbacks). Clustering your firms of choice in one or two cities will make callbacks much much much easier, as well as save time and energy that should be spent on interview prep rather than cross-country plane flights. So pick one or two markets where you'd like to work, and then go deep -- larger firms, smaller firms, lifestyle firms, branch offices of firms headquartered elsewhere. Span the market. Once you've decided where you want to be, try to meet with firms at every level in that market. And don't just take the callbacks with the ones that pay big bucks. Talk to them all. Remember the old Sua Sponte mantra -- not giving it a shot is the same as a rejection, ex ante.

On your callback:

Be awake, awake, awake! Get as much sleep the night before as you can. Or else ingest lots of coffee, soda, No-Doz, Jolt, whatever works for you. This was my single worst mistake. I would routinely fly home to California for callbacks (Oh See Eye happened very soon after my transfer decision, so we hadn't moved yet) and spend more time taking part in my husband's packing frenzy than I would resting up and preparing for the interview. DUMB plan. DUMB DUMB DUMB. Don't waste a single callback on sleep deprivation, sore muscles or other distractions. Stay focused!

Connect with the recruiter. Yes, it's nice to have a vibe with the handful of folks with whom you'll interview on-site. But I lost at least one, and possibly two, offers by not making an effort to track down and thank the one person who had interviewed me on campus for flying me out. Even if you're hosed all throughout the interview and don't get a chance to see the recruiter in person, remember their name and bring it along in your mind. If they don't show up to say hi during your rotation, ask after them with at least two of your interviewers. And if they do pop in at some point, remember their name -- I repeat, remember their name, no matter how little else you remember about them from your screening interview -- and be sure to thank them BY NAME. I'm not sure I can overemphasize how embarrassing it can be if you miss this one. *blushes*

Etiquette! Make eye contact. Do not pick crap off the soles of your shoes, fuss with your suit, look at the stuff on their desk (unless there are family pictures or something appropriate to discuss), or chew gum. If you're nervous that your breath needs a boost, eat a Listerine or Altoids Strip in between sessions. Accept water or coffee when they offer it to you; don't let your throat go dry or your energy flag. Answer the questions you're asked. Ask appropriate questions when they give you a chance. NEVER talk politics, religion, or any of the other subjects that would be taboo at a nice dinner party. And if you're wearing red knickers, make sure your thong isn't showing or your fly is zipped (as applicable).

At lunch, do not order rich or sloppy food. Even if your lunchmates do. In fact, avoid any red sauces, uber-creamy things or meat with bones. If you're actually a vegetarian, more power to you, but keep it on the DL if the firm proposes to take you to one of those mahogany paneled old-money steakhouses for lunch. They usually serve pasta, and may even have nice veggie entrees. Order yours without any "hey I'm veg" fanfare; it doesn't tend to play well at steakhouses, and your callback is all about playing well. Only eat as much as you want. Let your companions suggest dessert; sharing it is only wise if it's a cheese tray or something else in small bits where your forks are not likely to cross tines. DO NOT drink alcohol at lunch.

Dealing with dings: Laugh. Wipe your feet. And move on. The world is full of law firms. You have plenty of time to collect all one of the offers you're going to need to guarantee yourself employment. And even the perfect firm may either not be as perfect as it seems, or may change in a way that affects your practice group of choice. For that matter, even if they remain perfect, they may prefer to hire you a few years from now. Hang in there.

Collecting expenses after the ding: You are still entitled to your travel costs -- airfare, hotel, ground transport, meal allowance. Just be civil about requesting reimbursement. Grab a bunch of copies of the NALP form from Career Services, save all your receipts (even for public transit tokens!), and send 'em off with a nice letter. My boilerplate text was simple:

"Thank you once again for facilitating my callback interview with[firm] on [date]. I had a positive experience meeting [list of people] at your office, and while I was disappointed to learn that I did not receive an offer for summer 2004 employment, I nonetheless appreciated the opportunity to visit and get to know your firm. Perhaps in the future we may work closely together.

Attached please find an accounting of the travel expenses I incurred in my visit to [firm's] [location] office, detailed on the NALP standard expense form. Copies of all receipts accompany this form. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or for any additional information."

Sure, one firm sent my check to "Jennifer A.," and my name is not Jennifer. But since they'd already dinged me, I could have cared less.

Choosing between offers: May you be so lucky. Once you are, it is perfectly OK to ask firms to fly you back out to meet with more people and further distinguish among your options. It's also perfectly OK for them to stalk you. Don't blow off people who call you every few days to see if you're still entertaining their offer; if you are, return their calls. If not, thank them and politely decline. Make sure you do this in writing even if you've already spoken to the person or left an operative voicemail. Acceptances should also be in writing, even if they made you the offer on the spot. If you can find a way to split your summer, you're golden. I could not manage the logistics of a bicoastal split, a failure I still regret.

No regrets. Let go of bad interviews, verbal faux pas, and any other embarrassing bloopers you may have made during Oh See Eye. Trust me: reputations are made during the summer, not during the interview process. If you blew your callback due to lack of sleep and lost the offer, move on and be awake to get the next offer. Don't let a track record of dings influence your sense of your own value proposition. Most people in the industry do not get jobs through 2L Oh See Eye; you will not be any less of a lawyer if you don't either. So long as firms are hiring, there will be interviews to be had, even if the time of Oh See Eye has passed.

2005-08-05T17:13:00.000-07:00

Today my husband went to the university bookstore and spent our entire stash of Barnes & Noble gift cards, and then some, on a small pair of textbooks. Not wishing to be outdone, I marched off to the mall and spent somewhat less than our entire stash of Borders gift cards on six new novels.

Six new novels.

I haven't been able to read for pleasure in, like, forever. But these look so promising: a half dozen volumes of the immersive-yet-fluffy historical fiction that doesn't feel like I'm wasting my time reading it. Two are set in feudal Japan, one in Imperial China, two in the British Isles and one in the ancient Middle East. I'm sitting here enjoying an IPA and more hot sauce than I even have chips to scoop up (had to switch to Trader Joe's soy pita bread), deciding which book to taste first, luxuriating in a degree of freedom that I haven't experienced in recent memory. I have six books that I can read whenever I feel like it. Now, even.

Life after law school is rich like oil.

One of the Borders gift cards was a souvenir from a public-interest auction event last spring. Back in May when I could least afford it, my husband and I joined LawFairy and a bunch of friends for a fine dinner and blackjack at the home of a nearby professor. Her husband, a partner at a big firm a few blocks from our apartment, served as dealer. Her eleven-year-old daughter teased both parents mercilessly. A grand time, and a great deal of alcohol, was had by all. (Except the eleven-year-old.)

I confess without shame that I have no skill at games of strategy. Yet somehow, even after many glasses of excellent wine, I managed out of nowhere to smoke the whole table at blackjack, with a pile of chips at the end of the evening at least a third larger than that of any of my friends. (My husband, who is far better at things strategic than I, came close to my haul -- but I beat him, too.) The prize was this gift card.

"What a fun evening that was," I remarked to my husband as we strolled home from the mall. (Our apartment is within walking distance of a mall, a Jersey girl's dream come true.)

"Yeah," said he, although I think he's still a bit peeved that I convinced him to give the runner-up prize (another Borders gift card) to the friend who had the next-best haul.

"Watch out for me, I'm a sleeper," I bragged. "Look all clueless, fake everyone out, and then sneak up on everyone when they least expect it."

"Bah," my husband replied, "you got lucky. Or rather, the dealer got unlucky, repeatedly, and you bet high the most consistently."

"The best gamblers are the ones who have nothing to lose," I said. "Just like on the California bar exam."

"The best gamblers are the ones who obsessively count every card and know the game inside and out," he countered.

This explains a lot about why he is where he is, right now. And why I am.

2005-08-04T17:20:00.000-07:00

Several days later and the car has been sold, the wills have been executed, lunch has been had with the financial adviser, various (but not enough) friends have been caught-up-with, Mendocino was as magical as ever, the flight home to Boston was painfully crowded, and now California is another line item on the list of places where we used to live.

Also, Ye Olde Blacke Boxe still doesn't work.

"Aren't you glad you didn't bring that machine to the bar exam," teased my husband, as I retreated into the study to boot up our desktop computer.

"I would've died."

"You would've handwritten."

"I couldn't have finished the exam by hand in the time we were given." This is true. If they make us handwrite the Massachusetts bar, I may well not pass.

I may well have not passed California either, for all my gut is telling me; but apparently this feeling is universal. "Out of all those multiple choice questions," my uncle told me of his own California bar experience two decades ago, "I walked out of there uncertain that I'd gotten a single one right." I'd put my money on about half a dozen of mine, but out of 200, that's still cold comfort. "If I fail this test," said the girlfriend of a former summer colleague of mine, "it'll be because the multiple choice kicked my ass." It kicked mine, too.

All told, though, I feel like an enormous crybaby when people ask me how the bar went and I tell them "It was awful!" On one hand, it was three long days of hard work prefaced by two months of repulsive drudgery. It was no fun at all. It's probably fair to call it awful; in retrospect I can confirm that the whole process was without any redeeming qualities, unlike even the worst parts of law school.

But was the California bar exam really that awful? I can see how it could have been, if you went in there under pressure. Plenty of people around me did. But for the first time in my entire law school career, I found myself sitting for an exam with absolutely no stake in the outcome at all. No pressure, just labor, just three days of intellectual grunge. If I passed, good, then I'd never have to take it again. But if I failed? I'd try again next summer, with plenty of time still left before my California firm would expect me back. And it would be a pain in the ass, but not enough to make me afraid to fail. The truly awful part of law school, the obstacle course where you had everything to prove and only one shot at doing so, is over, and I beat that game fair and square. How awful was this exam in comparison? Only as bad as any test can be when you have unlimited opportunities to try again with impunity.

And it's not like I'm going to be avoiding bar exams for the foreseeable future, anyway. Massachusetts is apparently a Wednesday-Thursday exam, so now I'm pondering squeezing a third jurisdiction into the Tuesday-Wednesday slot come February. CA and MA are our Most Likely Outcomes as far as eventual domicile, but increased mobility is only ever a good thing. Who knows that some day we might not want to try living in New York, or Texas, or Florida? What's the harm in trying? If I fail, I fail. If I pass, that's one more option that will remain open to us.

See how quickly the focus disappears once the girl gets a J.D. in hand? For the past three years, I had all the clarity and drive and direction I could ask for. Now, everything seems so misty, so fluffy. Anything can happen next. A few months back, over lunch with Sherry and Jeremy, I rhapsodized about how crossing so many ancient items off the to-do list -- finishing school, finally returning to Boston so my husband could do likewise -- would leave me free to redefine my life, completely, from scratch. The reality of everything ending feels a bit less rhapsodic and a bit more like huh, now what?

