For the Love Of...

I don't know which part of today's exam was my favorite:

• The part where the professor wrote in the instructions of the exam "There are two questions, each weighted equally", but then when you turned to question #2, it turned out to consist of six different parts, each addressing a distinct issue and requiring its own separate answer. I don't know where this professor took math, but in my book, that's a total of seven questions, not two.

OR

• THe part where, one hour and twenty-odd minutes into the three hour exam, my computer suddenly and with no warning whatsoever died. The screen went blank. I checked the plug and lo and behold, the outlet at my seat had just stopped working at some point after I started the exam. Luckily, no one was sitting in the seat directly behind me, so I plugged in there and pushed the power button, which is how you come out of hibernate mode. If the battery runs out, the laptop is supposed to go into hibernate mode until you get some juice to run it on and turn it back on. However, instead of simply restarting, it started to reboot.
  

I nearly puked.

Was my exam lost? Would I be able to reopen it? What the heck just happened, anyway? Then I found that the exam software wouldn't let my computer complete the rebooting process. I felt the jaws of panic closing in on me. I looked wildly around for the proctor, in hopes that they had some magic cure, but there was no proctor in the room.* I didn't really know what to do at that point, but there was no time to dither about, so I tore upstairs to the Registrar's Office, waited impatiently behind two other students turning in take home exams, then dumped my tale of woe on the Nice Registrar Lady, who in turn called one of the lazy tech guys from upstairs. She sent me back to the room with some Kleenex and a quick pat on the arm, and the assurance that the tech guy would be right down.

I waited in the hallway just outside the door to the room, not wanting to unnecessarily disturb the other students taking the exam. It seemed most considerate to tell the tech guy my story outside the room. And I waited and waited, and started to wonder if he was coming at all, or if he had decided to step outside for a smoke (since, as far as the students can tell, that's how they spend at least four hours every day)-- in fact, I decided to step over to the windows to see if they were, in fact, smoking (for once, they weren't). Finally, finally he showed up and did some sort of mumbo jumbo that I couldn't see because I was busy trying to find my train of thought again, and then he turned my laptop back around and my exam was there OH JOYOUS DAY. I cannot begin to describe the feeling of relief I felt at the sight of my work, still there! still intact!

I lost about fifteen minutes to this crap, plus the time that it took me to calm back down and get my train of thought-- thouroughly derailed by panic-- back on the right track, and I could have really used the time to answer the seven questions posed, but what can you do?

Really though, I'm not too worried; to be perfectly honest, I didn't spend much time studying for this exam at all. My motivation isn't as high as it used to be. As several of us 3Ls have grown fond of chanting: D stands for Diploma!

*Damn, I guess I missed my chance to cheat my way to an A. Oh, wait: it was open book. Guess cheating wasn't really an option anyway.

Irritating

There is someone sitting on the back corner of the room typing with her fingernails. Is there anything more annoying than the tchik tchik tchik of acrylic on a plastic keyboard? I want to stand up and scream.

Is This Place Still Up to Code?

The elevators still are not working properly. The heating and cooling system seems to do the exact opposite of what the appropriate response to the weather would be. Now the wireless—always spotty in some parts of the school, but normally reliable in the library—isn’t working. Oh, and my last class was cancelled due to a foul odor in the classroom. No one from the administration seemed to be too anxious to locate the source of the noxious smell (and boy howdy was it nasty). What in the hell are they spending my tuition money on? Apparently not maintenance.

Apathy +Ignorance = Great Customer Service

Scene: Information table for one of the major bar prep courses. Two paid student representatives are staffing the table. A third year student walks up.

3L: When is the third year deposit due?

Rep 1: [chews gigantic mouthful of food taken seconds before 3L approached the table]

Rep 2: April.

Rep 1: [swallows mouthful of food] No, March. March 15, I think.

3L: [slightly confused] Oh. [hesitates] I don’t know why, but I thought it was sometime in February?

Rep 1: Oh [laughs], maybe it is.

Rep 2: [Reaches for information book]

Rep 1: Well, you’ll definitely get a bill.

