The Nightmare

There's just no escaping the terror of law school. After an ice storm made me call an early end to my Saturday night, I expected to get a good night's sleep. No no.

At six in the morning, I jolted awake, heart racing, gasping for breath, and why? Oh, just your run of the mill nightmare about law school grades. I probably should have figured out I was in a dream when the entire thing was taking place in my parents' living room, but I didn't.

Instead I was treated to my civil procedure professor, Burt Neuborne, somehow grade my exam first out of his stack of eighty-five. I noticed immediately it wasn't going well, and eventually he acknowledged my presence in this soon to be horror show.

"I see this test is a 90," he said. "That's not very good."

I started to explain myself, that these tests were just something I wasn't good at, blah blah blah. I mentioned that there were little things I had forgotten to write about, and Prof. Neuborne said I should have done something to distinguish myself, let him know who was writing the exam. (I like how my brain was trying to make me feel like I at least was a student of note in class, which also isn't true.)

Then, in an attempt to be comforting, my professor commented that I'd be fine, that I write an amusing blog. Yes, even in my dreams I'm still promoting this stupid blog to myself.

I raced to the nearest computer to see if this "90" somehow gave me a pity B. I searched for the NYU grading curve and found out a "90" was a C-/D, not a B. At that point, I started panicking.

Then I woke up.

Bush's Ownership Society

Today's NYT does a pretty good job kicking the President while he's down. It doesn't come out and blame the economic mess entirely on our outgoing Decider, but it might as well have.

Encouraging first time home buyers was part of President Bush's vision, or scheme, to create an "ownership society." This would make people rely less on the government and, voila, vote more for Republicans.

One problem: as it now apparent, none of the President's other economic policies did anything to help raise average incomes. Enter "the mighty muscle of the federal government" to save the day!

This tendency by the Bush Administration to ridicule and dismiss government until it needed it is what's been most infuriating by the past eight years. It took near economic collapse for the Bush Administration to decide government regulation was a good idea! Until money started vanishing overnight? Well, the government was just an oppressor to and burden upon the "ownership society." You know, those folks who pulled themselves up buy their bootstraps in order to buy homes they couldn't really afford.

The president also leaned on mortgage brokers and lenders to devise their own innovations. “Corporate America,” he said, “has a responsibility to work to make America a compassionate place"...But Mr. Bush populated the financial system’s alphabet soup of oversight agencies with people who, like him, wanted fewer rules, not more.

This administration's entire modus operandi has been to ask for more and more money and less and less accountability. "Just trust us!" seems to have been the motto of the day.

It's sheer hypocrisy at best, and it obviously didn't work:

When states tried to use consumer protection laws to crack down on predatory lending, the comptroller of the currency blocked the effort, asserting that states had no authority over national banks.

The administration won that fight at the Supreme Court. But Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s attorney general, said, “They took 50 sheriffs off the beat at a time when lending was becoming the Wild West.”

Even after watching all eight years of this failure, I can't figure out if President Bush was naive or just wilfully ignorant. According the NYT piece, he foresaw the problems facing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but then blindly ignored them after installing one of his old prep school buddies as a regulator of the two.

End result: the President's "ownership society" is smaller than it was the day he took office, and everyone's forking over $700 billion for evil federal government to play house with.

An Early Christmas Present from the RIAA

Somehow I completely missed the RIAA's big announcement yesterday that it was ceasing its endless witch hunt for "illegal downloaders," more appropriately called copyright infringers.

Mr. Bainwol said that while he thought the litigation had been effective in some regards, new methods were now available to the industry. "Over the course of five years, the marketplace has changed," he said in an interview.

Yeah, the marketplace has changed. Despite five years of lawsuits, the RIAA has seen album sales decline some 25%. Nevermind that the RIAA's crusade was a PR disaster and of dubious legal validity.

It's really the end of an era. When I headed off to college six years ago, high speed internet didn't really exist outside my dorm room. I grew up back when people had to wait thirty minutes to download a single, glitchy Dave Matthews mp3.

Then the RIAA went to war, and my college years were spent watching my friends bounce around torrents trying to avoid those dreaded RIAA letters. BU was a frequent target--my alma mater was ranked the 15th worst music infringer for awhile.

I guess the big question now is if Napster is still around somewhere? Wonder how many college freshmen, terrified of being extorted by the RIAA, are racing back to some P2P service to download some DMB tonight.

Two Face

On the left side, we've got embattled, grizzled law student Joe. On the right, civilized Joe.

My friend Adrianne honestly didn't recognize me in my grizzled form. Maybe I just looked too much like a barbarian? That's what law school does to people--it devolves you.