But the accomplishment of longstanding goals is as sweet as I'd hoped. No longer do I need to plan my days and hours around the goal of acquiring a portable trade or finding a way back East. I've done that. I've shed all the major constraints on my life to date, and whatever comes next is as wide open as the sky.

Sadly, though, the end of the story augurs the end of this blog. Within a month, I'll be clerking for a judge who disapproves of such excesses as Sua Sponte. But this is a prior restraint I don't mind accommodating, since there's really not much left of the story to tell. This is what law school was like. This is what transferring was like. This is what writing on to law review, working in a clinic, attempting moot court, summering at a California law firm, and thrashing through the California bar were like. Don't take my word for it; your mileage may vary. But for me, this is how it was.

For the next month I'll be doing a bit of a retrospective. I've been loath to give advice while still inside the belly of the beast -- invariably, too much remained that could still go wrong and make a liar out of me. Other people felt differently, and that was their prerogative, but it made me wince to read the tips of people who hadn't yet beaten the game. That's not to say their advice isn't good; the lion's share of it is. (Nor do I mean to imply that you should favor my advice over anyone else's. Please don't. What works for me probably wouldn't work for most.) But I know I barely trusted the perspective of anyone in the same boat as me. My best advicegivers had all graduated already. I did not feel qualified to offer such counsel until I had, as well.

Now, finally, I've seen the law school odyssey through to its natural conclusion. I'm a lot more comfortable reflecting on everything that did happen, now that there's no further danger that some unforeseen calamity might obliterate all the ground I gained in law school. I can't tell you anything other than what I've learned, but that, at least, I'm happy to share.

2003-08-07T16:07:00.000-07:00

After a year and change, and over 53,000 unique visitors (I love you all!), it's time for Sua Sponte to take that great leap forward.

That's right, folks! I finally caved to the eminently correct peer pressure and upgraded to Movable Type. (Actually, Xrlq did all the work. I just made the monkey graphic.)

Please update your blogrolls, bookmarks, and link lists to:

http://www.suasponte.org

And thank you for your continuing patronage of this one person's law school odyssey :)

2003-08-05T14:08:00.000-07:00

Now *this* is weird:

How did they know?

2003-08-04T18:46:00.000-07:00

I found an oddity in my email this afternoon:

Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:49:08 -0700
From: [director of journals at my school]
To: "1Ls.2002-2003"
Subject: Email replies to Journal Invitations on Aug. 2 and Aug.3

Hello All:

If you emailed an RSVP -- either accept or decline -- to the journal Writing Competition on Saturday Aug. 2 or Sunday Aug, 3, please send it again. The email server was down and no emails reached [our office].

Thanks, [name]

I had not received an invitation to join any of the four journals to which I had applied. Seeing this, I spooked.

"Do you think this means that all the journals have already sent out their invitations, or only some of them?" I fretted to my husband, as he attempted to parse the email through his illness (stomach flu which still hasn't subsided).

"I have no idea," he concluded.

There was only one thing to do: check the website.

My regular readers know how itchy I am about checking websites that post any law-school-related result. But I found this less trying than previous checks: perhaps because I knew I'd made Moot Court, I was happy with Moot Court, and I was already a member of an unofficial journal.

Then I looked. Fortunately, none of the glassware in my home shattered due to the sound I made.

I applied to four journals, with the following result:

Communications & entertainment law journal: accepted.
Constitutional law journal: accepted.
International law journal: accepted.
Law Review: accepted.

(Still have to wonder why I haven't gotten any email about this yet, but sure enough, that's my number on the website. Repeatedly.)

("You sure that's your number?" teased my husband. *whack whack*)

This is, obviously, beyond my wildest reckoning.

Toodles -- off to celebrate!

2003-08-02T22:10:00.000-07:00

My goodness, I had no idea that my terse (and, I'll confess, rather drunken) last post would generate so much discussion. I feel bad that I haven't been around much to contribute. Thanks, all, for talking amongst yourselves in my absence :)

The Movable Type relo lumbers on. I'll now have more time to spend on it than I expected, though, since my planned east-coast trip was pre-empted by a family health emergency. (No real harm done; just a few midnight hours in the emergency room, a persistent fever, and many go-fetch errands for yours truly.)

I think I may need to put upon Xrlq for some additional moral support...you wouldn't mind, would you, X?

2003-07-24T17:57:00.000-07:00

Without publicly airing too much dirty laundry or recent events, I have some real personal counsel for people considering law school.

Apply everywhere in your likelihood range, which is wider than you think when you discard limitations like cost and geography. Then go to the absolute best school you can. Even if it means moving, throwing away your givens, going into debt, changing your master plans. Apply to the widest range of schools you can, and do not go anywhere except the best school that takes you.

[/public service announcement]

2003-07-22T18:45:00.000-07:00

I had my first facetime meeting with my judge today, to review the first opinion I've ever written. All went very, very well.

I think I want to work in the judiciary.

2003-07-20T22:39:00.000-07:00

Did not intend to alarm anyone with previous post. All is sunshine-y, no worries.

Two things (well, three):

- Comments should be fixed. I'm still doing the MT migration thing, though. Promise. By mid-August (how pathetic am I?), if not sooner, all should be in working order.

- There's a ticklish margin between the blogosphere and the real world, and mine has just been transcended:

(a) I interviewed with Susan way the hell back in 1996 for an internship I never took, and then passed her much like a ship in the night during our mutual stint at the Bay Area's greatest fallen former browser company some five years later (give or take). Now she's got a blog. Hi, Susan!

(b) The circle has closed. A former coworker of my husband's -- a guy with whom I've shared many a grilled Dittmer's sausage and real-time-subtitled Sushi Seal book -- recently moved back to New York, started a blog, then started a meme, which was then picked up by one of my fellow student blawgers. Forget six degrees of separation; we're down to what, two? three? bah. Too close. My nana is probably reading this. Hi, Nana!

- Soju is a Korean sake-vodka thing and is truly, truly choice.

2003-07-18T20:07:00.000-07:00

It has come to my attention that comments are apparently broken. "You really must make the move to Movable Type," says Patrick. In truth, I've already begun to do exactly that; thanks to dear Xrlq, my MT server is installed and allegedly functional. I just need to get the proper shade of purple going on in the templates, get the domain online, and oh yes, learn how Movable Type frickin' works.

Feature-rich things tend to be lost on me. I'm a simplist at heart. (And if that wasn't a word a moment ago, it is now.) MT is gleefully coy on the subject of templates; it creates three or four new HTML pages if I blink at it too suggestively, and damned if I can figure out whence they all pull their layout and color scheme. And I haven't even tried to post there yet.

Five people will now post to my nonfunctional comments with a dozen different MT FAQs, and at least ten more will thumb their noses at my apparent technophobia. How the heck did this woman manage to make a living consulting in Silicon Valley if she can't even configure Movable Type to publish daily, weekly, monthly, bimonthly and semiannual archives in the proper shade of purple? What can I say; those were different times, and anyway, I was a *marketing* consultant.

I know it's incredibly outré to grouse about the work involved in blogging with MT when it's the middleware of choice for all the Cool People. (Although -- let the record show -- Howard and Denise are still in the old school!) I'm sure if I weren't working now, and had a few straight days to bumble around in MT and screw things up and then figure out how to fix them, I'd get to a point where I could manage.

But I've got to tell you the truth: aside from work, which is très fun, life has been presenting me with some pretty significant hurdles lately. Sua Sponte is not a place I rant, so you've been spared the worst of the lunar howling, but trust me: I've been using up so much of my spare time just coping that there's not much left to invest in MT.

I promise I'll get there eventually, though. I can't give up on MT after Xrlq has so thoroughly inspired me. And it would be nice to have functioning comments again.

Just give me two weeks or so.

2003-07-16T21:56:00.000-07:00

Today marked the midpoint of my judicial externship. This is only unusual in the fact that the gig started less than three weeks ago, and finishes less than three weeks hence.

I couldn't be more pleased. Imagine, a job I enjoy that actually fits my attention span.

2003-07-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

More fun with the district's word-processing software:

I'm a big fan of Word's autocomplete and autocorrect functionality. On my school laptop, typing "jur" yielded "jurisdiction," "cts" produced "courts," "disc" became "discrimination," and so forth. But the folks in the state judiciary, already known for their aplomb with macros, have raised the autotext feature to an art.

It's cute, but not terribly impressive, that court computers don't let you get away with typing "evidecne," "defendnat" or "witnes." What surprised me were the hidden secret codes, upon which I happened completely by accident.

For example, while I was typing the word "sheriff," Word interrupted me to suggest an autocomplete. Curious, I accepted, and suddenly was staring down a strange case cite: "Sherwood v. Superior Court (1979) 24 Cal.3d 183." Beginning to type the word "victim" brought me a similar interruption, this time for "Victor v. Nebraska 511 U.S. ___, ___ [Lawyer's Edition reference]." By the time I started to type "nearby" and was offered two entire paragraphs which I'm probably not allowed to discuss in public, I had to run next door to my fellow extern's office and make sure this wasn't just my computer playing games with me. It wasn't.

I peeked into the autotext dialog box to see just how many of these secrets were hidden there, and couldn't help but grin when I found at least several dozen, including what looked like long and short form citations to all of the state annotated codes. While I'm thrilled at the amount of interesting work with which the goodly folks here have trusted me, I couldn't help but wish that I had some more free time to play around with all of the autotext.

Maybe it just doesn't take much to impress me.

2003-07-12T15:43:00.000-07:00

Apparently a lot of people who graduated from my law school are also Princeton alumni.

(Hey, Jeremy, why the heck don't you put comments on your blog already?)

2003-07-10T19:43:00.000-07:00

A fourth man appeared at the issue-tracking meeting today. I was intrigued -- a mystery fourth male attorney? -- but the fellow eventually turned out to be a judge.

Nice guy, too. Actually, all of the judges I've met here are nice. Maybe it's a state-court thing.

I have noticed, though: judges do not appear to have first names anywhere but on paper. If you work for Justice John Smith, you refer to him in conversation either as "The Judge" or "Justice Smith." To his face, you address him as "Your Honor" (or, more likely, if you're speaking at normal attorney speed, "y'runner"). He is not John, and he is never Johnny or Jack, no matter how nice he is or how much you get along. No, I haven't embarrassed myself by assigning my judge a nickname; the cultural norms are so palpable around here, there was never even a risk.

It amused me to the point of suppressing a giggle, watching the attorneys -- with all of whom The Judge appeared to be on a first-name basis -- respond to every question he asked with a prefatory "y'runner." Maybe my Moot Court training will serve me in better stead than I thought.

Another giggleworthy moment: yesterday, while emailing an attorney whose name began with B, I saw a name leap out of the address book like a joyous little sparkle on my screen: Bedsworth, William. *shiver of delighted awe* -- I share an email address book with The Judge, one of my earliest blogging idols. (OK, he doesn't exactly blog. But what he does, I adore.)

