The Legal Underground

Weekly Law School Roundup #59

This Week: The What-You-Could-Have-Learned-Editition, in Which Your Editor Tells You What You Could Have Learned Last Week If You'd Been Reading Law-Student Weblogs . . .

Here's what you could have learned--

• How to spot a jackass. [Pelican Barbeque and Buckeye Beer]
• What breast milk and tort reformers have in common. [The Modern Esquire]
• Whether to go to law school. [Jeremy's Weblog]
• A law student's favorite songs. [Jaybeas Corpus]
• How to ruin a perfectly good CD. [Legal Ease]
• Why a federal judge struck down a ban on same-sex marriage. [Law Dork]
• Why a famous daycare is closed for the summer. [BBQ Daycare]
• A stupid way to cash in your Westlaw rewards points. [When I was Rational]
• Why United Airlines sucks. [Half-Cocked]
• Whether to blog about a summer job. [Three Years of Hell]
• How quickly things change. [Don't Know It From Adam]

Weekly Law School Roundup #58

This Week: The Critics Edition, in Which Your Editor Selects Posts in Which Law Students Are Being Critical of Something

So what's being criticized this week?

• Nissan's decision to call an SUV an "Armada." [Legal Quandary]
• Creating a Stephen-Colbert spin-off from The Daily Show. [Expressio Unius]
• Officials from the U.S. government who won't face up to the horrors of Darfur. [Obsessive Law Student]
• A vile little man of a professor. [Rogue Slayer Law Student]
• Thoughtless breaches of bathroom etiquette. [Just Playin']
• The slacker inside. [Magic Cookie]
• Throwing down the weights. [Don't Know It From Adam]
• Dressing children alike. [Narkoleptomania]
• Prudish bloggers. [Law & Alcoholism]
• Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise. [Naked Drinking Coffee]
• The hillbillies who can't stomach evolution. [inquire within]
• People who climb Mt. Everest. [divine angst]
• Ebert & Roeper. [The Unreasonable Man]

Update 8:15 a.m. CST Meanwhile, all of the above will be critical because I accidently sent trackback pings to their weblogs pointing to last week's law-school roundup. I'm sorry. Please delete them, and don't tell Dylan about my trackbacking faux pas.

Weekly Law School Roundup #57

This Week: The Call-to-Action Edition, in Which Your Editor Exhorts You to Do the Following Things Before It's Too Late

Send a poor schmuck some blue jeans! [The Slithery D]

Call yourself a lawyer. [Waiting for the Punchline]

Ask for your money back! [Legal Ease]

Pretend you're opposed to tort reform. [Barely Legal]

Get rid of Bibles in hospitals. [Bushwood Country Club]

Buy a second iPod. [Screaming Bean]

Duck! [Will Work for Favorable Dicta]

Duck again! [Legal Quandary]

Help a guy decide what law school to choose. [ambivalent imbroglio]

Ignore those e-mails from your law school. [A Girl Walks Into a Bar (Exam)]

Never do an outline the old-fashioned way. [Becoming a Jackal]

Protect yourself! [Law Dork]

Share an astounding secret with a Harvard third-year. [Jeremy's Weblog]

Get out a tiny violin and play it for Rush Limbaugh. [Death in the Afternoon]

Do some yoga--if you dare. [Raw Law]

Quit law school! [Meathook Reality]

Read about an honest plaintiffs' lawyer (fictional, unfortunately). [Jeremy Richey's Blawg]

Say no to study groups. [Jaybeas Corpus]

Read Blawg Review! [Parenthetical Statement]

Cancel your plans to travel to Florida. [The Modern Esquire]

Get the clap. [Naked Drinking Coffee]

Say yes to law journal, unless you say no. [De Novo]

Weekly Law School Roundup #56

Here are eleven reasons you might want to skip this week's Law-School Roundup:

• You don't believe a law-library anecdote can ever be that funny. [Bushwood Country Club]
• You'd rather chew off your own arm than read about a lawyer who moonlights as a porn star. [Will Work for Favorable Dicta]
• Pope humor sets your teeth on edge. [Jeremy's Weblog]
• You believe law students have no right to criticize real-life lawyers. [The Slithery D]
• The return of a prodigal law blogger doesn't interest you, even when she's returned to conduct an interview with herself. [Coyote Fun]
• You think it's immoral that a grandmother would have a set of rules for beating a Chinese buffet. [Soupie's BBQ & Daycare]
• You wouldn't spend a minute reading about Justice Harry Blackmun, even when someone has argued he "did more damage to democracy than any American in the 20th century." [Matt Schuh Online]
• You're trying to forget your age and just don't care about "the age gauge." [Just Playin']
• You have absolutely no sympathy for the plight of working mothers. [From Engineer to Lawyer]
• You're sick of reading about Justice Scalia's visit to NYU, even if the story is told in a unique and (arguably) entertaining way. [blue skies forever]
• You think there are enough group blogs by conservatives and don't want to learn about another. [Jeremy Richey's Blawg]