3L: [laughs nervously] Oh, OK. Well, if they’ll send a bill... [drifts slowly away from the table]

Rep 1 and Rep 2 go back to their conversation.

Why Bother?

If you're 40 minutes late for a 50 minute class, is there any point to coming at all?

And You Wonder Why I'm So Obsessive About the Purell

Kim is creating a bit of a stir in Estates and Trusts this morning: we’re all sitting here watching her pick her nose, then rub the resulting material between her fingers until it falls off onto the floor. A grown woman, about to graduate from law school, sitting in the front of the room (so almost every person in the room can see her!), enthusiastically engaging in an activity that most of us learned not to do before we started Kindergarten, if not sooner. There are several people in the section surrounding me whispering about her, and I’ve seen a couple of people elbow the person sitting next to them to point over at her mining expedition. The worst part of the whole thing is knowing that other people are going to have to sit in that seat—and good Lord, am I glad it won’t be me—and touch the desk that her booger-y fingers have been rubbing on for the past 41 minutes.

You Have Got to Be Kidding Me

Forgive my elitism, but a third year law student really ought to know that it’s not pronounced “kreem day la kreem”.

She Should Be Glad We Don't Have A Playground Here

The law school attendance policy is a source of continual irritation to me for reasons I’ve already gotten into on other occasions, both on the blog and in person. Over the course of the semester, I’ve added another reason to the list: it gives Kim (who, by the way, is at this very moment squeezing a zit on her chin in the middle of class) one more way to be an annoying suck up. At least once a week, one of my professors “forgets” to pass the attendance sheet. Some of us suspect a minor rebellion against the policy—I’ve heard several professors complain about the policy. It seems they don’t like it any more than we do. If this happens in a class that Kim is in, she makes sure to raise her hand, always in the middle of a good discussion or a particularly interesting bit of lecture. The professor calls on her, thinking that she has a question, or is going to contribute to the discussion, and she whines something along the lines of “I didn’t get the attendance sheet. Can someone pass it over to me?”, as if she wasn’t fully aware that the attendance sheet hadn’t gone around at all.

It’s like the kid in elementary school who would raise his hand a half hour before the end of the school day to remind the teacher that you were supposed to have a spelling test that day and even the kids who’d studied and were ready for the test wanted to challenge that kid to meet them at the flagpole after school and beat him up.

Why on earth does she care so much about the stupid sign up sheet? It’s not like they compare the number of times you sign the sheets and the number of times you don’t; the only thing that matters is how many of the scheduled class meetings you miss. If the professor forgets to pass the sign up sheet, it’s like landing on Free Parking in Monopoly. Nothing bad happens, nothing good happens. For the people who are absent that day, it’s like landing on Free Parking when there are hotels on all the orange properties AND all the red properties: you dodge the proverbial bullet. Unless Kim is in your class, in which case, the banker just informed you that you miscounted and in fact, should have landed on Kentucky Avenue instead of Free Parking. More importantly, she destroys the flow of class when she does this. The discussion is always derailed and the professor loses his momentum in the lecture. It takes a few minutes to get things back up to speed again. If all she cared about was making sure that she signs the sheet and doesn’t get counted as absent, she could do what the rest of us do if the sheet doesn’t get to us during class: you walk down to the front after class and ask the professor to sign the sheet. No harm, no foul on any side. Oh, that’s right: if she did that, it would mean behaving like a normal human being instead of a slimy worm.

I'm Not Mean, I'm Just Right

So Professor Strap thought it would be a good idea to set up a series of "debates" (and here, we are using the term in the loosest possible way) in place of an actual lecture for our immigration law class this week. If we'd been given the topics in some organized fashion and given time and direction on preparation for these debates and NOT told that we shouldn't work too hard on it ("no more than one or two hours"), maybe this wouldn't have come across as a way to get him out of preparing a lecture for class. The topic I was assigned to debate together with War against an unnamed opponent was (and here I paraphrase to 1)properly phrase the question for debate, unlike the professor, and 2)remove the jargon for you non-legal people) "Resolved: That temporary student and visitor visas should be prohibited for all people from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia". We were against this proposal.

