…if you’re going to write down the wrong time for your last 2L final exam, at least make sure the time that you write down is before the actual exam time and not after it.
That is all.
Good evening y’all! 
First day of the my 2L Spring semester was today, and I’ve got a feeling this is going to be one rollercoaster of a semester. As one might expect from some of my past entries, it wouldn’t be the first day of class without a mini-disaster of some kind 
Usually my car doesn’t like to start up in the cold weather, so I get up early and crank it until it starts, then sit there until it warms up, then leave for class. Well this morning it started on the second try (which was weird) so I let it warm up and headed to class a bit earlier than usual… and no sooner do I get into the inner lane of the major thoroughfare outside my apartment, in the middle of morning rush hour traffic, when the whole car just randomly dies.
No gas. No brakes. No steering. Nada.
Luckily for me I wasn’t going that fast and coast to a stop, so with cars barreling down on me I frantically hit the hazard lights switch, open the door and jump out of the car to start flagging other drivers to go around. I eventually get the car to start again and make my way to school…
…but not before I’m solidly late for Trial Practice class 
In hindsight it was probably a good thing though, because the first day of class was about as exciting as watching grass grow. It covered the basic mechanics and stages of a trial from voir dire through final judgment, stuff I had already picked up between my past professional experience and spending last year on the 1L trial team.
But the class is taught by a judge though and is practically-oriented (all future classes involve different pairs of us going through different parts of the trial) so I’m hoping the excitement level will crank up soon
Then I talked with Professor FRE about the Evidence exam and found out I deserved the grade I got, but for totally different reasons than I expected. I’ll save the details on that for the grade rundown once I get all of mine in (still missing 3 
).
And then I had Business Associations, which will have me terrified for at least the near-term future. Prof Ks (who also teaches BA) got his timeslots mixed up and was late for class, and for whatever reason I decided to do the responsible student thing and go get him — then got rewarded by being the first person called on to brief a case
I feel like I held my own so there’s an ever-so-slim I might actually do well with the material this year, but let’s just say I’m glad the class period only lasted about 50 minutes 
While I was in class I got a handful of emails from my internship, including docs I need to get reviewed ASAP. The schedule was posted for my tutoring gig so I’ve gotta get rolling on that. Plus there’s a 15-minute closing argument to write for trial team practice tomorrow night, and somewhere between now and then need to read about 80 pages for BA and Criminal Procedure ::headdesk::
The only real upside to today? We’re currently in the middle of a snow + freezing rain + ice storm, so morning classes got canceled 
Expect me to have no hair left by the end of the semester But hopefully it’ll be some fun 
Got my Evidence grade today.
The good vibes from ZombieLaw were a trap 
Nothing like totally laying an egg in a course on something I’m supposed to master if I want to become a competent DA… ::smh::
::headdesk::
Good evening y’all!
This morning was class registration day for the 2Ls at the N.C. Central University School of Law, meaning all of us were up at the crack-o’-dawn with fingers curled over the keyboard frantically refreshing a TWEN page around 8:00am.
Different from undergrad,1 where we got our PIN numbers weeks in advance and our custom-built registration system was inaccessible until a certain day/time, the Banner registration system at NCCU is up for everyone and instead the PIN numbers get automatically posted at 8am via the Registrar’s TWEN page. So folks have realized the most efficient way to snag classes involves a bit of computer know-how:
The whole process from start to finish takes maybe 5 seconds at most.
And people have gotten very good at it…
Last time around that included me. It’s why my Fall 2010 schedule only included 1 elective, as I tried to knock out as many required courses as possible so I could spend 3L year learning interesting stuff.
But this morning I made a fatal mistake
After opening the PIN window and clicking the spreadsheet attachment, I accidentally clicked the “Download spreadsheet” link instead of the “Open as HTML preview” option. In the less-than-3-seconds it took me to (i) realize wtf I had done, (ii) frantically click back to the browser, and (iii) open the HTML preview instead, I had given up priceless registration time.