Weekly Law School Roundup #55

Ten Reasons Why YOU Should Read This Week's Law-School Roundup--

• To learn about the most patient (or most clueless) professor in the history of law school. [Falconred Goes to Law School]
• To learn about the Apple G4 iBook. [ambivalent imbroglio]
• Because you've been dying to read a good book about economics, but you don't know which one. [Matt Schuh Online]
• Because you've been dying to read a good webcomic, but you don't know which one. [Preaching to the Perverted]
• To learn why a class participation requirement "is really just bribery and punishment in an attempt to make the professor feel better about himself." [The Slithery D]
• To find out what property professors bring to class when they didn't have time to prepare. [Jim's Polka]
• Because you want to find out why you're not obligated to pay off your credit cards. [Rex 2.0]
• To learn one more reason why network and cable news are an abomination. [michaelscaljon.com]
• To read a first-hand account of Justice's Scalia's recent chaotic visit to NYU. [Law Lush]
• Because you want to relive the cutthroat nature of the law-school library. [Legal Ease]

Weekly Law-School Roundup #54

This Week: The Something-a-Little-Different Edition, in Which Your Editor Saves the Best Links for Tomorrow

Tomorrow, of course, will mark the first installment of Blawg Review, which I happily agreed to host on this weblog. As a way of increasing your anticipation, which I'm sure is already approaching fever pitch, I thought I'd save the posts that would have otherwise appeared here and include them in Blawg Review #1 tomorrow.

Confused? Return tomorrow morning and you'll understand. In the meantime, I do have something to mention today: Professor Brian Murphy's Entertainment Law class at New York Law School. As far as I know, it's the first and only law-school class that awards extra credit for blogging.

The Entertainment Law Blog: During the course of the semester, you are required to make at least two substantive postings to the class blog. You may, of course, post as often as you like. A substantive posting is one in which you provide insight and analysis; a posting in which you merely link to an interesting article does not count as substantive.

How's the class doing? Here are some recent headlines:

Brittney  ["Brittney Spears and her husband are going to have their own reality TV show . . . ENJOY!"]

Tech Law Advisor ["There is an interesting new blog out there for students like us going through the ever elusive job search."] (Ed.'s note: Kevin, you're everywhere!)

D.C. Apartment Available for Sublet ["Spacious and furnished studio apartment in building with 24-hour front desk attendant available for the summer."]

Substantive? You decide. (Ed.'s note #2: I understand that in selecting posts to highlight, I was being a little unfair to the weblog. Rather than sending me hate mail, why don't you spend your time posting something substantive for Professor Murphy?) (Ed.'s note #3: Thanks to the reader who e-mailed me the link.)

Weekly Law-School Roundup #53

This Week: The Current Events Edition, in Which Your Editor Collects Posts about the Pope and Terry Schiavo, Plus Some Miscellaneous Entries for Good Measure

First, The Pope . . .

Pray for the Church It's the "end of a remarkable era" for the Church--what's next? [divine angst]

Relief that the Pope's at Peace Thoughts on the Pope's final struggles. [mellow-drama]

What the Pope Has Done for Some John Paul II as a human-rights leader. [TreeHugaBug]

Next, the Schiavo Case . . .

Keep Up the Good Work, Tom Some thoughts on Tom DeLay's comments that the federal judges involved in the Schiavo case will have to "answer for their behavior." [LawLush] (see also Ambivalent Imbroglio)

Public Enemy Number One More about Tom DeLay. [Preaching to the Perverted]

Judges as Terrorists A cartoon about the Schiavo case makes a law student want a drink. [Legal Ease]

The Path to Disaster What's wrong with judge-bashing? [Mackenzie's Weblog]

Fair-Weather Federalists, Look Out Will Baude will find you, wherever you lurk. [Crescat Sentantia]

Will Terry Schiavo Finally Have Peace? On the hypocrisy of our elected officials. [Didactic Discursive Diatribe]

Losing Credibility in the Eyes of the Courts Did Schiavo's parents try too hard? [The Unreasonable Man]

And Finally, Some Miscellaneous Entries . . .

