Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Snood v Sniadach

Law School is an arms race. Normal competitive pressures, a strict curve, and tuition in excess of $30,000 combine to create a situation where spending an extra $200/semester on supplements* starts to seem like a reasonable idea. It makes sense: $200 on study aids adds less than 1% on top of what is already an impossibly large bill and seems like a good investment even if it only were to raise your rank a few steps. You almost feel like you have to so long as everyone else is doing it... Luckily, I have a much more cost-effective strategy: forget your laptop.

I forgot to bring mine the the other day to Property, and I learned that you can learn an awful lot about property when you're not distraced by the pleasures of Snood, the internet and all that relaxing pornography, or (lord only knows how people can play this game so much) spider solitaire. I've never been so engaged in a class in my life. I've thought about just leaving my ethernet cord home from now on, and using the laptop solely for notes, but it won't work. I have a wireless connection, and not enough willpower to keep myself from using it.

I'm not going to make this a regular habit, by any means. CivPro just couldn't be done without an internet connection, and I need Lexis for ConLaw. I'm just saying that if you really want to learn the law or whatever is is we've been doing for the past six months: save your laptop for the final exam.

*Note: don't actually buy supplements, the library is stacked with everything you need (except for torts, because Lady Duff and I checked them all out).

Saturday, January 15, 2005

Brother Breyer

I have a lot of sisters, and I want what's best for them. If I had to marry one of them off (and people still were into loveless marriages of convenience), there would be no question, I'd want Justice Breyer for my new brother-in-law.

I watched part of the Breyer-Scalia debate the other day on C-SPAN, which is pretty tame compared to the erotic, erie-doctrine baths that some of my co-bloggers are all about, and decided he was the man. It might just be that anyone looks like a good match when they're put on a stage next to Scalia, it might be this story suggesting what a great guy he is, or maybe it's just exchanges like this:

"Souter persists. "Unless we allow whistle-blowers to bring a private right of action, this whole statute is a dead letter." Thomas replies that in Birmingham "we are very conscientious about the administration of our programs." " 'Trust me' is not an answer," snaps Ginsburg, "when you are telling a sixth-grader she can't play on a team."

In perhaps the single greatest moment of the 2005 term, Justice Stephen Breyer then interrupts Thomas to inquire: "Can I ask you a legal question?"

He goes on to offer a vintage Breyeresque three-part hypothetical, devoting at least five minutes to getting Thomas to concede that he must inevitably lose this case. To which Thomas finally responds with, "Justice Breyer, on the face of the statute, I just can't get there. I apologize."

Calm on the surface but laced with a thinly veiled contempt; exchanges like this have been the routine at my parent's holiday dinners for years. Breyer is practically family already.

Monday, January 10, 2005

Back in School

School started today. Well, not exactly, but it tried its hardest. Our property class didn't meet until late afternoon and our professor hadn't assigned any pre-class reading (though we did have an in-class read along; our professors will do anything to get that "role-playing" box marked off come evaluation time). Tomorrow will be the real test of how well my holiday-break decompression went. We have torts with a professor who, if he taught gym in my high-school, would have been known as a "ball-buster," and ConLaw with a gentle Yalie who assigned so much reading for our two-credit class last semester that my eyes bleed when I think about what he'll do now that he's got us for three.

Everyone warned me about how awful property can be, including the professor. When your guide says "I'm glad we'll be taking this hike together, but just so you know, there's nothing to see, it's a long walk, and we're almost out of water" it's going to be a bad trip. At least, as Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon says below, there's always the social element of school. Except it looks like they're trying to take our lovin' away. Now I don't have anything to look forward to, and the girl in the cafeteria even called me "sweety" today. I'm sure there will be some moment of light this week that reminds me why I'm doing all this.

Update

Scratch that "ball-buster" business. I just got back from class, and the dreaded torts professor is just a big ol' cuddle bear.

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Kumon people now...

When I was a much smaller law student, maybe nine years old, my mother enrolled me in Kumon, sort of the Scientology of mathematical tutoring regimes. That I'm now in law school instead of NASA is pretty telling as to how well it worked for me. My problem wasn't so much the Kumon "method," though, as it was the terrible, terrible graphics they always used; graphics whose unflinching badness distracted me from my numbers. Clearly, nothing's changed at Kumon: witness the fetal-alcohol effected smiley-face they use as the letter "O" in their logo. It makes the limbless blobs in the Zoloft commercials look positively chipper by comparison. The moral: I couldn't learn math because Kumon made a bad graphic design decision.

Fast forward sixteen years: I'm still a student, still doing my damndest to learn, and still my school insists on distracting me from my studies with this rough-looking logo. If you think it's not so bad, take a second look. It's as if a class of third graders decided to think of everything that reminded them of the law --an owl, a lady with a sword, a dove, a scale, a stack of books, ummm, bushes, ribbons and maybe a planet, yeah, a planet!-- and then scribbled them all together in a messy circle and called it a day.

It wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have an enormous version of it hanging in the moot court room. It's gold colored, maybe eight feet tall, and it looks like it's made of recycled milk cartons. I know I'm going to be arguing my brief in that room this spring, and that ugly thing will be glinting at me the whole time. I'll have flashbacks of some Kumon franchisee rapping my knuckles with a ruler because I couldn't match the tiled numbers fast enough, and I'll fail the class. What I wouldn't do for a nice simple torch.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Darth Econolaw

I haven’t met one yet, but I’ve sensed its presence: somewhere in my first year, I know I must meet Professor Econolaw. I hope I don’t punch him in the teeth. Mixing law and economics too closely isn’t particularly unusual, but it can be awfully distasteful. I haven’t quite yet figured out why. Nothing in the past century (besides perennial favorites penicillin and the toothbrush) has done more to improve living standards around the world as much as well applied economic policy. I believe it too, but then I wonder if I’m on the right side when I read something as simplistic as this:
Unlike an air- or waterborne disease, HIV-AIDS is easily avoidable by an inexpensive change of behavior, namely using condoms in sex, or by a more costly but still feasible change, namely by avoiding promiscuous sex.
Which is, of course, absolutely true, if it weren’t also true that much of the infected population can honestly claim to live in the kind of place
[w]idely acknowledged as [the] world's ‘rape capital,’ a rape happens every 26 seconds in South Africa. It is alleged that a woman born in this country has a greater chance of being raped than learning how to read. One in four girls faces the prospect of being raped before the age of 16, according to child support group, Childline. -PeaceWomen
Somehow providing cheap condoms doesn’t seem like it’s going to cut it for the masses of teenage rape victims. No doubt Posner is right in the aggregate; he’s thrown out coffee smarter than I am. There’s certainly evidence that the more treatable a disease is, the less cost expended by individuals in avoiding that disease. But I can’t shake the suspicion that something besides economic pragmatism underlies this kind of reasoning. Who tells the rape victim that providing her with subsidized treatment would “make matters worse by reducing the incentive to avoid contracting the disease in the first place?”

Maybe that’s it: economics is essentially rational, and I’ve always liked to think that law--and the policies it supports--are moral at their heart.