A Class Action: Semester Complete

It's done.

The first semester of law school is in the books, and while most of my peers are having a night out on the town, I called it an early night and came back to my room to box up $700 in casebooks, treatises, commercial outlines, and hornbooks.

For anyone out in the internets who ever reads this, let me add my voice to the choir: law exams are awful. I may be pudgy, shy, cowardly even, but I feel like I've been through a war. For the past three days, I've been suffering from some sort of food poisoning, so I've been walking around feeling bloated, gassy, my stomach constantly rumbling, unable to keep down anything other than water.

I've had a constant dull headache for two weeks. I haven't shaved in six weeks. I'm out of clean clothes. My room was a warzone of papers, books, food crumbs, dirty clothing, and assorted trash. My hands and arms are caked with ink from notes to myself on things I should look up.

Oh yes, and all but one of my lights has burned out.

The worst part about these exams is the shame they bring. I'm not sure what I could have done to be more prepared--I might have studied more, but I worry that my brain just isn't able to analyze these problems like a real lawyer would.

At this point, if I got some pity Bs, I'd be happy, confident that maybe I'd do better in the spring. I probably don't deserves Bs, though. When I think back on the rambling answers to my exams, I'm just appalled. I learned so much these past four months, but I'm not sure I showed that at all.

Wrong statements, rambling statements, inarticulate statements. There were things I missed in these exams that no lawyer should ever miss--is this just first time jitters or am I just lacking? Even if I get some pity Bs, I'd be embarrassed to declare I'm "above average" in any capacity as a 1L. By any legitimate grading scale, these exams were an epic fail.

Too bad I have to fork over another $30,000 to find out...

Universally, everyone I've spoken to is ready to purge their minds of law. Amusingly for me, most of the guys here have a date with their Xbox tomorrow. I was talking to James, who's spent his years working in politics and doing other worthwhile things, and his plan of attack is to go home, drag out his Xbox, and play Fallout 3! Well, me too! Another kid was debating whether he should drink and sleep or drink and sit in his basement and mindlessly kill Nazi zombies in Call of Duty: World at War.

As for me, I need to get away from here. I figure if two weeks in Iowa can't make me come running back to law school, then I really am screwed. In the meantime, I only just today realized Christmas is next week. So happy holidays?

"After Torture"

TPM posted an interview they did with my civil procedure professor, Burt Neuborne:

Prof. Neuborne was a fantastic professor, and, by and large, civil procedure came out of no where to be the most exciting class of my first term. That said, I won't be sad to be done with procedure this time next week.

Procedure is just a mess of rules piled on top of some greater legal theory. I've spent the past day working on a cheat sheet for my exam, and, at a glance, procedure problems seem deceptively easy to solve. That is until you start thinking about the underlying policy goals behind things like jurisdiction or choice of law or...the always clear Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

I'm having a hard time maintaining my enthusiasm for all this crap. For a while yesterday I began thinking I was coming down with a cold, so I started chugging orange juice and eating broccoli. I have no idea if it made a difference, but I woke up at 11 this morning as ready to go as ever...

My First Law Exam

What the hell? I thought I'd have some sort of feeling at the end of my battle with my torts exam. A visceral reaction to my performance. Probably it'd be the bitter rage after the first time I took the LSAT. Maybe the euphoria from the second go around. But no. Nothing.

Everyone was trying to compare notes after the exam, and I made a beeline out of the exam room. The only thing I wanted to do was sit and stare at a wall, purge my mind of torts, move onto the world of contracts. No joy. No tears. Just nothing.

The whole damn torts test was underwhelming like that. I tossed and turned until sometime near three in the morning before jolting awake before dawn--I was dreaming I had been engaged in a tort action against a donut company for trespassing on my bed. I did a once over of my notes and sucked down some water. Food before exams has always been bad news for me, and my stomach was audibly upset with this by the early afternoon. I was so worked up for this exam, so emotionally invested, and to walk away feeling empty?

I was the fifth person to enter my exam room, and have some perfunctory hellos to some sectionmates I hadn't seen in a week, I grabbed a seat in the back. As the room filled in, I immersed myself with my block rockin' beats and tried in vain to get JoePuter4.0 connected to the NYU wireless network. I wanted the comfort of an XP PC to take my exam, but it's time to put this two year old laptop to pasture. Fortunately I'd downloaded the exam earlier, so at the stroke of 9:30 AM, I was able to take to the field.

Scratch paper. Three pens. Halfway functioning computer. I flipped open the exam and read the first question. For a minute I drew a blank. I read the question at the end. Sat back, took a sigh. Realized what my professor was asking and started scribbling some notes on my paper. Then four hours flew by, and I was done.

