Blog Housecleaning

Over the past couple days I’ve been going through and tweaking up sections of the blog, mostly on the backend.

The most noticeable frontend change has been the blogroll, where I’ve been trying to add in all the various law school-related blogs that are still updated.

If you’ve got a blog that I should add to the list that’s not here, please let me know

How much of a lawyer are you after 1 semester?

My 2L and 3L friends are collectively rolling their eyes at the post title, but I promise it’s a serious (or at least seriously-intended) question

Just how much of a lawyer is a law student after their 1st semester?

Some background behind the question is in order, so you don’t think I’m totally batshit crazy for even asking. Everyone talks about the big life adjustment that is law school — teaching you to “think like a lawyer” and all that jazz.

But my (admittedly unproven) hypothesis is that 90%+ of any such adjusting is going to take place in your first semester, since presumably if it hadn’t you would have already failed out of law school.  Unless of course you go somewhere with a B+ median.¹

So assuming, arguendo, that my hypothesis is right, the next 2.5 years will be spent not on training you to be a lawyer so much as forcing you to have at least a passing knowledge of the current state of the law in various subject areas.

Not sure if that’s worded well enough to convey my point, so let me try a computer comparison:  basically in the first semester you’re taught all the logical constructs of programming (conditionals / loops / etc) and then for the next 2.5 years you get taught logically-identical variants of programming languages (Java / C++ / etc).

Or maybe a movie comparison works?  It’s like the first Matrix movie, where the first semester is for explaining wheretf you are and rebuilding your atrophied muscles from scratch, then the next 2.5 semesters get spent uploading various martial arts like kung-fu straight into your brain.²

Hopefully at least one of those three made sense

So going back to the question, let’s say you finished all of your required credit hours in Contracts, Legal Research, and Civil Procedure. At this point would you be competent enough to litigate a Contracts dispute pro se? Or will some other course over the next 2.5 years add still more training that you’d need to be effective?

Not sure why that particular question crossed my mind tonight, but I figured I’d throw it out there if any of my 2L/3L/post-L readers have insights they wouldn’t mind sharing

Back to reading for Contracts, just in case I need to represent myself any time soon Have a great night everybody!!

1. JUST KIDDING AGAIN! I promise I still y’all Tarheel ppl (you know who you are)  and it won’t become a habit [↩]
2. And if you haven’t actually seen any of the Matrix movies, you need to get out more. Seriously. [↩]

TDot’s Treats #1: Nan’s Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

Bookshelf #2: The Hierarchy of my Life

At some point over the last few years cooking turned into a semi-hobby for me.¹

One of my bookshelves actually has a section reserved for various cookbooks and recipes handed down from the family over the years (or bought on clearance, in the case of Beef for All Seasons ).

The fact I can effectively navigate my way around a kitchen is apparently hard for some folks to believe — especially the ones who know me The real shocker is that I’m actually halfway decent at it too

So after finding some über-appetizing recipes over the past couple months at  cursory circumlocution, Legal Alien’s Law School Blog and Teasingly Diverse, I figured I’d join the law student cooking craze and offer some recipes of my own  Hopefully y’all will like some of them as they get posted over the next few weeks/months

—===—

TDot’s Treats #1: Nan’s Homemade Spaghetti Sauce
Difficulty:  2 (of 5)

The inaugural recipe for TDot’s Treats is actually one of my grandmother’s specialties and a favorite of mine growing up

Even though Pops’s family moved to the U.S. from Poland, he picked up some Italian habits growing up in the Bronx area of New York.  Spaghetti is one of his meals of choice, and over the not-quite-50 years he and Nan have been married she tweaked her spaghetti sauce recipe so it’s just right.

I’ve tasted a lot of spaghetti sauces in my life, and this recipe here is still my preference.²

***

Ingredients:

• 2 cans of tomato sauce, ~15oz each
• 1 can of tomato paste, ~12oz
• 1 small onion, diced
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1/2 teaspoon of oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon of thyme
• 1/2 teaspoon of seasoned salt
• 1 lb. cooked ground beef

***

Cautionary Note:
I learned the hard way that it’s easy to put in way too much onion or way too much seasoning salt when preparing this recipe, leaving you with a not-quite-right sauce that’s either super-sour or super-salty

Remember you can always add in more later if you need it, so start light on the onion and the salt then gradually add in more to your liking.