By 8:00:xx, three of the classes I had planned on taking were filled 
So now my 2L Spring schedule is an inverse of the 2L Fall schedule: only 1 required course this time around, with a boatload of electives to go with it.
< 3 seconds == near-total schedule change
Business Associations is the required course and will be taught by Professor Ks. After my poor showing in both semesters of Contracts last year I’m a little terrified of taking another class with him, but every 3L I’ve talked to has told me he’s better than our other BA professor so I’m gonna try again ::fingers crossed::
Trial Practice I isn’t required but just about everybody takes it, given NCCU Law’s reputation in North Carolina for producing top-rate trial attorneys. I haven’t had this professor before so I have no clue how that’s going to turn out. If I’m lucky enough to make it onto one of our trial teams I’ll be using the class to prep for competition.
Scientific Evidence is taught by Professor DVLaw, which is actually the only reason I’m taking it because I hate pre-9am classes  It goes into deeper and more-practical detail on some of the CSI-esque forensics that lawyers see in a courtroom nowadays (DNA, emails, digital photos, etc) which should be cool to learn. But the main motivator is the professor: like MDG she’s tough on the workload and grading, but you leave her classes actually knowing stuff and how to apply it.
Criminal Procedure is a prerequisite for both our Criminal Prosecution and Criminal Defense clinics that folks can take their 3rd year, so I signed up for it now instead of taking Taxation like the vast majority of 2Ls. The downside is that I’ll be stuck taking both Tax and Sales & Secured Transactions during 3L Fall — too many #s in one semester for my taste — but it should give me a leg up in snagging an ADA-ship after graduation. It’s taught by Professor CrimLaw so at the very least it should be entertaining
And then Appellate Advocacy I is my throwaway class. The Professor teaching it is the same guy who runs the Criminal Prosecution Clinic during 3L, and it’s a required course if for some reason I decide to try Moot Court in my 3rd year despite my total lack of current interest. Most of the 3Ls have told me taking App Ad and Trial Practice in the same semester is suicidal, so I’m fully prepared to drop it and take it next year if it gets too burdensome.
So that’s what next semester is going to look like I’m excited!
And the crazy part? I only register for classes 2 more times before becoming an attorney… 
—===—
From the schedule-related archives:
What do “nom nom nom”, “::headdesk::”, and “#fml” all have in common?
Lots of people looking for nom-ing bunnies...
They’re all internet memes I’ve been using here on law:/dev/null for months now… and they’ve turned into a real headache when it comes to site maintenance
I first noticed something was amiss when the blog got hit by a massive wave of spam comments back on July 11th. The pageview spike was so massive I had to leave out that entire day when updating these bar charts, otherwise the “Pageviews per Day” bar would be about 50% higher than it is now.
To highlight the spike, I created a new chart below graphing the number of spam comments against the number of unique IP addresses we had in a given month (higher bars == more spam comments per capita).
As I spent the next couple weeks re-acquainting myself with .htaccess directives for this spam prevention entry, I noticed something else odd in the log files: we had a trio of referrer URLs showing megabytes upon megabytes of data being transferred but with -0- corresponding pageviews. After poking around I realized the bunny picture from this old Contracts entry was being hotlinked all over the place for reasons I couldn’t figure out.
So I logged in to Google’s Webmaster Tools for the first time in months, and figured out what was going on — over 15,000+ searches on 30 different variations of “om nom nom” 
July brought lots of spam...
Apparently when I switched how WordPress sets post URLs last month (from the old numeric “?p=1234” to the current setup), the search index for that Contracts entry went up high enough that the bunny picture became the #1 result for anyone doing a Google search with “nom nom” in it.
Not the entire entry of course. Just the bunny pic.