War and I did some half-hearted research, found a bunch of statistics and numbers and quotes and such from such sources as the Department of Commerce, the National Academy of Science, and the Institute of International Education; we also found demographic information showing that immigrants from the region tend, on the whole, to be well-educated, with lower than average rates of criminality and higher than average rates of applications for citizenship and of home ownership. In other words, exactly the kind of immigrants that our laws do (and arguably, should) favor.

All of that went out the window in the first few moments of the debate when our opponent argued that John Locke's Heirarchy of Values showed that the goverment should do whatever it takes to guarantee the national security.

I'll wait just a moment for you to soak in all the things that are wrong with that sentence.

Have I ever mentioned how I was all into Speech and Debate in high school? And how the hallmark of my stint on the Mock Trial team was the fact that I literally made at least one witness per competition cry on the stand? (Hey, Hulio: "Jess was already an adult and therefore not subject to the curfew law, wasn't he?... Do you remember giving a deposition in this case?... Hmmmm, may I approach the witness, Your Honor? Thank you. Please read the second paragraph on page 3 of your deposition... Eighteen is bigger than seventeen, isn't it?... So, were you lying then, or are you lying now?" Or how about this classic: "Yes, this case is about values as fundamentally American as apple pie: the freedom to worship whatever god you believe in, in the manner you see fit... You gonna cry, private school boy? Huh? Are you?") Chica was going down.

I was all set to jump on the fact that John Locke is not only not the philosopher associated with the Heirarchy of Values-- a fact which would have been revealed by a thirty second visit to Google, together with the fact that Chica has no actual understanding of Maslow's philosophy-- but that the philosophies with which he is associated actually support our side of the argument. Had this been an actual, orderly debate in which each side got a set period of time to present their arguments followed by rebuttal, instead of the I-Think-I'm-Chris-Matthews-Free-For-All "debate" that Professor Strap was conducting, I would, in fact, have gotten to this point. But nooooooo, Chica had to follow up with this gem: "Since we're at war with two of those countries, we shouldn't be issuing visas to them anyway."

It was on.

I turned to War and gave her a look, then turned back to Chica and replied "Oh? Which two would that be?". Being the moron that she is, she didn't hear the warning bells ringing loudly. In the snottiest voice possible, she replied "Afghanistan and Iraq" and though she didn't actually add "Duh!" at the end, you could practically hear it. I raised my eyebrows and turned back to War, asking "Did you know about that? Because I must have missed that announcement. I was under the impression that Afghanistan is our ally in the War on Terror and that Iraq is also a friendly nation that we are helping to rebuild," making air quotes around that last phrase. Professor Strap jumped in and tried to stop me by commenting that "We're not here to discuss the war in Iraq", but I was having NONE OF IT and turned on him instead, letting him know in no uncertain terms that Chica opened the door to exactly THAT discussion and I wasn't about to cede the ground. In fact, War and I jumped up and down on that point for several minutes, pointing out that exposure to positive Western influences could only help in the "war to win hearts and minds", while punitive measures could only drive people into the arms of extremists of all sorts. After all, if you don't have the opportunity to get an education and improve your life that way, why would you turn down the opportunity to get ahead (though perhaps only in the afterlife) or at least fight for the chance to improve your children's lives via the only means available to you? The whole time, Professor Strap kept trying to stop us by insisting that we weren't there to debate the war in Iraq (and for the second time, I just had to go back and correct my original phrasing, in which I wrote "the war on Iraq", which should give you some indication as to how I feel about the subject.) and it took all the self-restraint I could muster to keep from yelling "Well, then maybe you shouldn't have written a question involving eliminating visas to citizens of IRAQ, you effing idiot!". He ended the debate shortly after.

Now, all pretext of civiility will be lifted. THe last three classes are going to make him sorry he ever set eyes on me and War. It's time to participate in class, my friends. And boy howdy, do I plan to be an active contributor to class discussions from now on.

Moron.