I wonder if he lets his staff call him Bill.

2003-07-07T23:09:00.000-07:00

Well, this is nice:

"Your Brain Usage Profile

Auditory : 61%
Visual : 38%
Left : 63%
Right : 36%

JCA, you are mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing. This overall combination seems to indicate a well-working blend of logic and judgment and organization, with sufficient intuition, perception and creativity to balance that dominance.

You will at times experience conflict between how you feel and what you think which will generally be resolved in favor of what you think. You will find yourself interested in the practical applications of whatever material you have learned or whatever situation you face and will retain the ability to refine whatever knowledge you possess or aspects of whatever position you are in.

By and large, you will orient yourself toward intellectual activities and structure. Though not rigid, you will schedule yourself, plan, and focus on routine and continuity of operations, rather than on changes and disruptions

When changes or disruptions occur, you are likely to consider first how to ensure that such disruptions do The same balance is reflected in your sensory preference. You will tend to be reflective and measured in your interaction style. For the most part, you will be considered objective without being cold and goal-oriented while retaining the capacity to listen to others.

Preferentially you learn by listening and maintaining significant internal dialogues with yourself. Nevertheless, you have sufficient visualization capabilities to benefit from using graphs, charts, doodles, or even body movement to enhance your comprehension and memory.

To the extent that you are even implicitly aware of your hemispheric dominance and sensory style, you will feel most comfortable in those arenas which emphasize verbal skills and logic. Teaching, law, and science are those that stand out among the professions, along with technical sales and management."

Link courtesy of Omer Poos.

2003-07-03T19:39:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure which surprises me more: how many of the staff attorneys went to my law school, or how many of them are female.

I counted three men among the crowd of fellow double-Xers at this morning's issue-tracking meeting, then checked myself against the district phone directory. Sure enough, there were only three overtly male names among the attorney listings. (There was a Chris, too, which could obviously go either way.) That yields something on the order of two dozen woman attorneys to balance out the staff. Maybe there's some truth to the rumor that government work is the favored haven of female lawyers due to its excellent hours -- there is no shame whatsoever in going home at 5 pm.

Or maybe it's just a conspiracy of alumnae from my school. There must be some sort of women's network among all of the alumni-bonding organizations, and maybe that's what tipped off so many excellent sharkie[1] chicas that there was an entertaining, rewarding, and non-burnout-track job to be had in the judiciary. It's certainly working its magic on me; every day I think, contentedly, how I could certainly do this for the rest of my life. Research and write, research and write, become an expert for a day, turn a phrase, and then go home and actually have energy to cook dinner.

Although I'd expect at some point to get paid. :)

[1] I have no idea whether the shark is my school's official mascot. Sharks appear on the rear-windshield decals they sell at the school bookstore, though, and they seem to do a reasonably brisk trade in stuffed plush sharks. I'm a Shark fan generally, so this is all fine by me.

2003-07-02T16:47:00.000-07:00

There supposedly exists a California Manual of Style. In fact, I'm positive that it exists: I've seen one, on the vacant secretary's desk outside my office. But no one seems to need it, because everything in the judiciary is done by macro.

Alt-R, on your keyboard, inserts a reference to the reporter's transcript; Alt-C, the clerk's transcript; and Alt-Ins, the case citation dialog box. Once you've filled out that form, the cite is automatically pitched into your document. And a good thing, too: the format is just different enough from ALWD to be pesky, gnatlike. Where you'd expect

People v. Price, 4 Cal. App. 3d 941 (1970)

doin' it California Style yields

People v. Price (1970) 4 Cal.App.3d 941

and other such excitement. I think I might nip the manual off the empty desk, just to keep my karma up.

2003-06-30T22:43:00.000-07:00

Quick post, husband is calling me...

The job looks good. The view from my office (!) windows (!!) is incredible. And of course, one of the staff attorneys working for my judge just would be pregnant. She is now #7 on my roster of concurrently-expecting female compatriots.

Intel v. Hamidi came down today. Honestly, even though I represented Intel in Moot Court, I'm not really bothered by Intel losing in real life. Now they should sue for nuisance, like they mean it! :)

2003-06-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

Pre-job blues. Vacation ends tomorrow and mommy I don't wanna go back...

It's almost nine o'clock. Twelve hours from now I will be walking in to the courthouse, getting whatever ID badge is appropriate for an unpaid extern, and -- *yolp* -- showing up for work.

I haven't had a job since 1999.

Rather, more strictly speaking, the last joblike thing I had ended in 2001. It was a full-time on-site engagement, one of those spun-sugar fictions of the Silicon Valley boom where you could show up to work, do an ordinary job, and miraculously get paid whopping sums of money per hour instead of a salary. Those days of air and light, alas, did not survive the market crash.

This, I suppose, will be kind of like that gig, but probably closer to the pre-consulting days when I actually held down a full-time job. Except that this time I'm not getting paid one red cent. In fact, between gasoline, miles on the car, and whatever a monthly parking space goes for downtown, this job is actually going to cost me.

Bah, that's OK. I would have spent the money on a summer class anyway, and from everything I've heard, judicial externships feel a lot like school.

Here's to hoping that mine feels more like Moot Court than Torts!

2003-06-27T12:10:00.000-07:00

Without a doubt, the funniest opinion granting a summary judgment I've ever read: Bradshaw v. Unity Marine Corp., 2001 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 8962 (S.D. Tex. June 27, 2001).

"Despite the continued shortcomings of Plaintiff's supplemental submission, the Court commends Plaintiff for his vastly improved choice of crayon — Brick Red is much easier on the eyes than Goldenrod, and stands out much better amidst the mustard splotched about Plaintiff's briefing. But at the end of the day, even if you put a calico dress on it and call it Florence, a pig is still a pig."

(Link courtesy of Blue.)

2003-06-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

Public Service Announcement:

Sick of telemarketers? Sign up for the National Do Not Call Registry, which now exists. If you live west of the Mississippi, you can register over the phone (but make sure you call from the number you're planning to register) at 1-888-382-1222.

2003-06-26T12:07:00.000-07:00

Homage to Adam:

[take the test] - [by krystaljungle.com]

2003-06-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

Jeremy responds (hi, Jeremy!) to my ramblings of yesterday.

Jeremy, you should know, is a terrifically funny guy, and seems very much like the type of person with whom I would have been great friends, had we ever managed to be in the same place at the same time (not counting the blogosphere). I treasured folks like this in college, people who kept their own time and their own rhythm and were more than happy to make you laugh, kidnap you from your twenty-page paper for an enforced study break, and otherwise obliterate a bad mood or redeem a lousy day.

I know no one like him in law school, and the more of him I read, the more I think I understand why. He says, "I don't think law school is, or at least needs to be, "designed to change you as a person." It's school. It's teaching you stuff. Some knowledge, some skills. It's school. Not POW camp." It must be nice to go to Jeremy's school if this is truly the culture there. I have a strict policy of not talking trash about my school on Sua Sponte, but I can safely say this: no one would describe my school as a place that's simply there to teach you some knowledge, some skills, any more than a lemon reamer is designed to gently massage the fruit.

Lesson to learn from this: never, never underestimate the force of law school culture. Pay attention to culture when you're choosing a law school. It's every bit as important as the professors' pedigrees, if not more so: it will dictate much of how you feel for the next few months, and how you come away from them. If you're fortunate, you'll find yourself in a situation like Jeremy's, where your experience is as simple and enjoyable as just going to school.

2003-06-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

I may be so late to this party that everyone else has already left (wouldn't be the first time in my life), but even if that's so, I'm happy to play cleanup crew (ditto).

There has been much giving of law-school-related advice among the blawgs, both recent and older. On one hand, I'm tempted to join in; ever since my grades this semester didn't suck, I get the sense that I should puff up like a bull pigeon and share the magical secrets of my success with the craving eyes of the next generation of 1Ls. But on the other hand, everyone remembers the first rule of LSAT short-answer problems: correlation != causality. The magical secrets of my success, if I could think of any, might be entirely coincidental. I wouldn't know. Don't trust me if I say otherwise.

That said, I can at least provide some service to ye little grasshoppers: having gone through the psychological equivalent of the Ironman Triathlon followed by the 24 Heures du Mans and then the Iditarod for good measure, I can at least compare the advice other people give to the experience I actually had. Much good may it do you.

1. Doing What Other People Tell You

Garrett says: "Really, it's all a load of manure (my advice included)...even if you ask the ten top students in the class, you'll probably get about ten different answers. Reject slavish conformity to other people's lives, whether they are successes or failures."

Waddling Thunder says: "Jeremy has one method. I have a different one. I’m sure we both were equally prepared for exams at the end. And you, prospective 1L, are going to need to develop your own system as well, picking and choosing from what people before you have done."

JCA responds: Quite true. I tried to do the things you're Supposed To Do in order to get Those Grades, and wound up doing miserably. Correlation or causality? I changed this behavior second semester, and things got better. A one-point trend? Maybe. But I'll stick by my second-semester methods. It may feel grossly foreign to you, trying to fly blind when this is so different from what you've done before. But even though it might hurt like hell to break your own mold, doing so might be the only thing that works for you.

2. Talking in Class

Alice says: "Don't be the pompous windbag who speaks just to hear himself talk. Nobody likes that guy. Many law students operate under the conceit that they will be the one the professor bestows the slight nudge for class participation come grade time. Doesn't happen."

Garrett says: "Shut Yo' Trap. [F]or some reason all the people who are huge gunners early all end up doing badly. (You won't hear them talking much second semester)."

JCA responds: If you go to a school like mine, this won't be an issue. We had no gunners -- they were eviscerated within the first week. Professors had no truck with the long-winded; if your point wasn't made after fifteen seconds, you were coldly interrupted midsentence by the prof either cutting you down or calling on someone else. And those were the nice professors. The stricter ones maintained an obedient silence in their classrooms that bordered on monastic. "Browbeaten" is almost too charitable an adjective for my section, round about last October.

There were a few people who routinely said something in discussion, myself included, but none of us was ever permitted to indulge in the diarrhea-of-the-mouth that apparently goes unpunished elsewhere. If you had more than one thing to say, you took your little self to office hours and waited in line for your fifteen minutes' facetime with the professor. This, incidentally, was far more valuable to me than any in-class talking: you avoided all risk of public embarrassment at the hands of a professor who might mock your misunderstanding, and the professor would be approachable, personable, and actually interested in answering your question. Even if you feel you completely understand everything that's going on in the class (warning: when I felt this way, I was only ever mistaken), office hours bonding is essential if you're ever going need a letter of recommendation; it's tasteless to attempt to bond with your professor by talking in class, and ineffective to crowd up around the podium at the end of the hour. Go to office hours, talk there, and all will be well.

3. Balancing School and Life

Dodd says: "Make sure you always have a completely non-law-related book to read. [...] Schedule time to read said books (I read myself to sleep every night, so it was easy to maintain my reading in law school)."