Things have calmed down a bit now that I’ve started banning spambots and limiting the hotlinks. My guess is traffic will go back to a more-linear growth pattern for August. We’ll see what happens
***
On the search query front, we had a bunch of duplicate searches but also some fresh ones. Here are 20 of the 100+ unique search terms that brought folks here in July:
Hit up one of the 3Ls for more info.
 Take it to get looked at ASAP.Definitely a different mix of search results getting here this month…
***
And finally, here are the Top 5 most-viewed posts for the month of July 2010, quite a bit different from past Top 5s due to the new indexing changes:
*THANK YOU* as always to each of you for your continued support of us here at law:/dev/null!
—===—
Past Site Stats entries:
 [↩]I know over the last few days the entries here at law:/dev/null have had a distinctly anti-government flavor, and for that I apologize dear readers. These are supposed to be musings of a computer scientist “turned law student” and not of one turned into a political pundit
Apparently the Law School Gods agreed, because they made sure to provide material for today’s entry
I’ve mentioned in a few previous entries that I’m volunteering with the Alternative Dispute Resolution clinic at the NC Central University School of Law. The course requirements include mediating about a dozen cases in Wake County District Court, creation of sample documents used by mediators in the field like Agreements to Mediate, a presentation on an ADR topic of interest (mine was plea bargaining), and 3 separate papers critiquing how some of those dozen-ish cases were actually mediated.
And amid my structureless boredom of summer, I completely forgot about the critiques
So Professor ADR sent me an email wondering where they were. And I gave serious consideration to crafting some kind of plausible excuse to justify my failure. But the truth is I forgot, so I sheepishly confessed my sin in a response email and pleaded for mercy.
The professor’s response: “Well, you get points for candor at least.”
I guess it’s better than nothing
Pretty much ever since I started law:/dev/null — back when I decided to take a quantity-over-quality approach to these posts — it’s been a challenge thinking of something to write about each night that at least a handful or so of you will actually enjoy reading.
Then this week happened. And I had three (three!) separate topics enqueued. Three! Topics that, I concede, got briefly postponed so I could rant about my missing grades. But topics that I fully intended to resume writing about tonight. (Three of them!)
And then the missing grades materialized. And the bodies started piling up…
So in deference to the requests I’ve already gotten,1 I figured I’d spill the beans on my grades now rather than knock out those other entries and post grade info on Friday.
That’s how much I 
y’all
We haven’t actually gotten any of the physical exams back yet so I’m not sure how my performance broke down in terms of multiples-vs-essays, but I’ll share my guesses where I can.
Without further ado, here’s the rundown for Spring 2010:
====================
CIVIL PROCEDURE II
====================
MDG switched things up from the usual final, giving us a set of multiples but then providing documents from a mock court case for the essay. Our objective was to review the documents and craft a letter to the client discussing the numerous FRCP-related concerns that existed.
It was during that portion of the exam that I stopped watching the clock and had time called before I got anywhere near finishing it
CivPro II Final Exam Grades
The multiples were a challenge, with MDG describing them as “nuanced” and mentioning that even a fellow CivPro instructor missed a couple. The highest correct was 15 out of 20 multiples (75%) with the class average at 12 (60%) — high enough to pass the Bar, which is definitely a good thing given the difficulty.
The chart to the right shows how the final exam grades broke down. There was a +19-point curve.
My final grade for the course turned out slightly higher than anticipated, so my guess is I did well on the multiples. But I’m kicking myself for choosing a UNC Board of Governors meeting over an extra credit assignment we were given shortly after midterms though — the extra 5 points would have bumped the final grade to a B, bumping my 1L GPA above a 2.7 (eligible for some NCCU merit scholarships).
Lesson learned :headdesk:
Midterm exam grade: A-
Final exam grade: ???
Expected final grade for class: C+
Actual final grade for class: B-
Synopsis: Worse performance than last semester, but given how gratuitously I choked on the essay I’m satisfied with how it turned out. And now I know to do all available extra credit in the future
====================
CONTRACTS II
====================
Not a whole lot to say here: Contracts clearly isn’t my thing.