Next Time, I'll Key Your Car

I came out to get in my car to discover that an inconsiderate motorcycle driver had squeezed his crotch rocket inbetween my car and the car in front of me, inventing a parking spot that prevented me from pulling forward more than three inches without toppling his stupid bike. At the same time, a Papa John's delivery car had pulled up behind me into another non-existant spot. In order to keep his tail out of the intersection, he had to pull up until his bumper was maybe an inch from my bumper. I was completely blocked in.

I was tempted to call the police and have both morons ticketed and/ or towed, but I figured that by the time the police came, the Papa John's guy would be back and move his car. In fact, 10 minutes later, he was still MIA, but the motorcycle driver came back. He didn't even have the grace to look embarassed, just gunned his engine and pulled out into traffic without looking. I nearly had a stroke.

The best part of the story? He was a fellow law student.

Overheard

Two 2Ls are discussing interviewing for summer positions and land at the topic of male interviewers vs. female interviewers. Neither of these students is particularly attractive:

"Women interviewers always have a chip on their shoulder."

[Said with all seriousness]"Yeah, and plus, with male interviewers, you know they think I'm cute, so at least we have that in common."

Stupid Non-Lawyers!

We are discussing formalities required for a valid will in my Estates and Trusts class. This has involved reading several cases in which a testator attempts to fulfill the requirements of his or her state, but fails on some technicality or another. In one case, the testator was elderly and quite infirm. He went to his bank, where he was on friendly terms with several employees, to have the signing of his will witnessed by two people, as required by the law in his state. However, due to his physical limitation, a bank employee carried the will across the room to a second employee for signature, in an effort to help this poor old man out. Because the two witness signatures were not made in the simultaneous presence of the testator (who needed to either actually sign in their presence or to verify that the signature was his in their presence), the will was invalidated. The following are some of the comments of my esteemed classmates:

“Couldn’t you sue the bank for screwing up?”

(Yes, because suing someone is always the right answer and bank employees are, in fact, experts who always know all of the intricacies of state law governing wills.)

“I mean, it’s so simple to just fulfill the requirements.”

(The mere words on the page fail to convey the utter contempt with which this was uttered. I personally fail to see how you can expect a layperson, acting without a lawyer—as the people in the cases we read were—to glean the simple requirements from the dense legal language of the typical statute, even if he knew where to find the statute. You might, of course, argue that it was stupid to proceed without the assistance of a lawyer, but when even Wal Mart sells “make your own will” kits, I can certainly understand how someone might think that they could save themselves a chunk of change by doing it themselves.)

“Don’t have a party with your friends to have your will signed!”

(Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I kind of like that idea. Kind of like a wake, but you get to be there for it. You know, eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die and all that good stuff.)

Don't Flatter Yourself

I’ve spoken well of professors who are practicioners or former practicioners, as opposed to someone who got really good grades at Harvard or Yale and decided to stay in school to teach. I’m afraid I’ll have to make an exception for Professor Strap.

He is the partner in charge of immigration at a Very Big local law firm and teaches Immigration Law as an adjunct each year. I have been looking forward to taking Immigration Law since before I even started law school and was majorly bummed out when I didn’t get into the class last year. I should just learn my lesson about “interesting” classes already and stop getting my hopes up. I hate our Immigration Law course.

I described the professor to another student as follows: “He looks like he was a big football player in high school and still has season tickets to watch the team play.” Hence, his nickname: Professor Jacque Strap. This could be overlooked if he weren’t so incredibly incompetent. Seriously, if he makes half the mistakes in advising his clients as he does in lecture, he must commit malpractice eighteen times a day on average. I’m sorry, but if I can spot glaring errors in his lecture after a couple of months working at an immigration law firm, there is a serious problem in his knowledge. Apparently, he can’t even read a statute and understand the words—and a very straightforward statute at that!—because he insisted in a previous class that a certain status rendered you ineligible to attend school while we stared at the subparagraph of the statute that said the opposite.