Alice says: "Don't be the recluse. If the only place people ever see you is in the library, you're not doing too well on the social front."

JCA responds: First a bit of background. In the fall and early winter of 1998, I fancied myself a multitasker: I was taking four classes in graduate school, writing a weekly newspaper column, and planning my wedding in New York while working a full-time job that had me spending four days a week in Atlanta and Fridays in Milwaukee.

Turns out, I knew nothing from time management. Nothing. I learned the meaning of time management this year.

I guarantee that you will have an easier time of things if you (a) are single, (b) live within forty miles of your school, or (c) both. But according to the aforecited worthies (who, I assume, are unmarried and live(d) on or near campus), it's a challenge even so to make sure that you're spending enough time on your own needs when school seems to suck up every waking moment of your life. Time management is key. My solution was to reserve a day (and then an afternoon...and then a few hours...but always some time) for Personal Stuff. Force yourself to take time away from schoolwork, even if you feel you can ill afford it. Even if you only use the personal time to vent, eat bonbons, get drunk and feel sorry for yourself, at least that's therapeutic. School is quicksand. If you sink into it completely, you will suffocate. You will.

4. Urban Legends about Law School

Garrett says to read The Bramble Bush.

Dodd says to watch The Paper Chase.

JCA responds: I know nothing of any of this. I never read any books about law school, nor saw any such movies (not even Legally Blonde, unless you count it being the inflight movie once on a flight where I didn't have headphones). I came into law school with no expectations. I imagine it would have hurt even worse if I had.

Don't buy into the urban legends. You will have your own experience in school, and no one else's. See #1 above.

5. Metamorphosis

Alice says: "Don't be "the law student". [...] Don't pick arguments with your friends just because you're in law school or become a law zombie."

Dodd says: "Try and remember that people who aren't law students will find you intensely boring for at least the duration of your first year. Please resist the urge to tell them about all the "terribly interesting cases" you read this week."

JCA responds: And don't be surprised if you find yourself at an utter loss for anything else to talk about. It's hard to invest so much of your time and energy into an experience designed to change you as a person without it having some effect on your identity. There are people, it seems, who can manage this, people who can cleanly maintain their law-school self and their external self in parallel. This skill is as mythical to me as shyness, or mathematical brilliance, or the ability not to take oneself seriously: all features that other people have, or claim to, with which I have no firsthand experience.

If you're lucky, you'll have lots of lawyer friends who find it cute that you're pupating. If you're extremely lucky, you'll have a significant other who's perfectly agreeable about sharing the experience with you, or at least tolerating the fact that you're growing antennae. Even if you're basically going it alone among a crowd of mostly nonlawyers, keep a journal or blog and do all your law-school talking there. You will need to get it out of your system somehow, and there will be things that you will have no desire to share with your schoolmates.

6. How to Study for Exams

Jeremy says not to bother outlining the way you're told to, but rather, collect an array of study materials that roughly maps to your professor's syllabus and make your study aids from those. (He says a lot of things about this, actually; it's a long post.)

Waddling Thunder says to limit yourself to one commercial supplement, do a quickie outline, then blitz on practice exams: first from other schools, then from yours.

Alice says: "Don't join a study group. They are usually time-wasters. There is always at least one person who expects a free ride (i.e., a copy of your outlines)."

JCA responds: More or less everyone agrees that exam prep is very much a personal thing. I swear by my Gilberts; I had little patience for any other supplements. My grades went up when I joined a study group. I also noticed a strict correlation between my highest grades and the outlines that I'd finished before the semester ended. I make big honking outlines, then cook them down to issue-spotting checklists and recurring-problem-resolution flowcharts. I also had to make sure that every single case mentioned in class, even the note cases, was duly integrated into the master outline; not doing this killed me in Torts, but there's no reason that it should have this effect on you.

I recommend using old outlines and old exams from your particular professor, if you can. I found that much of first year was a people exercise, learning how to track a professor's expectations. It's a game; sometimes it's a game like Mao where you're unearthing the rules as you go, but other times the rules are right there, clear in front of you. For me, this was doubly true in the classes where the professors were heavily policy-oriented. They made no secret of their views, frequently discoursing at length on something with which I couldn't disagree more. This might feel hostile during discussion, but not once you see it for what it is: they're giving you the rules. WRITE THEM DOWN. If you can talk through an exam answer with suitable eloquence, solid logic and sufficient citations, and reach the professor's conclusion of choice, you will make a friend right when you most need one. (It's not intellectually dishonest, it's not selling out, it's lawyering -- making your client's argument rather than your own.)

But that's my experience; your professors will not necessarily be anything like mine. Experiment. Play with outlines, play with supplements, play with study aids. If something is a waste of time (i.e. briefing cases once you've gotten the hang of it), quit doing it. You don't have time to waste, but you do have time enough to get things right.

And you can. You can. The one piece of actual advice that I feel I can give with certainty is this: you will learn to know yourself, learn to know your limits, and, if you can keep from shattering altogether, discover an elasticity of soul that you didn't know you had. And don't worry: the psychological stretch marks will fade. You, however, will endure.

2003-06-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Waddling Thunder for discovering this excellent article on surviving a long commute.

My advice is simpler: don't drive, if you can avoid it. On a train you can at least sleep, read, or stare out the window and glaze over.

2003-06-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

You've heard by now, of course. (If not, here's the quickie: "Supreme Court Upholds Affirmative Action.")

*sigh*

Prof. Yin's reaction
Prof. Balkin's reaction
Prof. Volokh's reaction and thoughts on the dissent

2003-06-22T22:04:00.000-07:00

Google search of the day: "externship judge first day work wear suit."

For the record, when mine starts a week from tomorrow, I plan on wearing a long, sleeveless navy silk dress with lapels and buttons down the front. Of course that plan may change.

2003-06-21T21:06:00.000-07:00

My phone rang at 9ish this morning; it was, as anticipated, FedEx delivering the guilty pleasure that I am far from alone in savoring today.

I did not put Harry Potter down, except to drive back and forth to the gym, and only just finished it about a half hour ago. Husband immediately snatched it up and is already up to chapter two, although he would never admit his own fascination with the stuff. It's so formulaic, after all, so predictable...etc.

Without giving too much away for people who haven't yet read the whole thing: I had to get up and walk around during the chapter on O.W.L. exams. Dizzying. I know they're supposed to be a send-up of British-style midhighschool exams, the likes of which we fortunately lack on this side of the pond, but they felt just a bit too much like law school to me.

2003-06-17T19:23:00.000-07:00

I'm an avowed spicy food enthusiast, so this was a no-brainer. But even if I didn't already collect hot sauces, I still couldn't have resisted Lawyer's Breath:

Detail of label:

Apparently there's a whole product line of "judicial flavors," which I'll now have to sample!

2003-06-14T22:03:00.000-07:00

G R E E T I N G S Capricorn

Creature comforts are particularly satisfying, and you're in just the mood to appreciate them. But in the mood you're in, just about everything pleases you. As an added bonus, it seems as if others are bending over backwards trying to make things even better than they are. Examine your situation carefully. These moments are what life is all about.

2003-06-13T20:43:00.000-07:00

"Pinch me," I told my husband over celebratory dinner at Benihana last night. "Sooner or later I'm going to have to wake up."

It is obstinately refusing to sink in, this -- this -- success of mine. I've been resigned for so long to the fact that I probably blew it that I simply can't convince myself that I didn't blow it after all. But no matter how many times I blink at the transcript, it's still there, looking just as I had hoped and dreamed and prayed it would. My incurable Torts grade from last semester, cause of so much angst and lost sleep, now sticks out like ragweed on a neatly manicured lawn. Hopefully I can spin it as an icebreaker, a conversation piece.

I should say this: Nice numbers are nice, but only part of the real victory here. First of all, these grades mean that I can now proceed more or less unhobbled on my major project of this summer (details to follow at some point), something that has been very important to me since before I began this blog. But secondly, and even more importantly, these grades dispel almost all of the wholly destructive depression and self-doubt that resulted from my miserable first semester. I had no idea who this person was, getting on this train and going to this law school and getting these grades. I knew myself, and it wasn't me.

For this reason in large part, I'm almost wishing that I'd adopted a pseudonym to sign my blog posts instead of just a string of initials. It would have been easier to look down from the narrator's foretop into the life of some semi-fictional character as she went about the business of 1L than to go through the whole mess myself. Ah well. Live and learn. My next blog, or at least the next blog I keep during a negativity-ridden time in my life, will be fully anonymous.

But I, now, finally, am regaining confidence in my own character, the nonfiction flesh-and-blood one. I'm still here, it seems. I did not completely shatter, back a few months when it sure as hell felt like I did. I'm not sure who was in my skin for most of this year, but right now, I'm pretty sure that it's me again. I'm glad. I missed her.

Epigraph:
Before my first year of law school began, I had nine Xanax in a bottle in my medicine cabinet.
My first year of law school has now ended, and I still have the same nine Xanax in the same bottle in my medicine cabinet.
Inclinata resurgit.

2003-06-12T16:21:00.000-07:00

After a long phone conversation this morning with Adam, I lost my nerve and realized that I was no longer detached and blissful and enjoying life on the outside. I was in denial. My grades were sitting untouched on the web, and it was no longer comfortable not to know what they were. I was getting winded at the gym after five minutes because I just wasn't breathing.

"I think it's time to look," I told my husband, who's back to almost-full health but is still working from home.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm not calm anymore," I said.

I checked the schedule page, which informed me that Property still had not been posted. No matter. I logged in to the private-access system, left my mouse positioned over the Transcript link, went over to my bed and huddled down over my teddy bear as though protecting him from a hurricane.

My husband clicked the link.

Dead silence.

Dead silence.

I tried to inhale and found that I couldn't.

Then, in a neutral-pitched guttural voice, my husband said: "Your Property grade is here."

I managed a choking gasp of air.

"And you kicked ass."

I sat bolt upright; the teddy bear slumped forward in my lap. "In Property???"

"In everything."

In an instant I was clinging to his elbow, on the floor in front of my desk, jabbering breathlessly at the monitor. My Edie grade was exactly what I had prayed for it to be, on my knees by the radiator in the Abigail the night before I took the exam, solid and perfectly respectable, same as last semester's Crim grade. My Contracts grade had slipped ever so slightly from last semester, but if that's the worst effect chronic exhaustion and a panic attack could cause, I'll take it. My Civ Pro grade was the best it possibly could have been given my midterm grade, which meant that I'd aced the final beyond all hope. And Property: it was simply not possible. But there it was.

I cannot believe my luck.

"God did this," I squeaked to my husband.

"God didn't do this, you did this," pronounced my husband, who incidentally deserves mad props for coaching the hell out of me this semester.

