Evan Schaeffer's Legal Underground

AFTER THE INTERNET, THE WORLD'S A MUCH SMALLER PLACE . . . Back in December, I did a short post titled "A Gap in the New Zealand Internet Scene" about law-student weblog in New Zealand. Someone left a comment that made me remember something I hadn't thought about in years: back in grade school in the 1970s, I was assigned a "pen pal" from New Zealand, and we ended up corresponding for several years. I didn't think I remembered his name, but then it came to me, and I added it to a comment to the original post. Since my penpal's name was unusual, I tried searching it on Google. When I did, I found out right away that my old penpal had been killed not long ago in an automobile accident.

It wasn't the sort of news I'd been expecting. It gave me a strange feeling, especially since the reason for googling my old pen pal was to see if I could renew our correspondence. When I told my kids the story, they asked me to look for my old penpal's letters. I was sure they'd been lost long ago, but the kids insisted. Sure enough, I found them all in their original envelopes, stuck inside a larger envelope where they didn't belong. It's probably why I thought I didn't have them.

I hadn't read my old penpal's letters since early in high school. Now that I had them again, I wondered if there was a way to find his family in New Zealand to see if they wanted copies. But before I even starting looking into it, there was another comment added to that original post about New Zealand, which said, in part:

Evan, . . .  I am the eldest son of your Penpal . . . I am sorry to inform you that he did die in a car accident in 1999 in Singapore, after being in the Army for nearly 20 years. He even made Lt. Colonel. I'd be happy to correspond with you via email regarding this strange coincidence. - I found this whilst looking for details about my name and my fathers.

As it turned out, I didn't have to find my penpal's family because they found me. Since then, I've been corresponding by email with my old penpal's eldest son. I was even able to copy all his father's old letters and send them back to New Zealand for his family. It's something that wouldn't have happened without this weblog, which makes it one of those unusual Internet anecdotes that proves, once again, for better or for worse, that after the Internet the world really is a smaller place.

AT MY TRIAL PRACTICE WEBSITE . . . "All About Ex Parte Contacts with Judges."

THROUGH THE YEARS AT LEGAL UNDERGROUND . . . Here are two posts from years past--

A year ago: "The Epic Battle of the Law Firms and the Legal Recruiters: A Recounting of the Way the Pogrom Began" (3/15/05); and,

Two years ago: "Somewhat Famous Law Clerks in History #1" (3/25/04).

A READER WEIGHS IN WITH A BLEAK COMMENT . . . Last year's guest post by Raymond Ward about lawyers and depression is still getting comments. Here's what one lawyer said last week:

As I tell my children, truth is actually evil and would destroy the world should it be told too often. It is true that most lawyers where I am self-medicate to the point of self-sedation every day (and more at night). The ones who don't are the ones who actually have lost the ability to spot their own bullshit. The ones who do still think about things like justice, truth, fairness, conscience, etc.

I like to tell my wife life is 99% psychology. The psychology of lawyering is crisis management for people either going through calamity or grasping at money or both. Without the need to make all that cash to keep the wife and kiddies under a nice roof and simultaneously keep all the self-medication going (the booze, pills, smoke, restaurants, booze and other distractions) it might actually be a good job.

As it is the mandatory cash snatching and political ass licking ruins the job, and the professional life. I used to fear death. Now I just fear becoming like those seventy year old guys I see in court each week who believe their own bullshit and can't let go because being a lawyer is all they have. Their personal identities are dead. Mine is headed there quick enough.

I hope to hell I can get out while I still know right from wrong and have the guts to say so when it counts. Good fucking luck!

This is the comment in full; I didn't edit it except to correct a few typos and add paragraph breaks. The thing that struck me most about the comment is the bleak picture it paints of a lawyer's life. Even with its stylistic hyperbole, it doesn't strike me as being all that over the top.

Or is it? I know plenty of lawyers who engage in some recreational self-medication. Some of them hate their careers. On the other hand, many of them don't. And if the self-medicators are any more idealistic than the other group--if they spend more time talking about justice, truth, fairness, and conscience--it's probably just a side effect of the alcohol. 

It's a given that some lawyers are unhappy in their careers. But so are some doctors and some car mechanics and some circus clowns. Is there anything about the plight of lawyers that makes them more tragic than the rest of humanity? Not really. If it's easy for some lawyers to forget, that's something else that's probably true of other professions. I'm not going to dump on lawyers for it.

Besides, not all lawyers do forget. An example is a second guest post on this weblog, "Why Is It Them, Instead of Me?" by Florida lawyer Mark Miller. Miller's post makes a nice complement to the quoted comment.

AT MY TRIAL PRACTICE WEBLOG . . . "Don't Put Discovery Disputes on the Back Burner."