The downside is that I now have to explain to future employers how I barely passed a core class two semesters in a row.
The upside? I never have to take Contracts again until the bar exam
Midterm exam grade: C-
Final exam grade: ???
Expected final grade for class: C-
Actual final grade for class: C
Synopsis: I passed
====================
CRIMINAL LAW
====================
If my perpetual flailing in Ks killed any briefly-nurtured dreams I had of going the intellectual property route, CrimLaw coupled with 1L Trial Team have convinced me to follow my heart and go the criminal prosecution route professionally. It’s something I had wanted to do for years, but never seriously considered since public employees don’t make much salary-wise.
But based on my grades it seems like the only thing I’ll be qualified to do
The really crazy part? This was my best grade all year, and it was in the one class where I didn’t study for the final exam because I had a UNCASG meeting that weekend
Professor CrimLaw sent me an email making sure I knew that (i) I earned the grade I got but (ii) I shouldn’t make any professional decisions based on one course. He’s got a valid point but I don’t feel like I’m doing that here — I really, truly, and deeply hate Contracts too so technically it’s based on three courses
Midterm exam grade: A-
Final exam grade: ???
Expected final grade for class: A-
Actual final grade for class: A-
Synopsis: I’m 90% sure Professor CrimLaw isn’t a TDot fan, but I still enjoyed the course. And I’m glad I finally have something other than B’s and C’s populating my transcript
====================
LEGAL RESEARCH & PERSUASION
====================
Along with not watching the clock in the CivPro final, this was my other instance of taking a strong starting grade and pissing it away through truly stunning incompetence.
Note to the pre-Ls: read directions!
Then when you’re done: re-read directions!
Then after that: re-re-read directions!
Trust me
Cumulative grade after midterm: A-
Final memo grade: ???
Expected final grade for class: C
Actual final grade for class: C
Synopsis: It could have been worse I guess. At least the research skills we learned actually turned out to be useful. ::headdesk::
====================
PROPERTY II
====================
This was the only final exam where I didn’t have a gut feeling one way or the other on how it turned out. I’m not sure if it was from the stress of the looming Contracts final two days later or what.
My performance was worse than the midterm, but high enough that I ended up with the exact same grade I got in the Fall.
And I don’t remember any of it already
Midterm exam grade: A- (and in Top 3)
Final exam grade: ???
Expected final grade for class: B+
Actual final grade for class: B+
Synopsis: At least I’m consistent
====================
TORTS II
====================
Professor Torts is currently in Costa Rica with our Study Abroad folks, so I won’t know how the final exam turned out for a long while.
But I know enough to know I blew it
Back on the midterms I ended up with the #1 score out of the class on the multiples-only exam, so to end up with a final grade below even last semester’s I must have quite thoroughly FUBAR’d the final. And I feel fairly certain I did well on the essay, meaning I can only assume I botched the multiples.
Meh. Was never a fan of this class either…
Midterm exam grade: A (and in Top 3)
Final exam grade: ???
Expected final grade for class: A-
Actual final grade for class: B-
Synopsis: This was the only bona fide disappointment for the semester, but at least it’s over. I will most definitely not be taking Advanced Torts
====================
FINAL SCORE: SPRING 2010 FINALS
====================
Expected End-of-Semester GPA: 2.756
Actual End-of-Semester GPA: 2.733
Actual End-of-1L GPA: 2.678 (Law school median: 2.000)
*****
So that’s the rundown on the 1L grades.
But one wrinkle added to the mix over the past 24 hours has been NCCU Law‘s strong adherence to the strict-C grading model: we have a policy that any 1Ls who have fallen below a 2.000 at the end of their first year are academically dismissed from the school (hence my reference at the start of this post to “the bodies piling up” once grades came out).