But I've got to give credit where it's due. I learned last semester exactly how little it mattered to work one's ass off. There is no luck without work, but there is work without luck, so much work without luck. I did the work, but that in itself is meaningless except as a prerequisite. I have, quite simply, been blessed.

To everyone who supported me, everyone who sent waves my way, everyone who read my blog and posted words of encouragement and thought happy thoughts in my general direction; to every train that wasn't late, every electronic appliance in my possession that didn't break, every homeless person that didn't bother me when I walked to MUNI after dark; to every penny I found on the ground, every thread of good karma that clung to me, and particularly to the Source of all luck: thank you. thank you. thank you.

2003-06-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

I felt so big and strong, spiking my casebooks into the bookstore's giant recycling bin last month. But I was a mere flyspeck compared to this, a disposal method that -- admit it! -- we've all dreamed of trying.

2003-06-11T11:43:00.000-07:00

Make that six (6) simultaneously pregnant friends. Gaaaaah!

Three out of four of my grades have been posted, according to the master schedule. I still haven't looked at any of them. Think I'll just get pregnant instead. Er, I mean go to the gym.

2003-06-09T22:32:00.000-07:00

Tonight at Il Fornaio, hubby and I ran into P. from my moot court class. She's working this summer at a local law firm and staying up the peninsula, having a nice time and settling comfortably into the nonschool lifestyle. She told me that as of this morning, all of her grades had already been posted.

"And how do you feel?" I asked her.

"Good," she said, unemphatically, but with a humble smile and a notable ring of relief in her voice.

"Good for you!" I replied, and meant it. But at the same time I worried: how far back in line am I, really?

"I can look for you to see if your grades are posted yet," my husband told me on the drive home.

"No," I said, emphatically, unrelieved. And then, five minutes later, in a much smaller voice: "I am so tired of being scared. I don't want to be scared any more."

I may just be in denial now, but I refuse to chew on that fear again for as long as I can avoid it.

2003-06-09T20:41:00.000-07:00

Bekah nails it, again, as usual. If you don't read her blog regularly yet, I highly recommend starting.

Still no update on the master have-they-posted-those-grades-yet list. Tomorrow morning maybe there will be news.

2003-06-09T20:10:00.000-07:00

Welcome the Blawg Ring's 200th member, KC Lawyer!

2003-06-09T12:52:00.000-07:00

The website featuring professor/course/date filed listings has not yet been updated with the grades filed today, a.k.a. the deadline for doing so. I could cheat and go straight to my personal report (thankfully, the school has done away with the big honking lists of grades posted publicly; now we can log in as individuals and keep our results, however ignominious, to ourselves); but that would be cheating. I'm happy to wait another day.

2003-06-07T11:25:00.000-07:00

Google hit of the day: "options for people who fail law school."

One of my spring-semester grades has been posted, but the other three haven't. I haven't looked at the grade yet. I'm going to continue my protest against misery by postponing mine as long as possible and continuing to be happy and enjoy life until then. Incidentally, I should probably apologize for the sparseness of posting here. So it goes when I'm otherwise occupied enjoying life.

2003-06-06T16:45:00.000-07:00

Look what Amazon.com recommended for me...

2003-06-05T23:13:00.000-07:00

In case anyone is wondering, no, my grades still have not been posted. Monday the ninth is the deadline. I don't really mind waiting, to tell the truth. Right now, things could still go really, really well.

On a slightly tangential note, does anyone know when the Michigan slip opinion is due out? Any day now, right?

2003-06-04T17:33:00.000-07:00

No copyright class for me. I let time make the decision for me and cooked dinner for my groggy husband instead. Now that school's out I should make things that are fancier or more involved, but this recipe is one of his favorites and also happens to be a completely cheap and easy throw-together for all ye law students in search of dietary variety on a budget:

Don's Original Salmon Cakes[1]

1 can salmon, the cheap kind (about the size of a can of soup), bones removed
17 (yes, 17) saltines, put through the food processor to yield about 2/3 cup cracker crumbs
2 eggs beaten
Dried onion shaken over the beaten eggs -- use your judgment, we like a lot
Paprika to taste -- we like a lot

Combine everything in a mixing bowl, making sure you mash up the salmon. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours so that the egg softens everything -- letting it sit the whole day is OK for the commuter students out there. Heat a little olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Make little patties out of the mixture and fry them 4 minutes to a side in the oil. (Make sure you have enough oil going, since otherwise the patties will blacken before they're done cooking.) Pat the oil off the finished cakes with a paper towel and serve with spinach sauteed in the same skillet after you're done with the fish. Makes 8-10 cakes. Mmmmmm.

[1] Don is my stepfather. He did not actually invent this recipe, but did introduce it to us, so they'll always be Don's salmon cakes to us. Plus, whatever the original recipe called for, the paprika is definitely his innovation.

2003-06-03T09:36:00.000-07:00

Yet another of my pals has just gone pregnant, leaving me with a grand total of 5 women friends simultaneously in the family way. I'd conjecture as to the contents of the water except that these ladies live all over the country. Maybe 'tis just the season.

That was one good thing about law school -- the distraction value. Suddenly I'm seized with a last-minute urge to take that copyright summer class. Yes, the same one I decided not to take last week. It's so frustrating not to be able to stick to a decision! But things just keep rebalancing...

CON: The class isn't cheap.
PRO: We can afford it.

CON: It's law school again, and I could use some time off.
PRO: If I get too far out of the groove I may never go back.

CON: I can just take it at my own law school next year.
PRO: It'll help me for September on-campus interviewing to have some IP coursework under my belt.
CON: But am I even going to bother with September on-campus interviewing, with all my time caught up between Moot Court and whatever journal I'm on?

CON: It's an evening class, but the exam is on a morning when I'm supposed to be working by the judge.
PRO: The grade doesn't have to count toward my GPA if I don't want it to.

CON: Today is the first class meeting and it might be too late for me to hop on the bus anyway.
PRO: There might still be room in the class, and the university is unlikely to say no to my money.

Spinning wheels...got to go round...

2003-06-02T17:12:00.000-07:00

Back on duty: this time, rather than grinding away at the same old grind, I'm playing nursemaid to my convalescing husband (he's so cute when he convalesces). Many people say that untimely biological-clock-type urges are best addressed by getting a puppy. I personally prefer mothering someone who's only just dopey enough to still appreciate it.

Besides, our landlady wouldn't allow a dog.

2003-05-30T21:12:00.000-07:00

Howling aloud with laughter and clapping my hands: Justice Bedsworth's May column (okay, I'm a bit late on the uptake) includes a discussion of my first El-Dubyar memo topic. Memories!

2003-05-30T18:38:00.000-07:00

Life on the outside is beautiful. You can spend all morning writing, in your jammies (note to self: must find summer-weight jammies), finally get to the gym at 3 pm, and then, on the way home, pick up your dry cleaning and get your second manicure in as many weeks. I'm still in search of the ideal manicurist; the one who did my nails in Florida airbrushed the white tips, but failed to properly address the cuticles, while the one here did a terrific job on the cuticles -- as well as patching my thumbnail, cracked at the gym -- but didn't quite understand that the point of a French manicure is to give the illusion of long and elegant nails. She painted half of each nail stark white. "A clown manicure," I remarked to my car.

I feel so spoiled. I can complain about manicures! I can get my clothes dry cleaned! I can return home from a workout and a manicure and indulge myself in a snackfest of edamame, strawberries the size of apples, and three-quarters of a bottle of Sekt, German champagne from Trader Joe's, while listening to Alanis Morrissette MP3s and pretending to write some more. I've decided not to take either of the eligible summer classes at the local law school. Instead, I'm going to have an agent-ready manuscript by the time my judicial externship starts at the end of June. Or maybe not. But I'll be close to one. Enough for a book proposal, anyways. Heck, I've got enough for a book proposal already just in this blog.

...yeah.

2003-05-29T21:23:00.000-07:00

There is a page on my school's website that lists the classes for which grades have already been posted, by date. I found this page almost by accident, and now it tickles to think about it.

But I'm not going to check it today. Or tomorrow. Or anytime before Monday at least. The deadline for posting grades is June 9, and I don't need to think about them until then. And won't. Won't.

I refuse to worry. I'm having too much fun not worrying.

2003-05-28T11:26:00.000-07:00

See this?

This is called nothing left to worry about.

It was glorious, marching into the adorable post office in Glen Echo, Maryland with the ten-ton envelope in hand. It was glorious to fill out the certified-mail forms. It was glorious to pay $9.80 to ship the thing to California, even though I planned to fly back there scant few hours later. (Did you know that, since 9/11, you can't mail a parcel at a U.S. post office with an out-of-state return address? I didn't.) But it was well beyond glorious to walk out of the post office, emptyhanded in victory except for that little green receipt. It was done. I made the deadline. I tainted yet another trip to Florida with the burdens of law school, marred what would otherwise have been a quite pleasant series of plane flights (lots of upgrades!) with a lapful of cases and a highlighter, but I did it. I entered the writing competition. I am now in contention for membership on a law journal at my school, possibly even the principal law review.

We seem to be reasonably unique in this: the writing competition is mandatory for anyone seeking a seat on any journal, not just the biggie. Elsewhere, I think, you can volunteer your way onto any topical journal, official or non; it's only the school's major law review that holds such a competition as this. At my school, meanwhile, there are six journals (not including the newest one, as yet unofficial): big brother Law Review and five younger, topical, less Presteeeeegeous siblings. To work on any one of these, you need to compete. And so we do. I applied to four: Big Brother (because you must), a topical journal which absent the Presteeeeege factor would be my first choice overall, and two other siblings that could be entertaining as well. Results should come back mid-August.

Meanwhile, I'm back home, doing laundry, running errands, crossing things off my to-do list at my leisure. In my ten-day absence my husband seems to have adopted my car. "Mine needs gas," he tells me by way of excuse, and yet no gas has been purchased for it in weeks, although he did fill up my tank yesterday. One of these days I'm going to prevail on him to sell the thing; cars should not go unloved, particularly when their fellow cars are members of the family. Either that, or I'm going to get a real stereo for it and convert it to my late-night moot court practice commute car.

Moot court and law review are not quite mutually exclusive. At least I hope they're not. Moot court lacks Presteeeeege, that elusive quality that magically transforms one's resume into the apparent equivalent of better luck a year ago. And yet it would absolutely break my heart to renounce the one aspect of law school that I actually enjoyed in favor of one whose main allure is peer pressure. *sigh*.

Mid-August. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

2003-05-23T06:33:00.000-07:00

I did it! I managed to go a whole week without blogging. When I wasn't out at the barn, I was in here working on that law review competition (about which I have a great many uncomplimentary things to say, none of which should be publicly attributed to me) or out in the great room falling asleep on the couch. In fact, I fell asleep at the barn a few times too. It's tough not to when it's 96 degrees out and 94% humidity. No matter how much water you force yourself to drink, you're basically stuck in heat-exhaustion mode unless you live here. I'm not sure how Floridians do it. My mother is twice my age and flits about the barn with an almost manic energy, hauling manure with the same gusto with which she rides her horse Ernie. And I can barely hold my head up to watch. 'Course, maybe it's also the semester's stress draining out from me and leaving me limp.