I got up, felt neither relieved nor terribly upset. It's been a few hours and still I can't tell you how I feel. Missed more stuff. The worst part was that I finished the exam early, maxed my word count, and couldn't find anyway to get my 1200 word exam answers any more coherent.

So...that's that? I don't feel good about my performance and I don't feel bad about my performance. All semester, I've had more trouble with torts than my other classes. It's because torts is about concepts of duty and reasonable care, and contracts or procedure are all rules and interpretations of those rules. Going in, I figured torts would be my worst subject--and maybe it was?

I imagine the dream of clerking for SCOTUS is dead, but, on the plus side, I don't feel inclined to go jump out to window even if I did present myself most averagely on my exam. I think I might just stare at my wall for a bit longer...

Law Students seem to hate Law School

While looking for a picture of a pissed off law student for the previous post, I did a quick Google search and stumbled upon this article by Maureen Fitzgerald of the Canadian Bar Association. As part of her doctoral thesis, she interviewed a bunch of law grads about the horrors of 1L.

I sorta kinda enjoy law school, but I can't say I didn't laugh at loud a few times reading her piece:

All students resented the 400 or 800 pages of hole-punched photocopies of cases when they eventually learned that they did not need to read them. Students were less concerned about the number of cases than they were about the irrelevance of these cases. It was the sense that they were being asked to do something that was not useful that bothered them most.

One of the most common phrases I heard in the interviews was, why do we need to read all these cases to just extract one paragraph? Being required to read irrelevant cases lead to cynicism. Learning seemed more difficult than it needed to be.

The result?

Over time, students develop fundamental beliefs about grading and assessment, and these beliefs cause them to feel betrayed and cynical. Students came to believe that exam expectations were not clear, exams assessed things not taught, exams were not an accurate assessment of ability, exam marking was arbitrary, and the curve and ranking were not fair.

Well, alright, already sort of figured that out, but I especially enjoyed her comparison between tests and class:

Lawyers call this skill “problem solving” or “legal reasoning.” It is quite different than case analysis, which is taught. During the year, students learn black-letter or substantive law through the study of cases. They also learn, mostly on their own, how to analyze a case and compare it to other cases. But usually, their first attempt at synthesizing the law and applying it to a new situation happens in the examination room. One described it as “learning from the opposite direction.”

Even more hilarious:

Students appeared concerned that they had only one opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge, and if they blew it, they would be a failure. Others felt that the pressure of 100% finals and the timing of the exams caused them to perform badly, promoted unhealthy competition, and affected their motivation to do well. This study indicates that these exams resulted in low knowledge retention. This seems to be related to the fact that much of the preparation for exams involved memorization for quick recall and because, as several graduates said, the learning was not used after first year.

She sums up:

Finally, the curriculum and course content causes confusion and work overload. In combination, these teaching practices appear to cause students to feel overworked, generally confused, and ultimately cynical.

The CBA even includes this awesome apparent stock photo:

Well, I sure don't think law school is that bad...

The Impleading Interpleader Pissing Contest Anger Rage

I'm starting to understand the benefits of going into law school exams mad. Today, after overcoming much fear, I began looking at old law school tests.

My first gasp was that I could indeed see the "issues" present in the question. Law school exams, for those two of you reading who don't know, are really just elaborate fact patterns, and the law student's job is to tackle the fact patterns in the same way a lawyer tackles the facts of life of his/her clients. So, on the first cut, I could at least see the stuff in the fact pattern that needed to be discussed.

The second thing to do is to muster what little law we've learned--this is called the "black letter law," the rules, regulations, and activist judge decisions that make up the "law" as we know it--and apply it to these facts. Of course, most of what we've learned doesn't correlate exactly with what the facts present, so you have to analogize and extrapolate.

Provided you do this with a degree of linguistic fluency and you don't misstate the "law," you win at the game of law school exams.

Here's the problem: you have no damn time. All the professors prance around pretending like their four hour exams can be done in three hours, but that's hogwash. There just isn't enough time to articulately apply the law to the facts accurately--unless you're a true legal eagle.

Example: a two page fact dump about insurance claims arising out of 9/11. The crux of the question asks whether or not a federal district court should grant an interpleader, which is a funny way to having a court pool together money and evenly distribute it when multiple people claim ownership. (Say you have an insurance policy for $20K in case of a car crash. You proceed to crash your car, causing $30K in injuries to four people. How you, or rather the court, gonna split the $20k?)