The policy is essentially a trade-off in exchange for the school giving a shot to folks who might not be academically qualified to get into other law schools, providing a level of access that I personally think does wonders for the legal profession (at least in North Carolina) because many of the best lawyers I crossed paths with when I worked for the State Bar were less-than-stellar students as undergraduates.
The 2.0 model forces students to perform. It produces good attorneys. It’s why so many judges in North Carolina are NCCU graduates. And it’s why many of my classmates and I have a huge chip on our shoulder when we listen to trash-talk from students at other law schools.
But the dark side of that 2.0-cutoff is that NCCU Law ranks #2 in the nation for 1L attrition at a public law school (we’re edged out by FIU Law). We’re around #7 among both public and private law schools combined.
1L attrition is the red bar on the right-hand side
Take a look at this PDF chart from NLJ if you need a visual. The picture to the left is North Carolina’s section of the report.2)
That means roughly 1-in-5 of my colleagues will not be returning this coming August, and I’ve already gotten messages that a couple very close friends who’ve been mentioned here at law:/dev/null are among the casualties It kinda kills the buzz from being able to officially declare myself a 2L…
I’m not sure where those folks will end up down the road, but if they happen to read this entry I’m hoping they’ll keep in touch and let me know if I can help. We might not all be destined to be lawyers, but I’m a firm believer we’ll all end up where we’re supposed to end up.
*****
I completely and totally *hate* ending posts on a sour note, so I do want to formally say *CONGRATULATIONS!!* to everyone in the Class of 2012 — both at NCCU Law and elsewhere — who can officially call themselves 2Ls! Good luck to all of you in your summer endeavors, and I hope you’ll keep coming back to law:/dev/null next year now that I get to officially keep chronicling this experience
Have a great night everybody!
—===—
From the grade-related archives:
[↩]A tidbit of advice: Â read directions closely
Several of my 1L classmates at the N.C. Central University School of Law knew I had been having an absolute dog of a time writing our semester-ending memorandum in Legal Research & Persuasion. Â Essentially, all of the miscellaneous assignments we worked on throughout the semester got synthesized into a legal memo to a fictitious court, supporting a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss a fictitious lawsuit.
We got the assignment about a month ago, and when I read through the instructions I could have sworn they said the memo had to be single-spaced. So I worked on a single-spaced memo over the ensuing weeks.
I ended up hitting a wall after 4.5 pages. With the case law we were required to use, I just couldn’t figure out what else to add without being needlessly loquacious and redundant. But that was actually fine with me: those same instructions said there was no page minimum (the page max was 10) so 4.5 should have been fine.
Then I talked with some of my colleagues who had met with Professor LRP, who apparently told each of them they wouldn’t be able to thoroughly discuss all points of law without using nearly all 10 pages. I had no clue what I was missing… so I spent the past few days staring at this memo at every opportunity, adding a paragraph here, a new argument there, some additional authority I found somewhere else, etc.
Finally, around 4am or so this morning,1 I got to 10 pages. I print out the memo, read through it, ensure all the BlueBook citations are accurate, staple it, then go print out the grade checklist we have to turn in with the memo…
…which I notice very clearly says only subheadings are to be single-spaced
I figure I’m hallucinating.  “It’s 4am, I’m cracked out on caffeine. There’s no @#$%ing way this is supposed to be double-spaced.” So I go back to the instructions… and sure enough they say the same thing as the checklist.  Where I had paused at 4.5 pages — which would have been around 9 double-spaced and could have been turned in on time — I ended up with a 19-page memo that I had to somehow pare back to the 10-page max.
Long story short, I finally turned in a less-than-stellar memo around 7am this morning at the price of not sleeping at all for the past couple days. All because I misread directions a couple weeks ago.
Just thought I’d share in case any of you can learn a lesson from my illiteracy Have a great night everybody!
