Pass the Coffee

I am not a fan of early morning anything. I think it should be illegal to transact business or have classes before 10 a.m. unless all parties involved mutually consent to earlier hours. (How lawyerly of me. This is my way of showing understanding for you freaks of nature, uh, I mean morning people.) I can see right now that I am going to struggle with this whole getting up and into school for an 8 a.m. class, especially once it gets cold and I really don’t want to get out from under the warm covers.

It doesn’t help that I am utterly uninterested in the actual topic. I am hopeful, however, that the professor will make it bearable. He’s something of a legend around school. Cocky and fairly self-centered, but very funny and relates well to the students, as well as being a good teacher. I met him last year while working on the Public Interest Society auction, in which he was an auctioneer. He would come into the office late in the evening on his way out the door after teaching a late class and hassle us good-naturedly. At the auction itself, he whipped the crowd into such a frenzy that he got people to bid against themselves on several occasions. It was like watching an old-school revivalist, working the congregation until the village ladies faint and Uncle Bob stands on his chair, speaking in tongues.

Professor Marx is not a professor by career. He is, in fact a partner at one of the big firms downtown. He is sharp. In our first class, he made us all introduce ourselves, telling where we’re from, where we went to college, what we majored in, and so on. I’m told that he will remember these things about all 134 of us. I am hoping this also means that we will not wallow in jurisprudence this semester, but rather that he will take a practical approach to the material. There are plenty of classes in law school that are corpulent with high-minded philosophical bloviation with little or no application in real-life practice—I suppose this is the inevitable result when the vast majority of law professors are not practicioners or former practicioners, but rather the straight-A students who then did not leave the law school, just changed which side of the podium they stand on. It’s like getting lessons on sexual techniques from a Catholic priest. Theory can only take you so far.