***

Directions:
Start by pouring the 2 cans of tomato sauce into a fairly large saucepan, and begin cooking over low to low-medium heat. Add in the can of tomato paste and mix in thoroughly.

Now add in your onion pieces and mix into the sauce.  Then add in your garlic.  Mix everything together and let the sauce continue to cook for about 5-10 minutes before adding in your seasonings.

Then add in the thyme, oregano and seasoning salt.  The sawdust smell at this point is normal Stir in all of the seasonings and let the sauce cook for another 5-10 minutes.

Now add your cooked ground beef and mix in thoroughly to the sauce. Let the whole mix cook for — you guessed it — another 5-10 minutes.

After ~20-25 minutes of total cooking time, your sauce ingredients should be well-blended and ready for tasting.  Take a spoonful and try it, then add more onion (if there’s too much seasoning) or more seasoning (if there’s too much onion) to suit your tastes.

Boil some spaghetti noodles or other pasta on the side, throw it all together on a plate, and Voila! you have spaghetti for dinner

***

Total Preparation Time: ~10 minutes
Total Cooking Time: ~30 minutes

Serving Size: ~16 servings (depending on how saucy you like your spaghetti )

Recommended Side Items: garlic toast, salad

—===—

So there you go! All in all it’s a pretty simple recipe, and inexpensive too

If any of you try it, let me know what you think — I just finished cooking a batch tonight, and I finally got the onion:seasoning ratio right

Off to study CivPro before bed. G’night folks!!

1. The hobby actually started as a purely Darwinian response:  I was once told by a girl that if I were judged on looks, muscles, intelligence, and personality on a scale from 1-10, I’d get 5s across the board — so to differentiate myself I learned to cook an absolutely amazing Sunday breakfast, then expanded from there [↩]
2. Nan would even make batches of this stuff, freeze it and send it to me here in North Carolina until I had a kitchen to make it on my own. I’m spoiled [↩]

The main reason I dislike Ks?

Boring fact patterns

Torts, CrimLaw, even CivPro have more exotic cases IMO.

And I’m also pretty sure any decent grammarian could say the same thing as these opinions, but with 60%+ less verbiage…

The Greensboro Sit-ins: 50 years later

Today marks the start of Black History Month here in the United States, but more importantly it also marks the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro Sit-ins — a movement that began when four freshmen at the Agricultural & Technical College of North Carolina (now N.C. A&T State University) decided to demand service at a segregated F.W. Woolworth’s lunch counter.

The Greensboro Four in 1960

Their non-violent protest would catalyze the civil rights movement in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South, inspire the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee months later, and provide political momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which outlawed discrimination in “public accommodations”) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What a difference 50 years can make

This morning the International Civil Rights Center & Museum officially opened where that Woolworth’s once stood.¹ The country finally elected its first black President in Barack Obama. Students across the country can focus on their academic studies without worrying if they’re going to be beaten or lynched. Interracial dating is almost passé. The list goes on.

When I learned about the civil rights movement in high school — an occasionally sensitive topic growing up in a state that elected the country’s first black Governor when I was 8 but also awkwardly commemorated Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. all on the same day until I was 19 — I always wondered if I’d be able to demonstrate the same courage had I been in the same situation. Realistically: no.²

But I’m thankful for them just the same, especially when I get up in the morning for my daily drive to one of the most diverse law schools in the country.³

There’s always more to be done of course. Just last month Columbia’s School of Law released a study noting decreased minority enrollment in law school even as the number of seats available increased. All 5 of the HBCU’s⁴ in the University of North Carolina system are searching for ways to improve retention and graduation rates without limiting access by becoming more selective in admissions. Even the devastation in earthquake-stricken Haiti has roots in our historical racial divide.