BLOGROLLING LEGAL UNDERGROUND . . . Thanks to the following weblogs and websites that have recently added permanent links to this one via their blogrolls*--

• Law Blog
• GOVERUP.com
  
• Boise Personal Injury Lawyer
• Tips, Tricks, and Techy Tidbits
• Strategic HR Lawyer
• Georgia Criminal Law Blog
• Supplemental Jurisdiction
• Legally Blonde

*Blogroll (1) n. A list of weblogs, typically found in a column on another weblog; (2) v. To add a weblog to a blogroll.

KEEPING UP WITH BLAWG REVIEW . . . Blawg Review is a weekly review of law-related blog posts, supervised by an editor with seemingly boundless energy. Each week, the review is hosted by a different weblog. Here's what's been happening during the past two weeks:

• Blawg Review #48 was hosted by Rethink(IP). The authors criticized Blawg-Review bloat and experimented with a new minimalist format in which they highlighted only three posts. But then they apparently got cold feet, because they also put together a second post at Blawgr that listed a bunch of other posts that didnt' quite make the cut.
• Blawg Review #49 is hosted today by Jim Calloway's Law Practice Tips. In his issue, Calloway dealt with the bloat created by Issue #48 (two posts, remember) and returned to the familiar single-post format. Thanks to Jim for writing about a post on this weblog!

Blawg Review has information about next week’s host, and instructions on how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues. And to the Rethink(IP) guys: I'm only teasing!

Weekly Law School Roundup #11

This Week: The Shakira Edition, in Which Your Editor Highlights a Number of Memorable Posts by Law Students While Simultaneously Creating a Playlist of Shakira Songs for No Other Reason than His Own Amusement--

La Tortura Using nothing but email, a law firm tortures a law student. [Negligent Use of a Dangerous Mind]

Costume Makes the Clown A D.C. law student encounters Idiotarod 2006 while studying. [Barzelay.net]

Un Poco De Amor A short but touching love story. [Screaming Bean]

Hips Don't Lie Hips don't lie, but you can lie about being Irish. [Tales from the Club]

Estoy Aquí Find out why one law student is happily spending her Spring Break in an unlikely place: the library. [Purr Se]

The One Some thoughts on marriage from someone who's not married to her "beloved." [paren binubus]

Te Aviso, Te Anuncio Things you should know about the coffee at Barnes & Noble. [Ex-Iowa Law Girl]

The Day and the Time A guy turning thirty looks back to 1976. [This is where the cowboy blogs away]

Moscas En La Casa What the commerce clause has to say about the flies in your house. [What's it all about?]

Illegal A really good blog idea that just won't work. [Full Metal Attorney]

¿Dónde Estás Corazón? Random notes on the perfect guy. [Will Work for Favorable Dicta]

Ready for the Good Times Spring Break, alcohol, and weed. [Clearly Erroneous]

Tú Textualism and you. [Greyhame]

How Do You Do? An expecting father prepares for the new arrival. [Clever WoT]

Lo Imprescindible Why the essential thing might be the mute button on a cellphone. [ambivalent imbroglio]

Inevitable  Just when she thought she'd make it on time with her copies, Staples' power went off. [de cachondeo]

Día Especial A lazy Sunday spent studying. [Amicus Curiae]

Something A secret something about law school. [Jeremy Richey's Blawg]

Pies Descalzos, Sueños Blancos Thinking about the science of sleep. [In Limine]

Objection What's wrong with the United States. [The Grey Area Left of Center]

Quiero A recipe for a shamrock shake. [Bananas go to law school, too . . . ]

Look for next week's roundup at Will Work for Favorable Dicta, then it's back here the week after that. You can find my sixty or so old roundups from 2004-2005 here, including such nonsense as posts based on the works of The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Roger Corman, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Finally, thanks to the editor of Blawg Review for putting together a great list of law student weblogs, which includes many I didn't know about and used in putting together this post.

AT MY TRIAL PRACTICE WEBSITE . . . "An Easy Way to Fix a Leading Question."

GADGET UPDATE: The Beltronics STi Driver Radar Detector . . . Are you a law blogger who's on the run from the bar authorities because your blogroll has been deemed a "commercial network of cross-linked blogs" designed to hide a forbidden "mutual referrer system"? If so, you might need this--

It's the Beltronics STi Driver Radar Detector. Once you flip it on, its TotalShield™ technology will make you instantly invisible to every form of blogging police, even the most persistent. After that, no one will be able to find you. (That's assuming, of course, that they don't try to find you using Google.)

At about $450, the STI Drive is recommended for all varieties of lawyers on the run, even those who have actually breached their ethical obligations. Just remember not to hook it up to the Internet, where certain strident weblog posts might melt its fragile circuitry and render it nothing but a pile of useless goo. Batteries and sarcasm not included.