But now I have a whole new, much more personal reason to hate him: he accused Lasoe of trying to get free legal advice when she dared to ask questions during and after yesterday’s lecture. Personally, I think she should report his sorry self to the administration here. He didn’t accuse the American students of seeking free advice when they asked questions, just Lasoe. And let’s not forget: he’s teaching a class. Taking and answering questions is part of the job; it comes with the territory. And just in case someone out there is thinking, “Well, maybe it’s just a misunderstanding. I’m sure people try to get legal advice for free all the time”, the questions she was asking were to do with visa categories that are utterly unrelated to her current status and, with one small exception, unrelated to any status for which she could be eligible in the near future AND they were to do with the material being (woefully inadequately) covered in that day’s lecture. It’s not like we were talking about asylum and she was asking about how to convert her student visa into permanent residence. Oh, and by the way? If Lasoe were looking for free legal advice, it would be from someone who won't end up getting her deported, not from you!

The intense and burning hatred coming from our side of the room might actually cause him to spontaneously combust.

Overheard

Prof. Marbury: John Cleese is the funniest human ever born. A sweeping statement, but I stand by it.

Student: Wellllll... I guess he's funny, but I don't think he's the funniest human ever.

Prof. Marbury: [incredulous] You guess he's funny?! You don't think John Cleese is funny?!

Student: He was the teacher at the bad dojo in Karate Kid, right?




Yes, of course he was.

Just a Small Tip

If you are planning to give a presentation on law governing assisted reproduction, you really ought to be aware that the first syllable of the word “surrogacy” does not rhyme with “air”.

I Can See You!

You know, I can see you picking your nose. You are not invisible to the rest of the world just because you’re leaning over close to your laptop screen.

Robbing the Cradle

Waaaaay back when I first started this blogging stuff, I mentioned in passing the fact that the professor’s offices ring the library and that some of them are really, really loud.

Today, I was sitting at a table on the 5th floor, back in one of the corners. I needed the outlet to plug in my laptop to recharge the battery while I searched online for cheap texts for Spring Semester. One professor held a long and very, very loud conference with a confused 1L explaining the concept of detrimental reliance. Irritating for so very many reasons, including the inability to concentrate on your own work due to the noise, the rudeness of the fact that he was doing this with his door wide open instead of shutting it like a normal person, and the fact that it made me remember last year’s exams, when I was able to actually prepare and study material for the exams instead of quietly panicking over the lack of material that seems like it could appear on the exam.

But then, another professor took a phone call, also with his door open. I wasn’t’ really paying attention at first, except to look over at Death and roll my eyes at the noise. But then I heard the phrase “I got married on Saturday” come out of his mouth. This professor is middle-aged... very middle-aged. So this naturally caught my interest. “Yeah, we’ve been together eight years... thanks, thanks... she’s 13 years younger than I am and (something about his daughter that got lost in mine and Death’s laughter)... “

Seriously! If I were dating someone thirteen years younger than I, he wouldn’t even be able to drive yet! And if I were going to announce this in a phone call that would very definitely be overheard by students that I very possibly might have in class, I WOULD SHUT MY DOOR to cut down on the eavesdropping factor!!

But then, I’m not a law professor.

Hello, How Are You?

One thing that I just don’t get is people who can’t even say hello when you pass each other in the halls. There are quite a few of them at Our Law School. Now, I don’t like everyone who goes to school with me here. In fact, there are quite a few people for whom the old ant hill and honey treatment would be too good. But we’re all grown ups. Short of someone who killed your puppy or pushed your grandmother down the stairs, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to greet each other cordially in the halls, especially if you run into them out of the law building.

I think my new passive aggressive fun is going to be purposely greeting the people who do this. How much of a jerk do you have to be to totally ignore someone who says hi to you directly? Makes you look like a jackass if you do. It’s sort of a variant of the “kill ‘em with kindness” school of thought.

Overheard

Said without preamble:
“You know that law firm in Washington, D.C. that does International Law?”

Yeah, ‘cause there’s only one of those.

When I Said To Sit Down, I Didn't Mean There

Dragonbreath sat in my seat today. I walked in three minutes late, and there he was. I sidled on over, plopped my stuff down in front of him and announced in a stage whisper “That’s MY seat”. He got up and slid over into Dami’s seat. Petty? A little, I’ll admit. But it’s the principle of the thing. We just had this discussion yesterday. We’ll have words after class. Oh, yes. We will have words.