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.
Continue reading ‘No Drinking In Class’
Former Justice Thomas clerk and Catholic University Law Professor Peter “Bo” Rutledge will be arguing before the Supreme Court today in the case of Irizarry v. United States. The case involves the sentence imposed on a man who threatened to harm his wife. The sentence at issue exceeded the sentencing guidelines and the issue is whether the court must give the parties notice when it is considering a departure from the guidelines?
Interestingly, Rutledge was asked to give arguments in a long-standing, oft-forgotten trend involving Justices tapping former clerks to argue on behalf of parties or positions during oral arguments:
“As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed it in a footnote in the 2003 case Clay v. United States, appointing a lawyer to defend the lower court judgment when no one else will ‘permits us to decide the case satisfied that the relevant issues have been fully aired.’”
So, I’ve been toying around with SearchMe today. It’s a cool visual search engine (click on the screenshot to the right to see it). Still in beta form, but it’s open registration to try it out. I think it’s pretty cool. The whole premise is that you see the pages that come back in a search. They’re categorized and easy to scroll through. You can choose to see text results as well.
My search for “law school blog” yielded some interesting results. It also brought me back to a question I’ve had for a while but haven’t yet asked here: Can someone please point me to a good law school blog written by a member of the school’s administration or that is otherwise quasi-official? Our school has two that I know of (Admissions and Financial Aid).
(Incidentally, kudos to Catholic Law on the site redesign. I’m sure you’ve been working on it for a while. Well done!)
The trouble is there aren’t many. Those that exist seem to be, like Catholic’s or this one, updated sparingly and with information that is not totally useful or just downright uninteresting. Continue reading ‘Every Law School Needs An Official Blog’
It’s my pleasure to start the week off by introducing you to my friend, classmate, and new writer on Fight The Hypo - Sally Proust. I think you’ll find her mix of sass and sweetness refreshing. Here’s a little Q&A I did with Sally recently…
Fight The Hypo: First things first, Sally. Our readers are dying to know whether there’s a Mr. Sally Proust?
Sally Proust: Negative on that front. Still holding out for a quality guy who is willing to be part of my juggling act and hang out with a great gal. That’s actually how a friend described me to Lance Armstrong at our chance meeting in Georgetown.
FTH: Great is a good word for you, but I’m still wondering what the heck Lance Armstrong was doing in Georgetown that night. I think we’d all agree on that one. So what are you going to write about here at Fight The Hypo?
SP: In addition to the ups and downs of law school I struggle with the dating game. It’s not easy, but c’est la vie. I can empathize with readers who are enduring the same. If you don’t start law school with a serious relationship it’s hard to establish one because you don’t have the time to invest in building it. There’s no question relationships take time and work, which law students lack. Continue reading ‘Introducing New Contributor Sally Proust’
This week I made a mistake - the second time I’ve made it really.
In a way, we opened this blog to goof off. I wanted to improve my web design skills and write about this all-consuming experience I was having. After putting up version 1.0 of the design, I found friends wanted to join in the fun. When things around here got serious, our goal was to focus on our law school experience with a hefty dose of sarcasm, snark, and tomfoolery. By and large, we’ve slowly begun to figure out how that works. And we’ll continue to do so.
But we had a relapse in two recent posts (Gong Show and Second Amendment). While I think what we’ve written is good, it’s not new or original or law-related or funny or entertaining or insightful - all qualities we hope define our writing here. For a blogger, politics is like crack or junk food - something eaten when hungry or bored or in need of a quick fix and instead of finding a good snack (nice piece of legal news or gossip), you go to the old standby (political screed). Trouble is, we’re not really that good at writing about politics and there are plenty of people much smarter that we are writing about it. To those put off by our political digression this week, we apologize.
Anyway, it’s been a learning experience. When we approach “serious” topics that have political overtones we will try to tackle them from a legal perspective, rather than debate the political calculus. These are the sorts of things I feel like we should be doing. We’ll have more fun this way and we think you will too.
Also, look for some fun new features coming soon to Fight The Hypo - at least a few design tweaks, launch of the shameless commerce division, petitions, and there are rumors that a love and law school column is in the makings.
I was going to call this the “Friday Fight The Hypo Award” but who has time to award something every week?
So our first official and illustrious “Every Now and Then Award For Fighting the Hypo” goes to, Mommy on the Floor.
She writes:
I was on call for Torts. The professor kept asking if I had a duty of care in certain situations. If I am a homeowner, do I need to try and rescue a trespasser who has fallen in quicksand? What about a bear trap? I wasn’t really sure so I was hemming and hawing. A few weeks ago, he had talked about sea captains and how they have a duty of care to the crew because he is pretty much the only one who can rescue them. Apparently, this is analogous to being a homeowner. He said, you have a duty of care because its like you are a sea captain.
So I am typing along and my friend who sits next to me starts to laugh. She points at my screen. I had written,
“If someone gets caught in a bear trap, you have to help them because you are the sea captain.”
When will this stop being funny? It just made me realize how ridiculous these hypos are. Am I going to be defending sea captains? Are we plagued with bears and everyone is running out and planting traps?
But I promise you, if you fall into quick sand on my property, I will help you. I have too, because I am the sea captain. Aye Matey!
Fight on, Mommy. Fight on!
(H/T to Divine Angst for the heads up on this post; check out the law school roundup that she and Evan Schaeffer put together each week)
WSJ’s Law Blog (highly recommended reading) has this post from a former BU Law student, Kirsten Wolf, who graduated $100K in the hole, assuming she would land an “average” job that would net her $85K/year upon graduation. Despite passing the Massachusetts bar, Kirsten wasn’t able to find the mythical “average” job and decided to simply do something she loved. The only trouble is, she’s still $85K in debt and not making Big Firm Associate bank.
Continue reading ‘Is Law School Worth It?’
