Posted by TDot on Feb 11, 2010 in
Randomness I mentioned back on Monday that the February meeting for the UNC Board of Governors was/is today and tomorrow.
Beware of the Statues. The Gerneral ones. 
After today’s meeting, a handful of Student Body Presidents and I went down to the N.C. General Assembly to meet with a few legislators on the 8% tuition increase we’re trying to get replaced with more student-friendly rates.
Saw the picture on the right as we were leaving.
I can ignore the errant, comma. I can Ignore the Arbitrary capitalization.
But after misspleling tiwce I’d argue taking $$ away from education is the very last thing the General Assembly needs to be doing.
Added irony: these signs are right next to the Legislative Complex, for the bus loading zone at… the Museum of History and the Museum of Natural History, both frequent field trip preferences for schools
Spellcheck is your friend…
Tags: ::facepalm::, Money Money Money, UNC Board of Governors, UNCASG
Posted by TDot on Feb 10, 2010 in
The 1L Life It was only a couple weeks into law school when I first wrote that CivPro had become my favorite class, an opinion that endured throughout the semester.
CrimLaw has quickly displaced Torts at #2 on my list… and as the semester continues I’m pretty sure this is where I want to spend my career 
I fumbled at the start of class today when Professor CrimLaw asked me to detail the 4 types of homicide under the common law — totally forgot about involuntary manslaughter — but later in the class we got into Justice Blackmun’s dissent in Callins v. Collins, 510 U.S. 1141 (1994).
Prof. CrimLaw asked what I took out of the dissent, which I characterized as Blackmun “whining” about the death penalty. That opened the door for a class-wide discussion on capital punishment… where I ended up being the only one to openly support executing murderers 
My once-hostile philosophy on the death penalty notwithstanding, the debate itself was engaging. Even in CivPro I’m rarely more than half-certain on my opinions in class discussion; that percentage is far lower in something like Ks. But CrimLaw seems intuitive and comes naturally (at least thus far).
I was already planning on going the public service route in the Marine Corps, and had developed a growing interest in being a litigator from the Kilpatrick-Stockton competition last month. The downside of course is that it doesn’t pay much, but it’s one of the most direct ways for me to help improve my community. I’d argue that’s well worth the pay differential
My opinion might change after taking Evidence, but for now I think this is what I’ll be doing for a living 
I’ll keep you posted over the next couple years 
Tags: 1L, Career Prospects, CrimLaw, USMC
Posted by TDot on Feb 9, 2010 in
Randomness Another Tuesday. Another day below freezing. And this time with howling winds.
Ended up scrapping the usual post-Torts run with Rico because it was so damn cold.
I’m so ready for summer to get here…
Tags: Gotta Be NC, Rico, Torts
Posted by TDot on Feb 8, 2010 in
TDot's Tips I’ll confess: I was notoriously arrogant when I first got to N.C. State back in 1998.
I know that comes as a shock to all of about -0- of you 
In hindsight I’m not entirely sure why I acted the way I did. I was only a slightly-above-average student, paired with well-above-average acne and well-below-average athleticism But you wouldn’t believe it from how I carried myself and interacted with other folks.
Until I met QuietStorm.
We both were freshman appointees to the single most distinguished student deliberative assembly ever conceived in the State of North Carolina, and both of us got assigned to the same committee. I jumped into the policy debates in person and over the listserv from Day 1, and didn’t hesitate to employ a little vitriol in condemning proposals I considered ridiculous.
In response to one of those emails a few days after our appointment, I got a polite response from QuietStorm — our first interaction with each other — essentially telling me to STFU. My response was far less refined, including at least one reference to me “actively mock[ing]” people with her political beliefs.
She shot back minutes later informing me that I didn’t know her well enough to know her political beliefs, she was only trying to be help me avoid alienating people, and a closing admonishment: “Don’t burn your bridges. You never know when you’re going to need one.”
I realized she was right — over the next few months I learned that she was not only more politically conservative than me, but that we also made a phenomenal team. So I dialed back the pretentiousness over the next semester and adopted a policy of trying to be courteous and respectful to everybody.
I’m sure there are plenty of folks in the world who don’t like me, but hopefully their distaste isn’t from anything I did to them
Days like today remind me it was a good choice.
It started this morning in response to my quote in this article for the Raleigh News & Observer. I sound like a fool, but got a Facebook message from someone who graduated in 3 years, read the story and wanted to wish me well in law school. The name looked familiar but I wasn’t 100% sure why. A quick Google search confirmed my hunch — QuietStorm and I both worked with him in the Student Senate way back in 1999.
