A “hotchpot”? Really??

Only in ZombieLaw would something called a “hotchpot” be a real and legally significant thing.¹

For all the vaunted education of all the property attorneys in the world over however many centuries, you’d think they could come up with a better word…

1. For you aspiring law students: the “hotchpot” is apparently what you call a zombie’s net estate plus any advancements that have already been made to his/her kids, and that total $$ amount (estate + advancements) is what gets distributed to however many heirs exist. [↩]

Tags: 2L, ZombieLaw

Well *that* sure didn’t take long…

Good evening y’all

Sorry for never finishing another entry from this weekend! As a super-quick recap: Friday night’s post-meeting festivities lasted until about 5:30am, I woke up at 7:30am, and was not only coherent but surprisingly non-exhausted — I made it to the UNCASG meeting 30 minutes early and was the first one to arrive, the first time either of those things has happened in the 4 years I’ve been involved with the organization

My presentation that morning went well, and I used the rest of the afternoon trying to catch up on ConLaw from last week. The post-meeting dinner was good in terms of company¹ but the service and food were both abominable.² The obligatory carousing afterwards made up for it, until folks were a bit too loud for my comfort at 2am and I convinced them it was time to leave my hotel room and venture somewhere else. At which point I promptly fell asleep

Then of course Sunday was the drive back, being reminded how tedious it is unpacking from a mini-vacation, and reading for class.

Which — coincidence! — is the subject of tonight’s post.

If you ever want to quite thoroughly jinx yourself when it comes to law school, start a blog (like this one) and write in an entry (like this one) that you’re 2 days ahead on the reading. Tempting fate is definitely a Recipe. For. Disaster.

I just spent pretty much my entire night tonight doing absolutely nothing but grinding away on ConLaw to get caught up. My figuring is if that’s the class with material I’m already kinda comfortable with, and it’s worth 4 credit hours, I need to go full-tilt for a solid grade. And I can successfully say I’m back ahead on the ConLaw readings so that’s a mini-sigh of relief.

However…

Catching up on ConLaw meant not touching Evidence, for which I’m now at least 1 full class behind. I’m also totally lost in ZombieLaw, not so much because the material is difficult (it’s not) but because it’s SO F*CKING BORING.³  Legal Letters is at equilibrium, and I’m ever-so-slightly ahead on DV Law.

Not bad, but it’s thrown me that I’m already behind in 2 classes… when just last week I was safely and substantially ahead of schedule.

Hope your respective academic years are proceeding apace and you’re still on top of your readings  I’ll be using the Labor Day weekend to get fully caught up myself. Have a great night y’all!!

1. About 15 of us from 6 different universities [↩]
2. Avoid King Neptune’s on Lumina Drive in Wilmington. Trust me. Let me know if you want details [↩]
3. And we’re doing fractions, divvying up equal shares of a net estate to an arbitary number of offspring and collaterals. Fractions. 3 semesters of Calculus? Done. Linear Algebra? Finished. Statistics? Yep, that too. Took all this high-end math for my Computer Science degree, and I’m going to be done in by fractions that I hated all the way back when I learned them in elementary school… [↩]

Tags: 2L, ConLaw, DVLaw, Evidence, Legal Letters, UNCASG, ZombieLaw

2L Year: Initial Impressions

Good evening y’all!

The first day of my 2L year at NCCU Law is officially done! ::happy dance::

It’s interesting how much different everything feels as a no-longer-1L. Several of the 3Ls were walking around with a “we have class?” look on their faces, while the 1Ls had that “we have class!!!” look instead. The 2Ls were somewhere in the middle, my guess reflecting a new level of comfort with the law school and the whole educational process.

I figured I’d jot down some initial impressions to see how they stack up once the semester is over…

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DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: HISTORY, LAW & PRACTICE
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NCCU Law was one of the first law schools in the country (and the first HBCU) to develop a clinical program dealing with domestic violence issues. This class is the prereq for working in the clinic and is my first class of the day on Mondays and Thursdays — and several 3Ls tell me the course has a reputation as being the most-work-per-credit-hour-earned at the school  Professor DVLaw seems personable though, so that should makes it more bearable.

The material is another story. The background details aren’t necessary for a family-friend blog like law:/dev/null, but let’s just say I’ve developed a very visceral impulse reaction toward people who abuse others. And I can already tell trying to learn the law and apply it rationally will be a challenge.

For example, today we were given an in-class exercise featuring three trial themes often used by both the prosecution and the defense in real life domestic violence cases: framing it as (i) an issue of personal choices, (ii) an issue of luck/chance, or (iii) an issue of social standing. We were then given the basic facts of an actual Durham DV case we chose at random: a man attacked a woman, pulled her hair, knocked her (1-year-old) child to the ground, and when the police arrived he verbally threatened to kill both her and her other (7-years-old) child when he got out of prison.

Our task? Come up with an argument on the spot as though we were the defense attorney, and then afterwards do the same as though we were the prosecutor. I had the “personal choices” theme with 2 of my classmates, and I totally failed at coming up with anything defense-oriented. All I kept wondering is what “choice” the 1-year-old had in getting knocked to the ground, or what “choice” the 7-year-old had in being threatened. Thinking about the fact pattern just really pissed me off, and I was in a dour mood for most of the class because of it.