So that's the main "question." Here's one of the bigger issues, however:

One of the insurance companies, which is actually from the U.K., is going to go bankrupt trying to pay off the claims, so it has turned to a Singapore insurance company to cover its debts. In order to bring the Singapore company, the English insurance company has to "implead" the Singapore company as a third party.

So we've got impleading and interpleading going on, which is confusing enough, but the entire question is supposed to take an hour to answer.

My first thought was to look at the requirements to "implead" somebody. I want to know if I can bring a foreign company into an American court in order to indemnify a bankrupt English company that might owe money to dead Americans because of the actions of Islamic terrorists.

The bulletpointed list of what can and cannot be implead provided no answer.

Pissed off, I stomped around my room, asked a few people, grabbed some water.

10 minutes later I realized the situation was identical to a case we covered in early September, Asahi v. Superior Court, which dealt with a Taiwanese company providing widgets to a Japanese company that was selling motorcycles in California. Notice this case doesn't deal with insurance or interpleadings at all--but it has a similar relationship, i.e., a foreign company helping another foreign company do something in the U.S.

In Asahi, those silly Californians wanted to adjudicate a third party dispute that didn't really have jack diddly squat to do with anyone in California. In this fact pattern, I read three paragraphs removed how the American victims need this to get resolved.

It totally applies.

It took me, at this point, 15 minutes to figure this out.

The question is supposed to take an hour--it has another dozen "issues" like this in it.

Suffice it to say, I'm mad now.

NYU's New Grading Curve

First thing this morning, this arrives in my mailbox:

To: All Students
From: Liam Murphy, Vice Dean

Re: New Grading Curve

As you may know, after lengthy deliberation the faculty recently approved a new grading curve, effective immediately. All fall 2008 classes (including early seven week classes) will be graded using this curve. The new curve includes a number of innovations, including the introduction of an A+ grade. We believe that the new curve will more accurately represent the achievements of our students to the outside world.

Here it is:

Mandatory First Year Curve

A+: 0-2% (target = 1%)
A: 7-13% (target = 10%)
A-: 16-24% (target = 20%)
Maximum for A tier = 31%
B+: 22-30% (target = 26%)
Maximum grades above B = 57%
B: remainder
B-: 4-8% (target = 6%)
C/D/F: 0-5%

---------------

What is the point of this curve? Based on the usual descriptors on the ABCDF scale, roughly 95% of NYU students are "above average?" Why? By virtue of the fact we had a decent LSAT score and got into U.S. New's #5?

Even better: 57% of the class is better than merely above average.

On a personal level, I'm ecstatic here: I can do less work, have less stress, and get better grades. Statistically, this curve suggests I have a better chance at a 3.5 than a 2.7.

Philosophically, what's the point? This curve makes the catch-all "B" a worthless indicator of my knowledge of the "law." If 57% of my peers are getting better than a B and 11% lower, the B is pretty much the de facto bottom of the barrel.

So despite my apparent academic ignorance of the law, that B suggests to the world that I'm above beyond average. Maybe be societal standards! But by law school standards? How can I be above average if only 11% of my peers are below me?

After worrying about grades since roughly fourth grade, I'm done--I'm, ahem, collaterally estopped.

It has begun...

I'm in bed; I can't sleep. All I do is go over elements of torts in my mind, while trying to also come up with contractual defenses and the intricacies of the Erie doctrine.

I went to the LEEWS law exam prep course on Sunday, which, for a while, put me a bit at ease. One key point: go into a law exam like you're pissed off, not fearful. The idea is that four hours to demonstrate your legal knowledge to a professor is fundamentally unfair, so it's better to go in with a chip on your shoulder than a mass of anxiety. You're to treat the exam like a lawyer would treat a problem--only with tremendously absurd time constraints.

It's good advice--but it's not stopping me from lying in bed, biting my lip, anxiety welling up in my chest.

The situation hasn't yet escalated into something akin to Turow's drama in OneL, but the feelings coursing through me are...unpleasant.

The worst part is that the damn tests do NOT really matter. Statistics show the vast vast majority of law students pass with flying colors, most go on to have interesting and/or lucrative careers regardless of law school exam performance, and that it's harder to get into law school than to get out of it.

But that hasn't stopped me from despising myself for not studying harder and earlier, for not memorizing the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or the six factors of abnormally dangerous activities in the Restatement Second of Torts.

So it's 1:30 AM, a week before my first exam, and I already can't sleep. The life of the 1L is a sad miserable existence; we learn mountains of material no body in the real world needs, we get tested on materials in ways antithetical to the way class is actually run, and we're powerless to stop from blabbering on and on about the law at any possible occasion.