Then after CivPro I drove down to Raleigh to get my car repaired (again). I was talking with one of my colleagues from western NC about the tuition/fee vote at this week’s meeting of the UNC Board of Governors, and after I hung up a guy standing near the door goes “Hey are you Greg?” After my initial impulse to go “who wants to know?” subsided, I found out he was a student at UNC Pembroke (about 1.5 hours south of Raleigh) who I had met for a few minutes almost a year earlier as part of our UNCASG Listening Tour.
Here in the span of a few hours were two folks, interaction with the former separated by time and the latter by geography, who I never expected to cross paths with again. Imagine how either of those conversations would have turned out had I still been an asshole!
And as if Life wanted to underscore the point, just before writing this post I got a terse email from a guy working for an organization I’ll leave nameless, demanding a favor from me in my capacity as President of UNCASG — the largest student advocacy organization in North Carolina, and thus a preferred audience for his group. The guy in question? One of the folks responsible for deploying various crude insults about me back during my first campaign for Student Senate President.
Needless to say I declined his request 
As many a 2L, 3L and post-L will tell you, the folks we’re working with in law school are going to end up being our friends and colleagues for years down the road. It’s probably a good idea to treat them well so they’ve got a favorable impression of you in the future, because whether it’s in a courtroom or a car repair shop you never know when you’ll cross paths with someone again
Have a great night everybody!
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Past TDot’s Tips entries:
Tags: 1L, About TDot, NCSU Student Senate, QuietStorm, Tips, UNC Board of Governors, UNCASG
Posted by TDot on Feb 7, 2010 in
Technology It’s no secret that I think pretty highly of the North Carolina Central University School of Law, a point I made clear in one of my first entries here at law:/dev/null.
So when the Executive Board of our Alumni Association met yesterday and asked for tech-savvy current students to come up with ways to improve interaction between alums and plebes (including possible changes to its anemic web presence), my inner Eagle and inner Comp Sci geek both jumped at the opportunity
It was an interesting and enlightening way to spend a Saturday morning.
On the extremes, among the alumni in attendance was an ADA from the Class of ’08, relatively fresh out the law school door and still fairly “hip” to current trends in technology; then there was at least one immigration attorney who graduated in the mid-’80s, trained to Shepardize cases exclusively by hand since the Internet hadn’t even been invented when she earned her J.D. And of course there were a half-dozen or so folks in between, along with an equally wide spread of current students of varying technology backgrounds.
Discussing tech options is hard enough among tech-savvy folks. It’s even harder among an eclectic mix of people spanning years and comfort levels:
- Some folks didn’t like email listservs since they already got enough email from clients; others (including me) think they’re indispensable since they’re more “in your face,” forcing you to pay at least fleeting attention to them.
- Some folks (including me) didn’t like the idea of using Twitter; others thought it was a useful tool we already deploy, and leveraging it helps us reach into more nooks and niches of the alumni pool.
- Some folks (including me) liked Facebook pages; others (also including me ) realized it was both tacky and counter-productive forcing people to register for an unrelated service in order to access alumni information.
About the only thing we all agreed on was that WordPress is pretty nifty. I briefly showed them the law:/dev/null Dashboard, realizing a few seconds after I volunteered that doing so was probably a bad idea in light of the inevitable spam comments and general lack of redaction polish to the blog.
Fortunately Lotta was the only commenter showing up on the screen, and the breadth of the Plugins directory helped hide the fact I only use a few of them.
Not sure where things go from here, but whatever the results I’m looking forward to it. Some amped up school pride never killed anyone. I think.
Have a great night everybody!
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Tags: 1L, Alumni Relations, Blawg Love, NCCU Law, Tech Talk
Posted by TDot on Feb 5, 2010 in
Technology 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
Tags: Blawg Love, Tech Talk
Posted by TDot on Feb 4, 2010 in
The 1L Life 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.
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.
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!!
Tags: 1L, CivPro, Damned Lies and Statistics, Ks, LRP
Posted by TDot on Feb 3, 2010 in
TDot's Treats 
Bookshelf #2: The Hierarchy of my Life
At some point over the last few years cooking turned into a semi-hobby for me.
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
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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.
***
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
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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!!
Tags: About TDot, Mmmm delicious..., Nan & Pops
Posted by TDot on Feb 2, 2010 in
The 1L Life 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… 
Tags: 1L, ::headdesk::, Ks
Posted by TDot on Feb 1, 2010 in
Randomness 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. 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.
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.
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’s 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:
Tags: In Memoriam, Race Relations
y’all Tarheel ppl (you know who you are) and it won’t become a habit 
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