"You're decompressing," Mom tells me when I complain that I'm still, for some stupid reason, having nightmares about my Contracts exam. Not the grade, the exam itself. I dreamed once that I showed up to take the exam but had already sold back my casebook and couldn't find my outline. Another time I was running through the classroom building, desperately in search of the exam room, which was on a different floor every time I checked.

The more I think about it, the less likely I am to take a full class this summer. I have two realistic options at our local law school: Copyright, which interests me and may never fit my schedule during the year, and Crim Pro, which is a bar course for which I'd love to get a grade that didn't count towards my GPA. And yet, based on how much fun it was to stick myself to the writing competition, I think I might just be better off not forcing myself to do any more of that kind of work this summer. Of course, this may change a week from now when the registration deadline approaches.

I'm off to Maryland this afternoon, where it is presumably cooler, to attend a Bat Mitzvah. Blogging should resume apace by Tuesday, when I return home to the other coast. Happy Memorial Day!

2003-05-16T09:52:00.000-07:00

The law review writing competition packet is a paltry 49 pages, which still didn't stop Kinko's from attempting to charge me $26.70 to print it. Keeping in mind that I'm doing this solely as a lark, I turned around and went back home: anything over $20 for anything except postage is too much of an investment at this point. Fortunately, my husband has offered to churn me out a copy on one of the high-speed laser printers in his office. It's a bench memo for a criminal case with evidence issues, which if nothing else should at least be good practice for the work I'll be doing later this summer.

My flight to Florida leaves at 2 pm today. I should have ample time to read these 49 pages and get started on my first draft, provided that I actually stick myself to doing it. I'm getting so comfortable being on vacation; this almost feels like poking an old bruise compared to the relief of doing nothing law-related at all. But as everyone and their brother keeps telling me, this is important, and everyone and their brother can't be wrong, n'est-ce pas?

[takes deep breath]
[dives back in]

2003-05-15T21:01:00.000-07:00

G R E E T I N G S Capricorn

This is the day you get to take stock of what you've been working toward. When you go over the checklist, you are absolutely delighted to learn that everything you hoped for is starting to come true. If you're in the mood to celebrate, seek out the people who can really understand what all this means to you. The time has come to look back at your hardships and laugh at them. It's only a matter of time before the whole world knows your value.

2003-05-15T01:35:00.000-07:00

Just got home from a special Wednesday night premiere of the Matrix. When it's past midnight Eastern time, folks, it's past midnight everywhere as far as movies are concerned. Ahh, California!

Go see it. I recommend two margaritas beforehand.

2003-05-14T14:49:00.000-07:00

I am high, drunk, spaced-out on empty expanses of time unburdened by responsibility. "I don't have to do anything," I gushed to my husband this morning. "I can do whatever I want."

"Could you clean the chinchilla cage, then?" he said.

I probably should clean the chinchilla cage. In fact, my to-do list takes up almost a full page in my scratchbook. But none of it's pressing, nothing's a burden, all of it can wait as long as I feel like. (Except the law review writing competition, of course, but that doesn't even start until Friday anyway.) I could clean the chinchilla cage, take down the trash, do the laundry, clean out my inbox and book some more travel plans and organize all the bank statements...or I could put it all off with impunity.

Freedom is juicy like a plum.

I went to the gym this morning, and round about 300 calories when I felt myself getting tired, I realized with a grin that I didn't have to push myself. No more how-much-can-you-stand-it endurance testing; I now know exactly how much I can stand. I stepped off the elliptical trainer and practically skipped back out to my car. Ah, the load off! The load off!

There is nothing I have to do now, but so much I can do. The gym advertised a kickboxing class, and I thought: I can take kickboxing! There is so much I can take! Kickboxing, aikido, tai chi, hatha Yoga. Cello lessons again. Voice lessons again. Latin, Japanese, Arabic. Dressage riding. Poetry seminars. Crim Pro or Copyright summer courses, if I feel like it. Anything, if I feel like it.

When did my life become such a treasure? Suddenly it's summer, and California is beautiful: not just Mendocino, but even the normally-dingy part where I live. The sun is brilliant, the weather is clear and warming up, and I have time, to do errands and drink pearl tea and go shopping. I need something springy and dressy anyway, for the bat mitzvah in DC I'll be attending a week from Saturday. I can drift around our terrific local open-air mall, wander into Bloomingdale's or Ann Taylor or Talbots, and just gaze at what they're offering this season. No pressure, no rush. No commitments. Well, one: I promised my car that I'd get her washed today. She hasn't had a bath since going offroading in Mendocino in March, and she's earned one.

I owe debts of gratitude to so many of my steadfast chattels that could easily have sputtered, died, and screwed me over, but didn't. My car reliably trundled me to the train station such that I never missed my train, and on more than one occasion took me all the way to The City, bless her. The appliances in my apartment kindly remained fully functional throughout the semester. But the MVP has got to be my venerable old Sony laptop, which survived floppy drive issues, a burnt-out pixel that has turned permanently blue, and interminable kicking-about in my pullman bag as my indispensable (yes, 19(b) indispensable) sidekick through two of the nastiest semesters any inanimate object (or person) should ever have to suffer. I used to want to upgrade; now I'm wondering how much longer I can make this baby last.

Speaking of which, why am I still sitting here typing? I have time not to type. It's sunny and breezy and I'm getting a facial this afternoon. Salute!

2003-05-13T22:05:00.000-07:00

First:
THANK YOU.

Second:
It's done.
It's done.
It's done.
It's over.

"It's over," the proctor told us at noon. "You can cheer now." We all blinked stupidly at her for a few seconds, until B. shouted out: "Way to go, Section 5!" And that did it. We gave ourselves a round of applause.

"I have never felt so bad handing in an exam," R. told me.

"That just sucked," I agreed. I have no idea how it went. Thanks in no small part to the influx of positive energy, at least last night's panic didn't get in my way; still, I haven't a clue how many issues I missed, and have less than no desire to wonder at this point.

"Let's do one last group lunch," suggested J. from my study group.

"Oooh, yeah," I said. "But first let me dump my books."

After each exam, I jettisoned the casebook and supplements from that course in my basement locker. I now went down to reclaim this stack of literature, realizing as I did that I was leaving my locker completely empty. On a whim, I took my lock off and clamped it onto my borrowed-from-husband backpack. If the news comes back bad, I'm prepared...and if it comes back good, I'm prepared. And if it comes back neither, the lock will still be handy come August.

"That book is worth nothing," the bookstore buyback guy told me, looking down his nose at Civil Procedure in California. "I knew it!" I hollered back. He hardly flinched. I was a bit wild-eyed by then, but didn't realize quite *how* wild-eyed until the guy got to my Contracts casebook. "We're not taking this," he told me, handing me back my casebook. "Yes you are," I said, pushing the book back towards him. "No," he insisted, handing it back to me again and nodding towards a large mail cart to our left which contained a goodly number of abandoned casebooks.

"Ah," I said, and took aim. The gusto with which I flung my casebook into the cart prompted S. and I., behind me in line, to giggle. I grinned in some satisfaction, and when the bookstore wouldn't buy my Restatement, I spun around and slam-dunked it into the mail cart. This time S. and I. flinched at the look on my face, which had gone beyond wild-eyed to furious. "Bit of pent-up aggression there?" S. teased me. "You have no idea," I told him.

Everything on my law shelf (minus my Gilberts supplements and Glannon on Civ Pro, which I'm keeping since they could be useful some day), cashed in, amounted to $83. As far as expectation damages go, that's pretty piss-poor. Still, it was money in my pocket as I ventured back out into the astonishing sunlight.

We lunched at Chevy's and toasted with a pitcher of margaritas: "Here's to the best study group in Section 5," I pronounced, "long may we litigate!" We polished off another pitcher before disbanding to go our separate ways, promising to stay in touch over the summer. I still don't think any of them read my blog. That's probably OK.

I meandered down to MUNI, popped in my last token, and got on the N-Judah as usual...except that, instead of heading towards Caltrain, I rode the outbound line. Nearly an hour later, I was crossing a road called La Playa to find myself face to face with the Pacific Ocean.

DANGEROUS WAVES! read a sign.

Don't go in the water, Bill Logan had warned me. It's dangerous at Ocean Beach.

But it wasn't; it was the serenest I'd ever seen the otherwise-misnamed Pacific. Rather than crashing in one after another, the waves faded in and out over each other in no real succession, glassing over large stretches of smooth muddy sand. Ocean-fresh fog veiled the sky and cast a quiet over the scene, much the way falling snow does. The beach was near-deserted, the tide was low. Just me, the birds, the dampered lather of the ocean and a multitude of sand dollars.

Few things are as perfect -- so round, so detailed, so delicate -- as an unbroken sand dollar. I picked up at least a dozen, and there were hundreds more that were broken but still nifty. Several large brown sea gulls watched me flirt with the thin slow-moving waves (the whole sand dollars were more likely to be down by the water than up in the dry sand), standing still and staring at me with mild interest. You look almost like an albatross, I told one of them, but you're not.

I had several miniature bottles of various things alcoholic stowed in the backpack, but wasn't inclined to do shots. Instead, I chose one: a bottle of amaro, Italian for "bitter." Bitter it was, but textured. So was law school. So was this year. I polished off the bottle and tasted the taste in my mouth for another twenty minutes. These things take time to wear off.

On the train home, for closure, I queued up The Swan. I did this for a whole damned year, I thought silently as the sunlit bay flashed by outside the windows (over on the bay side of the peninsula, it was still astonishingly sunny), and now it's over.

It's over.
It's over.
This should sink in soon.

2003-05-13T08:15:00.000-07:00

Last night at about ten-thirty, I shut off the light in my room at the Abigail and settled back into bed. And then about the worst possible thing happened.

I had a night terror -- one of those terrifying insomniac panic attacks that I thought had stopped bothering me in college.

For at least three hours I couldn't sleep; my heart thudded in time with the really annoying bass line blasting in from a nearby room. People seemed to be stomping up and down stairs, slamming doors, yelling, coughing, and otherwise making a ruckus all around me. At midnight I had some vodka. At one-thirty I put in my earplugs and managed to release some tension by crying a little. I must have managed to doze off, only because I saw the the binder clip fall off my outline and all the pages go flying around the room (including into the toilet); by the time I pulled it back together it was apparently 9 AM and the exam had already started. This was clearly a dream, therefore I had to have been asleep. Although I couldn't tell you how much rest I actually got.

The terror never quite passed; there's still a hard thrumming nugget of it stuck right between my lungs. I'm doing my best to breathe it out.