If things can change so much in 50 years, however, I’m optimistic for what the next 50 will bring for all of us

More info on the ICRCM opening and the 1960 sit-in:

• Civil Rights Museum opens in Greensboro (Chicago Sun-Times)
• Civil rights museum opens (Greensboro News & Record)
• Protestors reflect on success of 1960s sit-ins (Raleigh News & Observer)

1. I was hoping to make it out to the unveiling, but when I got up at 5am to make the drive for the 6am breakfast I was greeted with streets full of ice [↩]
2. You can see some of the violence sit-in protestors had to endure in the PBS documentary “February One”. [↩]
3. When it’s not snowing — we’ve got another 2-hour delay tomorrow, plus a forecast for even more wintry precipitation tomorrow night and Friday. You know you’re in the South when a little snow/ice shuts things down for days [↩]
4. HBCU = Historically Black College or University. Contrast with PWI = Predominantly White Institution [↩]

Home, Sweet Home :)

The drive home from the tre-fo was a little crazy, but I’m finally back in the Bull City

It was a little strange driving down the interstate unable to see lane lines or the curb or anything else but the solid snow+ice on the road around you. The interesting thing is how courteous and cooperative folks become when they’re in an equally precarious situation alongside you.

I’m wondering if there’s a comparison to be made there with law school…

Fortunately the DOT did a lot of road-clearing work on I-40 from Greensboro to Durham, so after escaping Forsyth County it was a relatively smooth ride. Now hoping MDG will cancel CivPro tomorrow

But reading anyway just in case. Have Why Do Fools Fall In Love playing in the background — I forgot how thoroughly ridiculous / amusing this movie is…

[Update @ 8:30pm -- All classes canceled until noon... meaning no class at all for me ]

Improv FTW

We got enough folks here for quorum — they just happened to be accompanied by 8″+ of snow… with more still falling

Both the UNCSA campus and the WSSU campus are closed, so we had to improvise and go with our contingency plan: main meeting in the hotel’s conference room, and committee meetings in our officers’ hotel rooms Everything seems to be going well so far — committee meetings are wrapping up, and Pizza Hut was kind enough to deliver lunch so I’m typing while munching

And today’s Stat of the Day isn’t even the snowfall quantity: we’ve already got over 15,000 students who have signed the UNCASG tuition petition, and still have a month to go

So, this iPad thing. Why?

Let me preface this post by stipulating 1) Steve Jobs is one of my role models, and 2) I  really do Apple and its products — I used to work for the company in undergrad, only buy Macs, swear by Keynote for my job, and will snap up an iPhone if they ever come to Verizon Wireless.

But why get an iPad?

I finally got around to watching the Quicktime stream of the iPad unveiling, after intentionally avoiding all non-weather-related media since Wednesday afternoon so I wouldn’t learn about any details before seeing the video.¹

The positives seem compelling.  The technology in the iPad is impressive, especially given its size. The price point is lower than I think any rational person would expect with the components packed into it. Being able to seamlessly run iPhone apps is a perk to everyone with an iPhone. And there’s plenty of potential for gaming.

How many of those are compelling enough to justify adding another gadget to your technology ecosystem though? My reflexes are too slow for gaming,² I don’t have an iPhone so no already-purchased apps, and as much fun as reading the news looked in their demo I’d just as soon pull out my MacBook Pro or read it on my BlackBerry.

I’m sure it will eat into the Amazon Kindle market, and there will undoubtedly be niche markets for the gaming folks or the type of people who use the MacBook Air. But (at the moment) I don’t see the hook into the broader market. It basically reminds me of the G4 Cube, which was a huge flop until Apple tweaked the idea into the Mac mini.

History favors Steve though — after all, while he’s making $$$ reinventing entire markets, I’m shelling out $$$ to join one of the slowest-evolving professions in the world

Time will tell I guess Have a great night folks!

1. Yes, I’m one of those people The good folks over at MacRumors.com help with their spoiler-free stream links [↩]
2. I have to stick with turn-based strategy games like Civilization [↩]

Mother Nature and I are gonna have words…

Remember back during winter break, when I was looking forward to enjoying some wintry precipitation only to get cheated by Mother Nature?

Well apparently she’s deciding not to tease me this time, with what looks like a fairly decent snowstorm (at least by central North Carolina standards) barreling down on the state starting tomorrow.

The catch? Our monthly business meeting of the UNC Association of Student Governments is this weekend

We can’t reschedule, because of the time-consuming bureaucratic red tape we have to go through to meet in the first place. We can’t cancel, because we need to have some votes on tuition/fee-related items before our University system’s Board of Governors votes on them in 2 weeks.  So we’re gathering ~80 folks from 17 institutions throughout the state to converge in a city (Winston-Salem) right in the middle of the winter storm warnings, with the non-trivial possibility of having to meet in our hotel rooms if we can’t reach the host campus.

