Monday, February 28, 2005

Fellow Bloggers

We've noticed a lot of new local visitors over here at Intermeddler, and we figure that can only be the result of a mention over at Menlovian. Welcome to all the new visitors, thanks to Menlovian for sending them our way, and thanks for letting us know about your BLS blog.

I've been googling for other Brooklyn blogs for the past six months and hadn't found anything. I guess that's because I never combined Brooklyn with search terms like "ass faucet". If I had, though, I would have already discovered the smelly poop site, which lets me send "really smelly poop to [my] mean friends." Lucky for you, professor lowest-grade.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Strange Omens

I woke up from a nap a few minutes ago during which I had an unsettling dream. I dreamt I was interviewing for a judicial internship and the judge decided his chambers would be a local bar (Floyd's on Atlantic Street, I think), for whatever reason most of my friends from school were invited.

Things looked good. I was fielding the normal questions pretty well, even when he asked how I thought my previous experience unloading trucks at a grocery store was relevant, I pulled an answer out of the sludge. At one point, the judge brought out a trumpet out from behind the bar, blew a weak, tinny note which he followed with a full blast. He said I sounded too much like the first one. That might have just been the horn from the staten island ferry --which you can hear every twenty minutes-- trying to work it's way into my dream, or it might have been some Freudian phallic thing I should have learned about in my undergrad psych class, but either way, it seems like poor interviewing etiquette.

As always, the judge said he'd move quickly, which he did. His clerk came over and said "sorry to do this in front of your friends, but we unanimously decided that we didn't want a regional accent in our chambers." I countered with something about how 1) I didn't have any kind of accent and 2) I didn't need to talk, I could just write. The second clerk replied "I've read your writing sample, and you don't have a vocabulary." Not even that I had a poor one, he said it didn't exist.

I didn't even know I had this level of self doubt/loathing, but apparently my sub-conscious is pretty clear on the issue. I'm just going to have to chalk it up to bad voodoo in the air: my pseudonym for our memo last semester was based on a Hunter S. Thompson character who, the night before our moot court brief was due, shot himself.

Monday, February 21, 2005

Diary of a Long Night

Our Moot Court brief is due tomorrow afternoon at 2:00. To celebrate that fact, I've decided to stay up all night finishing it. I thought I'd update this post every now and then over the next 16 hours to let our readers (who don't comment nearly as often as they should) follow how things are going.

Monday, 10:21 PM
I'm writing my statement of the case. Most of my classmates did this over a week ago, received the professor's comments, and will now turn them back in. That was the smart thing to do. I've just opened my 2-litre bottle of Pepsi, which I'm drinking out of a wine glass because it's the only clean dish left in my apartment. I'm saving the coffee for later and reserving the cocaine for emergencies.

Tuesday, 12:55 AM
My case is stated, and now I'm on to refining my argument section. I'm thinking I should have started with a caffeine source other than Pepsi. I now have a sticky film on my teeth, diabetes, and am taking too many bathroom breaks. At least coffee would have left me with only one of those problems. My IM window shows me that Lady-Duff is also putting in a late night. OE is in the international moot court section, and out of deference to the fact that the international community always takes longer to get things done, doesn't have to turn her brief in for another week.

Tuesday, 3:43 AM
Still deep in the bowels of my argument and it's as bad a place to be as it sounds. I'm still very much wide awake, however, and things are starting to come together. It's still one of the worst pieces of work I've ever put a pseudonym to, but I'm caring less and less as the hours tick by. All indications are that Lady-Duff is also still going strong, though reports indicate she is eating cookie dough straight from the tube.

Tuesday, 6:37 AM
The argument is finished. I'm now working on the cite-checking and the table of authorities; stuff which I normally wouldn't mind but which requires an attention to detail I'm not sure I'm capable of right now. I've got a lot of sugar in me, so I've put off food until 9:00 or so, at which time I've got a nice pot of coffee and a nutella sandwich waiting for me.