In a few minutes I'm going to pop out my Wi-Fi card, pop in my floppy, and kick up my exam software. Contracts starts in about twenty minutes and goes for three and a half hours. It could scare me per se if I let it, even if I weren't recovering from a panic attack. Please send me all the support you can spare, for the next four hours, starting now. Thank you so much. Thank you.

It will be over so soon...

2003-05-12T16:42:00.000-07:00

Have I mentioned what a bad idea it is to do Professor Contracts' exams while sleep-deprived? I think I want to cry.

I think it's time to take a break, go next door and check in to the Abigail.

2003-05-12T14:25:00.000-07:00

Plugging away at practice exams on four and a half hours of sleep; since I'll be spending tonight at the Abigail and my elderly laptop doesn't run Visio 2000, I had to get all the flowcharts done before I took the train into The City this morning. I've got five, or six, or some large number of pages floating around that are proving to be reasonably helpful. I just need to get back in Professor Contracts exam mode: talk, talk, talk, just go on at length on anything, write entire paragraphs about defenses that don't apply, etc. If I can somehow retain the mojo that mysteriously graced my midterm in December, this will be the highlight of my year. Oh, Contracts, Contracts, speak to me, baby.

[sings]
Call me
Irresponsible
Call me
Unreliable
Call me
Unconscionable too

In other news, one of my friends and longtime studygroupmates seemed to be giving off a strange vibe this morning. She sat down next to me at Professor Contracts' review session, and I had an odd thought: She almost looks pregnant. But being far from trim-waisted myself, and knowing how much fun it is to be reminded of same, I thought better of saying anything.

I didn't need to. "I have some news that's not about Contracts," she told us afterward as we clustered in one of the private weenie-bin study rooms. "I have a bun in the oven."

We were all floored. I hugged her with tears in my eyes; several other studygroupmates did likewise. She's joked about dropping out of school to have a baby before; but then again, most of us (women) have. This, she tells us, was completely coincidental to any such fantasy -- it was an oops. Moreover, the dropping-out part of the plan appears to have been scrapped. "I'm not planning on taking any time off," she said, "but it does help that I don't have any finals next semester." She planned that on purpose, it turns out. Of course we all tried to plan it; but her purpose was a bit more concrete than our general distaste for exams.

Wow.

Must. Focus. Contracts, yes.

2003-05-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

The Zone. It's the place where your second wind carries you, where you're running on nothing but momentum and adrenaline. "Why bother stopping now?" you hear yourself say. "Might as well keep going." It's a place where obsessive tendencies can all too easily thrive.

I spent an hour and a half at the gym this morning, burned 500 calories, and realized as I left that I was shivering and my skin was clammy. That's not supposed to happen.

I fear I've lost my sense of my own limitations.

Maybe that's a good thing.

2003-05-11T10:26:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, Lexis Nexis stopped incrementing my loyalty points. Does anyone know if they plan to start back up any time before the fall semester begins?

2003-05-10T22:47:00.000-07:00

It's finished, it's finished, it's twenty-two pages long and it feels reasonably complete. Remember when anything over twenty pages felt long? Now, with my record at 42 pages, a 22-pager impresses me by its sheer economy. This is the slimmest, most efficient outline I've done this semester. Almost makes me worry that I missed something.

2003-05-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Exasperation (tm) of the moment: when, every time you save your Word document, the file size increases by another 300K or so.

Why does it do this? My Contracts outline, midway through expectation damages, is a scant twenty pages and has no excuse whatsoever for being 1.1 MB.

It is a gorgeous clear day out, with a fine fresh breeze wafting through my living room and over the couch where I am still sitting, still working. Apparently annoyed by this, Word seems to be slowing things down, fattening helpless files at random, and otherwise flirting with the idea of crashing my laptop outright -- something which would be kind of inappropriate at the moment.

Maybe it's just feeling as sulky, fed-up and petulant as I am right now.

2003-05-09T22:27:00.000-07:00

I'm going stir crazy. Too many consecutive hours on this couch, too much Contracts left between me and the end of the outline. I'm about up to spring break, and have given up all hope of finishing the thing tonight.

The only food in our refrigerator right now is a piece of smoked mahi-mahi and two packets of instant udon. Everything else is either a drink or a condiment. Fortunately, we have no shortage of drinks. Unfortunately, I still need to work tonight.

My Chi candle has burned almost halfway down.

"Ugh - i am SO TIRED of studying," emails J. from my study group.

"I am seriously having a hard time doing anything," replies C.

"I feel I am about to anticipatorily repudiate this class," adds D.

I send out an email in response: "Glad to hear I'm not alone."

2003-05-09T17:26:00.000-07:00

Can someone explain to me why "rescission" is spelled with a double-S? Shouldn't it be rescind --> rescision?

2003-05-09T09:59:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to resent the fact that the law review writing competition kicks off a week from today. It's going to take every last ounce of juice I can muster to get myself keyed and focused on Contracts. I'll be lucky indeed if there's anything left afterward except brain salad, unlimited exhaustion and a hangover.

At least everyone else is in the same boat.

Ah, remember when that used to be consoling? And didn't imply that you were more screwed than you already feared?

2003-05-08T16:46:00.000-07:00

Well, that happened.

I didn't freak out during the exam. I didn't even really freak out after the exam. But it didn't particularly help to hear C., high on a post-exam dim sum binge, remark: "In the middle of the exam I just had a moment where I thought, you know what? I'm perfectly OK with a C+ on this." Because I'm still not, even on a stomach full of dim sum.

I did what I could. I did all I could. I stayed calm, consulted the outline, consulted the checklists, and did all I could. It's out of my hands now. All that's left to do is pray, have a drink, and finally go see X-Men United. And then hunker down to four days of hard-core Contracts.

But that shouldn't be a problem. Contracts, I've done before. Edie, I'll never have to do again. Works for me.

2003-05-07T17:27:00.000-07:00

Okay.

I've got three sweet pages of checklist, a solid outline, and plenty of time left to practice this evening. I have no further reason to freak out. Therefore, I will stop freaking out. In fact, I already have. Ipse dixit.

I'm going to go now, go and pick up a burrito and one of those little fourpacks of miniature wine bottles before I catch the northbound train. I'm going to thumb-index my outline on the way up to The City. Maybe I'll do another practice exam. Maybe I'll take a nap, if I can. I am, of course, restricted to one of those little wine bottles on the night before an exam; the remainder will stay in my locker until after Contracts. Or maybe I'll have one after the exam tomorrow, if it winds up kicking my butt. Of course, it may not. No reason to worry about it or anything.

Please think all kinds of good calm thoughts -- tropical island beaches, forests in winter, tea ceremonies and zen gardens -- in my general direction from 8:30 to noon tomorrow. Your support is extraordinarily appreciated.

2003-05-07T15:08:00.000-07:00

Must. Fight. The Fear.

We originally had a study group date scheduled for this morning; one by one, in the wee hours of last night, people started to opt out. The sad truth was that none of us felt prepared to answer a question. I've done one since then, and am not disgusted with the result, but I'm still just so damn freaked-out about this whole deal that I'm starting to physicalize it. Neck muscles like coaxial cable, stomach full of lava. Phantom hunger and waves of thirst. Hot chills. The apparent need to go to the bathroom every twenty minutes or so.

Ambient music: "Cello for Relaxation," a CD I bought myself as a prize for making the Moot Court team. (My answer to the "How do you manage stress?" question on the application: "I meditate and listen to cello music." This purchase naturally followed.)

I should do some yoga.

2003-05-07T11:28:00.000-07:00

Suddenly Edie has become one of the scariest exam preparation experiences I've had so far in law school.

This is Professor Edie's first time teaching the class; obviously, no old exams of his are available for practice. He thoughtfully recommended a selection of practice exam questions from previous Edie professors, which should at least be useful to bone up on how an Edie question actually gets answered (even if the questions at issue are easier ones than Professor Edie is known to pose). The only problem is that none of these old exams is furnished with an answer.

This was the problem I had with Torts last semester: I did an astonishing number of practice exams, on which I apparently taught myself to make the same mistake consistently. One good A answer would have straightened me out. None were provided, and I wound up paying the price in my grade. And Professor Torts was reputed to be a generous grader. Professor Edie shares no such reputation.

I've also come to rely on student answers as teaching tools -- not so much for the material, although they can be helpful there too, as for test-taking techniques. What do Edie professors want to hear? In what order, and to what extent? What facts flag which particular issues? It gives me the jitters that I still don't know, have no real way of finding out, and the exam is tomorrow.

The good news is that we're all in the same boat. Or maybe that's the bad news.

UPDATE: Turns out we're not utterly without sample answers, for what it's worth; three questions include them. Still, I really need to calm down...this is entirely too unnerving...

2003-05-06T23:26:00.000-07:00

Edie outline is done! Not a moment too soon. Two days in between exams is simply not enough time to prepare, particularly when you haven't even finished outlining for the upcoming exam until one of the two days has already elapsed.

The beast is 42 pages long, which I think is a new record for me. Much of it is policy. Most of it is probably useless on the exam. Still, as with all of my big honking huge outlines, I'll be glad I included all the obscure policy butterfat should the need arise to cite to it.

Problem is, I still don't feel as though I actually know the law enough to issue-spot.

No one seems to. Rather, everyone knows the basic black-letter law -- of which there isn't really very much -- just enough to worry about where Professor Edie is going to go with it. He's such a sweet guy, such a clear professor, with no overweening political agenda and an apparently genuine interest in actually teaching us something. He also has managed to earn the sobriquet "The Killer" due both to the reputed difficulty of his exams and the documented harshness of his grading. Between the astronomical number of class-hours we whiled away in rambling policy discussions (and, I'll confess, games of Snood), and the paucity of complex hardcore rules to play with, no one's quite sure how this exam is going to bludgeon us all to pulp. But we're nervous nonetheless.

Tomorrow, which will be spent entirely on study group and practice exams, will hopefully help.

2003-05-06T19:27:00.000-07:00

A funny from my Edie casebook:

We find greater merit in the district judge's third ground, that "sick bitch" -- and, we add, the other verbal abuse, and the obscene gesture, that Bullock directed toward Galloway -- was, in context, not a sex- or gender-related term.

[Judge Posner's etymology of the word "bitch" is omitted.]

I think I might just miss this class.

2003-05-06T18:00:00.000-07:00

Thought:

One week from today this will all be over.

One week to the minute from right now, I will hopefully be stumbling around Ocean Beach in drunken bliss, searching for sand dollars.

[checks clock]

Actually, by six o'clock, I'll probably have finished my beachcombing jaunt and already be home. The drunken bliss, of course, will be sustained as long as possible without treading into hangover territory.

Seven days was all she wrote.

2003-05-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

Decision time: trek up to the City for Professor Edie's review session at noon...or spend the rest of the day finishing my outline and go to his office hours tomorrow? (They start at 9:30, which would mean the sunrise train, after I told myself I'd never take it again.)