Do You Know What's Happening in Darfur? Genocide. Again. [Half-Cocked]

Get a Snazzy SLR and Other People Get Presumptuous Photos of famous people. [Falconred]

Would You Take Your Girlfriend to See Swingers and Fight Club? Everything you wanted to know about chick flicks. [Death in the Afternoon]

Why Didn't She Read the Blog Accounts? The author of The New Yorker's recent profile on Justice Scalia gets the facts wrong. [Glorfindel of Gondolin]

Traveling Never Gets Old Ten things one traveler learned while in Hawaii on Spring Break. [Obsessive Law Student]

The Non-Establishment Route to Success in Law School

In a comment to this post from a few months ago, Mike Cernovich of Crime & Federalism suggested that law review, moot court, and other law-school extracurricular activities might be a waste of time:

Law schools only teach students the "establishment" route. I knew when I decided to be a lawyer (when I was 19, after reading With Justice for None) that I did not want to take the establishment route.

Unfortunately, NONE of my professors could give advice outside the usual get in the top 10%, do law review, summer at BigLaw, then clerk, then go back to BigLaw. Excepting that they would (sometimes) know about DOJ or a prosecutor's office.

I think that most students probably have to make a very tough choice: Devote your time to taking the establishment route, or learn how to be a lawyer. For example, I did not do law review, moot court, trial team or any other extracurricular activity because I was too busy representing real clients and solving legal problems.

When I took the establishment route, I did it largely because that's what the big firms expected. I don't regret it, though, because I was lucky enough to work after law school for a large defense firm that provided good training for young lawyers. But Mike's anti-establishment route, which involved attending CLEs as a law student and offering to work for lawyers for free, certainly has its merits, especially for one who plans to start out as a solo.

I wonder if anyone besides Mike has tried anti-establishment approach?

The Anonymous Lawyer Between Covers

When I last wrote about The Anonymous Lawyer, it was on December 26, 2004, when New York Times reporter Sara Rimer pulled back the curtain of anonymity to reveal the law student who stood behind it: as we all know now, it was Jeremy Blachman, who told Rimer that he hoped to turn his weblog into a book.

Today Harvard Law School is reporting that Jeremy has already negotiated a book deal with Henry Holt and Co.--

In the days following the Times article, he heard from two dozen book agents, all itching to capitalize on the buzz. In February, he settled on a deal with publisher Henry Holt and Co. to write the book version of Anonymous Lawyer. When interviewed for this story, he politely declined to say what the deal is worth.

“It will be like a ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’--letters to the reader in blog form about this guy’s life at the firm,” said Blachman. Although the existing blog will serve as the source material, he says the book will have new stories and a plot.

I say to Jeremy: Congratulations, and I'm looking forward to the book. (And thanks to Mike Cernovich for notifying me about Jeremy's news.)

Does Law School Change a Person?

In a recent post, Buffs of Buffs Law described a recent conversation in Legal Ethics class about why "everyone hates lawyers, and why lawyers hate themselves"--

Commentators blame the loss of lawyers' independence in the lawyer-client relationship, the fact that law students graduate with incredible debt and so practicing law suddenly becomes a money game, a decline in civility and professionalism, a lack of true community service, poor access to the legal system for indigents, inane complexity everywhere you turn, and so on.

The classroom conversation turned to the ways in which law school changes law students. Some reported being more money-driven; others had lost their ideals; still others found themselves focusing on negatives. In the post, Buffs offered an explanation: "When you learn the intricacies of an amoral system, and you learn to manipulate that system, you yourself become a little more amoral. And when law school rewards amorality if not immorality, you naturally move in that direction."

Is this right? (I'm selectively quoting, so if you're interested, read the entire post at Buffs Law.) One definition of "amoral" is "not caring about right or wrong." Buffs gives this example: on law-school exams, the right answer is usually to sue a potential defendant for every possible cause of action even though, if you were allowed to let real life intrude, you'd say that it was really the plaintiff who was to blame.

Of course, law school exams are largely make believe. No one really practices law by making decisions as if he were answering an exam question. In real life, for example, rather than bringing every possible cause of action when it's the plaintiff who's to blame, you'd tell the plaintiff that you're unable to represent him. While Buffs worries that law school changes law students, my recollection is that once I was out of there, the feeling that I was seeing the world upside-down rubbed off pretty quickly.