[↩]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…
First day of real class was today; I’m saving a summary of the experience for later on though, otherwise I’ll never get through this look back on Week 1 I did have the ignominious honor of being the first student’s name to leave the lips of my Civil Procedure I professor this morning (thankfully for not adding the TWEN course section in a timely fashion instead of having to brief the main case I didn’t read).
Oh and I successfully got a parking ticket. Â Which undoubtedly amuses those of you who knew my less-than-stellar parking habits at NC State.
Before I continue yesterday’s entry, let me know if you find any decent and quick intros to WordPress. Â I dived into the whole blogging thing before bothering to learn the software, so I haven’t gotten around to things like tweaking up the CSS for this template or editing the blogroll. Â And I’m borderline afraid to touch the “Plugins” section…
—===—
But back to orientation.
I’m sitting in the back of the student lounge, feeling slightly obnoxious being dressed to the nines, and thumbing through the documents I was given at registration. Â I glance over the orientation schedule. Â Look at a pamphlet from the American Bar Association. Â Read up on some of the historical sites in Durham. Â And notice one of the first letters in the orientation folder is from a Dr. Psyche, the law school’s psychiatrist.
Not the university’s psychiatrist, the law school‘s psychiatrist…
Dr. Psyche works full time just for the law school, offering a whole array of counseling services (with friend- and spouse-related options jumping out, along with a reference to suicide prevention). Â Compounded with the agitating but not exactly law school-specific annoyances I had already dealt with that morning, it was at that point I started to wonder what exactly I was getting myself into. Â I guess God sensed my nervousness and mild amusement that suicide prevention is necessary in law school, because mere moments later I’d be lucky enough to experience a faux pas that made me want to shoot myself.
I notice folks are leaving the lounge, and we all headed upstairs to our respective classrooms for the day’s schedule; I had Room 102, where I’ll be for the rest of the semester. Â NC Central has a pretty impressive array of technology services in their new law school, courtesy of a multi-million dollar cash infusion by the North Carolina General Assembly after the ABA raised concerns about facilities during its reaccreditation review (and also coinciding with Rep. Mickey Michaux, a NCCU graduate, becoming a co-chairman of the House Appropriations Committee). Â So my room had a large screen in front, and projected onto it was a live video feed from Room 202 upstairs where everyone would be speaking for the day.
Let me preface this whole experience by noting I have a long history in Student Government and “real world” politics. Â One of the favorite rhetorical devices of almost every politician, student or otherwise, is to greet his audience with “Good morning,” receive a tepid response, then say something to the effect of “Let me try that again: good morning!,” at which point people laugh and more of them say “Good morning” in response even louder than before. Â It’s such a widely (ab)used tactic that student leaders and political operatives instinctually respond “Good morning” the first time, in the hopes the second time won’t be necessary.
You can probably guess where this is going.
The Chief (Dean of the law school), a charismatic guy who clearly enjoys his position “getting to walk around and ‘be dean-ly'” as he later put it, stands next to the podium in Room 202, looks to the audience of 1Ls before him, and starts: Â “Good morning.” Â And on instinct, the past 11 years of politics and SG experience goes on full display with an automatic “Good morning” from me in response… even though the Chief’s upstairs, and there’s no microphone turned on in Room 102 for him to hear me. Â And I happened to be the only one out of the group of 40 or so 1Ls in my room to say anything.
No sooner do the words leave my lips than I notice the lapse in judgment, right as about 10 of those 40 heads turn back toward me wondering who the ignoramus was trying to talk to the video projection. Â A bullet to the brain would have been the only cure for the embarrassment at that moment. Â Not sure if I successfully played it off by staring intently at the screen as though no one had said a word; I could feel my cheeks burning, but folks turned back around pretty quick so hopefully they never figured it out.
I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the day.
—===—
That’s it for now, have a few cases to brief for Contracts I and Property I tomorrow. Â I’ll pick up with the look back after class. Â Have a great night everybody!
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