OTOH after the outline's done, at least I'll have something to talk about.

Still, it's tough to say no to a review session. There remains a ray of optimism among first-year students at my school: maybe this will be the revelation, the one magic moment where everything comes together and makes perfect sense. And with that feeling comes the companion paranoia: you don't want to miss an opportunity for things to be clearer, every little bit helps, etc. Of course, this being [school name], there's also the danger that the session will be mobbed by other people whose only mission in life is to beat you on the exam.

UPDATE: I wound up going. *sigh*.

2003-05-05T17:39:00.000-07:00

No more Property! No More Property! NO!! MORE!! PROPERTY!!!!

I had a brief encounter with the fear this morning (*huge wash of gratitude for all the support!*), and, while it passed, I'm still having difficulty right now internalizing the fact that Property is over. It's over. No more relativity of title. No more takings. No more covenants running with the land (I wound up not using the Gilberts estimation, incidentally). No more frickin' Rule Against Perpetuities. No more watching Professor Property berate those poor souls who still bother to raise their hands, or fawn over the folks who rhapsodized about legal revolution.

I should be riding a wave right now. And yet I'm mostly just tired.

Not crushed, not borderline depressive, not anything nasty like last semester. I feel rather like I'm leaving the gym. Good workout. Now I could use a shower and a nap. The test itself was unpleasant, but not unprecedented given the number of practice exams I did yesterday. No panic. Slight difficulty focusing every so often when things just got too dense, but I stayed in control and managed to finish with enough time left to review my answers. They looked passable. It's anyone's guess whether they actually are. It's not worth wondering, right now.

I'm meeting up with some old friends for dinner and drinks, which should help revivify me nicely. They're running late, which in turn gives me some time to get more work done on my Edie outline. Edie is in two days. I should probably worry or something.

Nah. I just need a glass of wine and a good night's rest; tomorrow, as with any good workout, my energy should come right back.

2003-05-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

Churning this morning. I'm afraid I'm going to run out of time on this exam, afraid I'm going to miss things.

Please send waves.

2003-05-04T21:13:00.000-07:00

Too many hours spent on Property practice exams can turn an otherwise congenial, upbeat person into a burnt-out bitter zombie with a migraine and persistent nausea. I might be able to do one more question tonight; then again, it's not yet 9 pm and I could just as easily blink once and find myself in REM sleep. I know I complained at Professor Civ Pro's parsimony in sharing old exams; Professor Property is far more generous, which turns out to be less of a virtue than I thought. If I didn't still have two exams waiting to be taken, I wouldn't feel so bad about taking a break.

Of course, if I do take a break, I should spend the time making more progress on my as-yet-incomplete Edie outline.

[considers this]

Nope, can't do that either.

All right. A few glasses of water, maybe a piece of chocolate, and one more practice exam tonight. I can do that.

2003-05-04T15:23:00.000-07:00

I've switched from stress relief candles to a different school of thought. The candle now burning on my coffee table is not designed to relax, but to inspire: "Chi -- Vital Energy," its label boasts. "Grapefruit, Ginger & Verbena." Just what I need to power me through the remaining five (aaaaarrrgghhh) practice Property exams between here and the real thing tomorrow at 1:30 pm.

Once again, I'm thankful for afternoon exams, particularly open-book ones. I plan to spend the train ride staying calm and thumb-indexing my documentation: my outline, my policy notes, maybe even a few key pages in my casebook. My husband tells me that my checklists should be sufficiently solid to obviate consultation of anything else. They're nice, to be sure, but you never know when the professor will be in the mood to pull something nasty. I'd rather be glad I covered my backside than overconfident.

(Worst trick seen so far on an exam: giving three principal characters virtually identical names with completely identical initials. Professors: PLEASE don't do this!)

2003-05-03T23:41:00.000-07:00

*groaannnnnn*

I am unbelievably ready to be done with Property. The material itself is starting to make me angry, hair-tearing and booze-chugging angry. It is a quarter to midnight and I am working on my gott-damned common ownership flowchart (is there a lease implied in fact? does the lease sever the joint tenancy? does the lease survive death? and what about the statute of frauds?) and I am not allowed to go to sleep until I figure out, and internalize, the difference between an easement by estoppel and a constructive trust.

I am in this to learn the law. The exam can rot in hell.

current theme song

2003-05-03T17:52:00.000-07:00

Seeking advice on keeping one's energy up. These marathon fact patterns are just sapping mine, and I haven't even gotten to the policy questions yet.

2003-05-03T15:07:00.000-07:00

Nauseous.

K. decided that we needed to stop on our way up to The City to pick up some munchies from Whole Foods. ("We", lately, consists of a carpool of K., C., me, and K.'s large dog, who comes along for the ride.) We snagged the standard hummus, sesame blue corn chips, rice crackers, Ry Krisp and guacamole, along with a bottle of lemonade for good measure, then ducked into Peet's Coffee for a caffeine spike. C. and I both ordered chai; I probably should have paid better attention when C. took a sip of hers and immediately threw the rest away. "That's awful," she said. "Bitter. The soy milk must be bad or something."

I took a sip of mine, in which I had forgotten to request soy milk, and had the same problem. "It's not the milk, it's the tea," I said. "It's just nasty." But instead of doing the smart thing -- kissing my $3 goodbye and just tossing the drink -- I added some honey and Sugar in the Raw to cut the bitterness, then wound up drinking the entire cup. And now I'm nauseous as heck. Maybe I'll take a study break in an hour or so and toss my cookies. It wouldn't be inappropriate.

The caffeine turned out to be necessary, though: we spent our entire three-hour study group session on the one massive four-part issue spotter from last year's Property exam. These things are not for the faint of heart; Professor Property has all but admitted that they're designed to trigger panic attacks. "I make my exams difficult," she said, "but I grade them generously." Hopefully the latter is as true as the former. We'll have to take her word for it.

Two people did not survive until the end of the study group session. L. succumbed to the panic while we were puzzling through the ambiguous conveyance analysis: "I just need to get back into my own space," she said without confidence as she packed up and left. We could all identify. S. toughed it out through the takings section, but finally hit the wall as D. and I argued over the test for abolition of a core property right. "I'm so sorry I'm so lame today," she stammered. "I'm so sorry." She was not lame today, we told her; she went home anyway. Once the fear infects you, there's nothing you can do but detox.

Fortunately the fear did not infect me. I just need to practice, practice, practice Property exams. These five-page, four-part, nasty rambling fact patterns are fundamentally formulaic once you get used to them. There's always a taking, always an adverse possession issue, always an ambiguous conveyance whose analysis involves both the RAP and a covenant. There are a finite number of rules that we've covered. If I can get them all to fit together, get my time spent issue-spotting down under a half hour, it will help. And Professor Property's policy questions all have a "correct" answer; it's simply a matter of making the law fit it, which should be an entertaining exercise in contrarianism for me -- but eminently doable, with practice.

Practice.

Off to practice.

2003-05-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

A quick property question, for those up to the occasion:

My notes, my outline, and a handout from Professor Property all conclude that, for the benefit of a covenant to run with the land at law, one must show ownership of the land, intent of the grantor, and vertical privity of estate. My Gilberts supplement, meanwhile, insists that the three tickoff items are grantor's intent, "some form of privity of estate" and the touch-and-concern requirement as well.

Which is correct?

2003-05-02T11:27:00.000-07:00

These, I guess, are the basic questions I'm considering right now:

Moot court team + law review = worthwhile by general consensus, if I can manage the time commitment...

~ but ~

Moot court team + non-law-review official journal = worthwhile?

~ or ~

(Moot court team + non-law-review official journal) > (moot court team + unofficial journal)?

(Moot court team + unofficial journal) > moot court team alone?

Axioms:
* BIGLAW = BFD
* and yet I'd like to have as many options as possible.

2003-05-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

Interesting...the competition seems to be undersubscribed this year:

Subject: Deadline extended for Inter-Journal Writing Competition registration

Just in case those darn old finals distracted you . . .

The deadline for registering for the Inter-Journal Writing Competition has been extended to Monday, May 5, 3:30 p.m.

Stop by the Scholarly Publications Office to pick up a registration packet. Then bring the Registration Slip on the packet's last page (with your name and student identification number written on it) to the Records Office by 3:30 p.m. on Monday, May 5.

The Inter-Journal Writing Competition starts on May 16, and ends on May 27, 2003.

I signed up last week, but have to wonder why they would be extending the deadline from today until Monday. Could they really be suffering from a dearth of applications?

2003-05-01T09:37:00.000-07:00

The more I think about the Civ Pro exam, the more I get scared that I actually did blow it. I've been valiantly trying not to think about it at all, but nasty little flashes of "Hey, you forgot to ______!" have been interrupting my concentration all morning. I need to just dive into my Edie outline, finish it today, and then start to crank on Property. Civ Pro is over. "It's in God's hands now," I said to I. as we packed up our laptops yesterday. "I don't know if I'd go that far," she replied. "Okay," I revised, "it's in Professor Civ Pro's hands now." Anyway, it's out of mine.

I've just done something that might turn out to be rather stupid: I booked a flight to Florida leaving on May 16, a.k.a. the first day of my school's interjournal writing competition. I'll stay by my mother and the horsies for a week, then fly up to Washington D.C. for a bat mitzvah [1], then finally return home to California on May 27, a.k.a. the last day of my school's interjournal writing competition. I signed up to enter the competition, but really have no major stake in getting on a journal:

- my usual luck in legal writing isn't such that I'm likely to make it onto the official law review;
- the five other journals apparently don't get the respect that law review does among employers;
- if merely having a journal on the resume at all is a tickoff item for employers, I've got that already in my unofficial journal -- which comes with its own story;
- Moot Court competition is reputed to take up all the time you have and much that you don't;
- I would much rather spend 150 hours working the kinks out of a sweet oral argument than cite-checking;
- I'm not sure I have 150 hours to spare for a journal anyway, even though maybe half of those hours are allegedly spent partying.

On the other hand, the journals -- with the exception of the main law review, where everyone takes themselves über-seriously -- all seem to be laid-back social organizations, and the note you write for your journal in the spring of your second year satisfies your graduation writing requirement. It would be neat to work on the communications law journal, to befriend like-minded folks I haven't yet met, to write my note on Internet law rather than flailing about the shallow course catalog in search of a writing-requirement seminar I could force myself to care about. There was one woman this year that I know of who did both Moot Court and a journal; she won her Moot Court competition, too, so she must have done something right. Maybe it's workable.

At any rate, I'll probably be bringing my laptop and ALWD handbook along to Florida, which would be supremely ironic on a trip which was supposed to represent the official sloughing-off of my 1L skin. Then again, it would just be typical of law school to permit no such thing.

[1] Waddling Thunder: will you be in town? Drop me an email.