My displeasure must have been written on my face or something, because when we switched over to the prosecution side Prof DV points to me saying “this will probably make you feel better.”

Definitely going to be a challenge…

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EVIDENCE
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Evidence is next in the schedule, and the first thing I noticed is how f*cking PACKED the room was — I swear every 2L and their sister must have signed up for this section of this class. There were even a trio of students who showed up late and had to spend the entire class sitting on the steps because we didn’t have enough desks left in the room

Even though Professor FRE teaches CrimLaw for one of the other 1L sections (not mine), I did talk with him on a couple occasions during summer school and he seems like a quality guy. Good sense of humor, movie buff, former basketball player, etc. Should keep things interesting.

The class itself started with some preliminaries, then we watched the first 10 minutes of the 2000-remake edition of Shaft and discussed how a prosecutor would build a case within the confines of the Federal Rules of Evidence based just on the information in those first few minutes. Then we just jumped straight into the rules themselves, covering a half-dozen of them before class was out.

I’m actually a little nervous about this class because there are so many rules to remember — and usually with several facets to each one. We’ll see how it turns out

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CONSTITUTIONAL LAW I
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NCCU Law switches things up from our nearest law school neighbors at UNCCH Law and Duke Law, teaching ConLaw I and II as 2L courses rather than covering them in the first year…

…but when we take it doesn’t matter for me though, because barring something totally unexpected I can guarantee this will be my favorite class

Today was just a historical overview lecture from Professor ConLaw, who has a reputation for being a challenging professor (and also teaches Torts for one of the other 1L sections). I don’t know if I’ve got the work ethic to earn an A for the class, but as a guy who used to quote passages from Marbury v. Madison and other Supreme Court decisions way back in high school I will definitely enjoy it one way or the other

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ZOMBIELAW (DECEDENTS ESTATES I)
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Class today was mind-numbingly boring. Professor ZombieLaw herself is hilarious — she refers to the course as “Dead People’s Stuff 101″ — so that should make it a little bit better I hope…

…but it’s basically just like Property for dead people

Upside: it gives me a chance to get caught up on Twitter and Facebook?

***

That’s the rundown on Day 1 of classes Tomorrow is the first day for Legal Letters, then more ConLaw and ZombieLaw before I’m done for the day.

For anyone else reading this who’s already started classes, I hope you have an excellent week! And to everyone else, have a great night!

Tags: 2L, ConLaw, Duke Law, DVLaw, Evidence, NCCU Law, Prof ConLaw, Prof DVLaw, Prof FRE, Prof ZombieLaw, UNCCH Law, ZombieLaw

Property III, Zombie Edition (aka Decedents Estates)

My alternate title for this post? “Things I will not be doing with my law degree #2″¹

Now folks I know it’s premature to write off a particular course before we even get to the first day of class. I know. Really. Trust me.

But if I were a gambling man,² I’d say there are pretty good odds Decedents Estates will be the least-favorite class in my 2L Fall schedule.

I didn’t even discover the syllabus until a few minutes ago; turns out it’s one of maybe a dozen or so courses at NCCU Law that use the LexisNexis implementation of BlackBoard, as opposed to everyone else having a WestLaw TWEN page — including 100% of my 1L courses.

To give you an idea of how few courses at NCCU Law use LexisNexis’ BlackBoard, I didn’t know it even existed until a classmate told me earlier today

I’m all about faculty having the resources to teach a course in whatever manner they think will be most effective for me learning the material, but it would have been nice to have at least some kind of forewarning that I should check LexisNexis if I didn’t see my class in TWEN. So that was my first annoyance.

Then I perused the syllabus and some of the reading material for Monday, and from the looks of things it’s like PropLaw just for dead people   I didn’t do bad in that course last year — I got the exact same grade both semesters — but it’s just not something I was particularly interested in thinking about.

Which is my euphemism for “it was really f*cking boring”

It’s also not exactly the most inspirational of legal topics. Back when I worked for the Wake County Clerk of Court’s Office, I was the Director of its “Division of Special Projects”³ so my office was at the edge of the suite for the Estates Division. Every day there was at least one person (often more) bawling because they recently lost a loved one and now had to deal with the government and distribution of the estate.

Not to be Pollyanna-ish about dying and all, but thinking about where my stuff is going when I croak isn’t really my thing. If you happen to think differently, more power to you — in fact I might even hire you one day to handle drafting my will. Just don’t expect me to enjoy it

Until then, I’m referring to DE as ZombieLaw so I can derive some kind of amusement out of this class…

Have a great night everybody!

1. #1? Mediation. [↩]
2. Not to insinuate anything that might adversely affect my character and fitness review   [↩]
3. Basically a catch-all division for stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else. For example, a good chunk of my time was spent in an ombudsman-like role investigating the (not infrequent) allegations of misconduct by Clerk’s Office staff. Since our areas of expertise didn’t involve interaction with everyday court-goers like other parts of the Courthouse, our offices were interspersed wherever there were spare rooms [↩]

Tags: 2L, NCCU Law, ZombieLaw