Tuesday, 9:38 AM
That's as good as it's going to get. I'm worried I'm going to accidentally oversleep and miss the deadline, so I'm just going to get dressed, go to school, turn this thing in and be done with it. I smell terrible. I can't say enough good things about coffee. I didn't want to make moot court anyway. Goodnight.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Note to Future 1Ls

When deciding whether to be a plaintiff or a defendant for the purposes of writing your first-year appellate brief, ask yourself this question: "on a scale of 1-10, how much of a free-spirited hippy is my LW professor?" It can be hard to tell, because everyone is so fashionable these days, but look for the tell-tale signs: regular yoga lessons and lower-back tattoos are usually enough to unmask the demon. It's important because if you choose the government or corporate side, no matter how clear-cut your case might be in the real world, no matter how straightforward the law, she will sabotage you.

We're trying to convince a court to affirm a motion for summary judgment. What do we have to go on? We're in the 2nd district, but our lower court judge relied on an unpublished WI state court case, which says on the cover-page in caps: UNPUBLISHED OPINIONS ARE OF NO PRECEDENTIAL VALUE AND MAY NOT BE CITED. Nice. I'd ignore it, but we were instructed to discuss it in our argument. Found a good 2001 Supreme Court Case that clarifies the issue, and teaches us the current state of the law at the same time? Nope! This note in the instructions takes care of that: "due to a very confusing 2001 case... you are to use no case law after the year 2000."

To top it all off, the issue itself is summary fuckin' judgment. In previous years, students worked on interesting and controversial constitutional issues. I've heard about other people working on compelling I.P. issues or, in the case of O.E., the legal status of detainees under the Geneva Convention. We're working to affirm a summary judgment. And this is from one of the coolest writing instructors out there, which leads me to believe that this is normal. Christ almighty, is this what I have to look forward to?

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Call of the Criminal Law

When I first came to Brooklyn, the idea of working as a criminal lawyer a la The Practice fit somewhere near tax and insurance law in the heirarchy of what I might be interested in. Man, it's sure starting to look cool.

Yesterday, I went to a short seminar on the role of the media in high-profile criminal cases. It was put together by Brooklyn faculty member and alum Gerald Shargel, who has made a career out of taking high profile cases and now in his spare time teaches criminal procedure and evidence as an adjunct. His panel guests included ABC's Cynthia McFadden; Greg Smith, a cool, gruff, James Elroyesque reporter for the NY Daily News; and, to make me feel old and unaccomplished, Patrick O’Gilfoil Healy, a New York Times reporter who is, wait for it, only 23 years old. Listening to these people describe the cases they've worked on and covered; what makes a case catch the public's imagination, the perils of a client who won't stop talking, the merits of television cameras in the court room. Well, it just sounded cool. And I'm not just saying that because "D.A." has a cool, Elliot Ness tough-guy kind of cachet to it.

Nah, that's it. "D.A." just sounds, really, really cool.

Sunday, February 06, 2005

Uuuuuuunh-Wuuuh!

I don't normally take advantage of my school's extracurricular offerings, so when I signed up for a four-week seminar called "acting skills for lawyers," I shouldn't have been surprised when my extra-curricular activity took advantage of me.

It makes sense that attorneys should learn a bit of method acting. I always thought TV lawyers were a lot more convincing than the genuine article. Maybe if I went to the next three sessions (I won't) I would learn some of those skills. We spent the first hour-and-a-half of the three-hour session practicing relaxation techniques, which means we just went limp in our chairs. Seeing as I've been training myself not to fall asleep in those same chairs for the past five months, the exercise might have been counter-productive. If we were having any trouble relaxing, the solution was to emit a sort of shout-grunt from deep within our chests. We were told by our instructor, a diminutive, congenial hippy from woodstock, that these noises would help us relax. I'm not so sure. Since hearing her primal bark, I haven't been able to sleep, let alone relax.

Next week is improv, which I think would probably be a lot of fun. In the meantime, our instructor told us to practice our noises in the shower: I haven't, and there's nothing on this earth that could make me. I'll be damned if I'm going to go to class unprepared, so I'm going to have to hear about it second hand, I'm afraid.