I dang well better get to enjoy some snow this weekend at the very least

Dying a not-so-slow death…

After classes today, I’m starting to wonder if that’s what is happening to my faith in people since starting law school

But before rehashing today’s material, I have to confess it’s not an entirely recent phenomenon.

When I first moved to North Carolina over a decade ago, I was a doe-eyed teenager who knew some individuals could be a bit unsavory but firmly believed that most people were good, upstanding folks — and the bad ones probably just had bad parents or something. I was a strident opponent of the death penalty back then too, not because of any amorality to state-sanctioned killing (I was also a big “separation of church/state” kid), but because no crime could be sufficiently heinous to merit the ultimate punishment in light of the non-zero chance the person being executed was actually innocent. And so on and so forth.

Then reality smacked me around a little bit.

Back in 2003 I started working for the Office of the Clerk of Superior Court in Wake County as its first “Director of Special Projects” — code for having carte blanche to work on various Courthouse problems with minimal red tape.

One of those problems was figuring out a way to consolidate 3 separate Courthouse evidence rooms.  I’ll forgo mentioning the actual floors since I’m not sure if they’re considered confidential anymore, but for the sake of description the bottom room held seized cash and small drugs, the middle room was for small weapons and miscellany, and the top room held everything relating to the major felonies: dozens of weapons (including some wrapped in biohazard tape with dried blood still on them), luggage full of weed, various exotic implements of death… and the tri-fold picture displays frequently used by prosecutors to make a point with the jury.

One afternoon I walked through the top evidence room with a deputy from the Sheriff’s Department, just to get an idea of the scope of the storage problem I was working on. I pulled out one of the tri-fold displays and nearly puked at the crime scene photos: this particular victim was lying facedown in a pool of blood, and after reading the text I learned it was the mother of the accused… a mother who had been beaten, raped and sodomized by her own son before he slit her throat and left her to die.

There were a string of displays featuring dead prostitutes, dead drug dealers, dead gang members, and various other dead people participating in illegal activities.

But then it went back to the totally innocent victims. One particular display that got seared into my brain was a two-fold instead of a three-fold, on the left side containing a photo of an attractive Hispanic female in her early 20s smiling for the camera. The right side? That same woman, on the floor, no longer smiling, brutally shot 43 times by her then-boyfriend who claimed she was cheating on him.

43 shots. Now I’m no expert, but I do know my way around the occasional firearm enough to know the Glock 21’s standard magazine is only 13 rounds. Try pulling an imaginary trigger as quickly as you can 13 times. Then pause to reload. Then do it 13 times again. Then pause to reload. Then do it 13 times again. Then pause to reload. Then do it 4 more times.

I timed how long it would take in my head, and started crying in the middle of the evidence room. I took the rest of the day off.

You can pretty much pinpoint that day as the one where I stopped caring quite so much about the Eighth Amendment.

Fast forward back to today in class.

We’re having an engaging discussion in CrimLaw about Ewing v. California, 538 U.S. 11 (2003), and the fairness of Cali’s “three strikes” habitual felon statute. And I tell you folks, I didn’t care. At all. A guy stole $1K+ worth of golf clubs to add to his burgeoning criminal record, he was going to prison for the rest of his natural life… and I felt no sympathy. ”Don’t want to get sentenced to life in prison as a habitual felon? STOP BREAKING THE @#$%ING LAW.” That was pretty much the only thing that went through my mind.

Then there was Contracts, discussing the doctrine of unconscionability and Higgins v. Superior Court, 140 Cal. App. 4th 1238 (2006). Essentially 5 siblings lost both of their parents, moved in with a family they knew through church, got approached by Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to build a new 9-bedroom house for all of them (the siblings plus the family they moved in with)… and then once the house was built, the quasi-foster family threw out the siblings.

Since this was a Ks case it centered on an arbitration clause when the Higgins brothers pursued ABC, but what really got me was the family that ejected them. Kids lose their parents, move in with you after meeting you at church, you exploit them to get a new mini-mansion… then throw them out to enjoy the gains you unjustly got at their expense. We need to throw these people in prison with the golf club thief.

I was accustomed to the crazy @#$% we’ve already seen in Torts, but stuff like today caught me off-guard. And makes me dislike people. Grrr.

Sorry for the rambling-ish post tonight everybody, it was just one of those days. I hope all of you have an amazing night, and I’ll try to post something more chipper tomorrow