Damn it.
Author Archive for BigShow
I have always enjoyed summer school. I took summer classes in both undergrad and in my masters program. Summer was always more laid back. The classes are more compacted because of the shorter time frame, and that meant no filler and just good information that helped teach the subject. And at my undergrad and grad instiution, summer was no different from the rest of the year. Academically, it was business as usual.
Then I took summer classes this summer. Here’s my advice - don’t ever take summer classes. At least, not at CUA. Continue reading ‘Here’s a Tip - Skip Summer School.’
I know that Dr. Bombay is working on a piece about the Court’s ruling in the child rape death penalty case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, which you can read here, but I wanted to get out ahead of him before his communist propaganda saps and impurifies all of our precious bodily fluids. (Ed Note: bodily fluids reference.)
The Supreme Court in this case basically stated that five Justices of the Supreme Court are better at determining the will of the people of the United States than Congress and the state legislatures are. This is the kind of judicial activism that makes people disgusted with the judicial branch.
I have a real problem with the the legal arguments behind this opinion. Kennedy’s reasoning seems tautological - no one has been executed for these crimes in 40 years, and only six states have enacted child rape capital punishment laws. He uses these facts as a means of justifying the argument that society has decided child rape should not be punished by the death penalty. This is a ridiculous conclusion, given that it was the Court’s jurisprudence that was the reason behind the amount of time since the last execution, and the Court’s dicta in Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584 (1977) that suggested that the death penalty for any crime not involving the death of the victim would probably not pass constitution muster, made states hesitant to go through the long process of creating a child rape death penalty law - why go through the process if the Court will likely strike the laws down anyway?
Determining whether society’s morals have evolved on capital punishment is not a role for the Court. It certainly shouldn’t be a part of any Constitutional anaylsis framework. It’s a question for Congress and the state legislatures. The Supreme Court here substituted their own morality for the views of the American people. They have now made it effectively impossible to impose the death penalty for any cases that don’t involve the death of the victim. That is a decision that should have been made by the elected representatives of the people themselves, not the Court.
One of the things I was rather surprised by during my first year of law school was the number of rules that professors had regarding behavior of students in class. Perhaps my age is getting the best of me, but I had assumed that the days when professors had to lecture students on raising their hands, not eating a meal during class, holding conversations with neighbors, surfing the internet on laptops and other disruptive behavior ended when I left undergrad. And that was ten years ago.
Of course, when I was in undergrad no one but the tools ever brought a laptop to class.
I am a big fan of limited rules in class - I would rather let my fellow students police behavior through good old-fashioned peer pressure than waste class time having the professors do it. I’m sure I can do a better job getting my neighbor to quit surfing Perez Hilton in class than the professor can.
Despite the fact that we’re just 1Ls, a lot of the folks in our program are concerned with job prospects after school. A friend of mine recently interviewed for a non-legal position at one of the top law firms in town here, and while I’m not surprised at what he found during the interview, it does make me question some of the facts of life in our profession.
Early on in the interview, the associate who was interviewing my friend made the comment, “You know, this firm would never recruit out of your school. What do you think about that? How do you distinguish yourself from your education?”
Now, one of the unspoken things at our law school is the fact that we’re not top-tier. Everyone knows it, but no one talks about it. So my buddy was taken aback by the fact that the associate came right out and said it, but he kept his composure. He replied that while he wasn’t happy hearing that, his experience outside of law school made him qualified for the current position etc. Anyone who knows my friend would be impressed with his credentials.
Continue reading ‘Your School Sucks - Why Should We Hire You?’
One of the things that I’ve begun to realize about law school is that each semester, I’m going to have a miniature mid-life crisis. This is like a regular mid-life crisis, except instead of going out and buying a sports car, I just get depressed. I like to think of this as the “Mid-Semester Itch.” It’s sort of like the “Seven Year Itch“, except my XBox 360 plays the part of Marilyn Monroe. The minute the Mid-Semester Itch strikes, I start behaving like an undergrad, ignoring my school work, and my in-class attention span plummets to hyperactive-11-year-old levels.
I’ve tried to figure out exactly what it is that causes this Mid-Semester Itch, and I’ve got a couple of theories:
