Because I Should Be Doing Homework; Lots of Homework

If anything, this semester is even crazier than last semester. But, my new year's resolution was to post at least once a month for every month of the year, and it's January 30th. So I'm posting to meet the January quota. Because if I tried to wait until tomorrow, it just wouldn't happen and I would have broken the resolution, in spite of a sincere effort to make it an achievable resolution.

Last semester's grades: I don't want to talk about them, other than to say that I now know why the professor's nicknamed that semester "murderer's row." The grade distributions for Legal Profession, Criminal Law/Procedure (the course depends on whether you're a "day" student or a "sunset" student), Evidence and Constitutional Law were all a little bit sucky.

This semester's classes:

Awesome! Well, mostly. I'm taking an overload of 17 credit hours, and that is driving me a little bit crazy, even though I'm really only doing the work for 16 of them because one of them is the credit for the case comment I wrote at the end of last semester and the first part of the break. I made Law Review, and now get academic credit for the paper I wrote to get onto Law Review which is just oober-cool in my opinion (I'm also too lazy to figure out how to get an "u" with an umlaut for web-display).

I'm taking Trademark Law with the same professor who taught Property to my section and Information Privacy Law. His teaching style and my learning style mesh, so the poor man is stuck with me in every class that he teaches, because on top of the educational synergy, he's teaching the courses that I'm interested in; I predict I'll have him for Administrative Law and Intellectual Property next semester.

I've got the same professor for ConLawII that I had for ConLawI, and he's the only person I know, IRL, who can use the word "normative" more than once or twice in a single, 75-minute class period. See the discussion of the word "normative" over at Belle Lettre's Blog. Incidentally, he almost always uses it in contrast to being descriptive, so I guess even though he's a law professor with a bunch of philosophy under his belt, he uses it primarily as if he were a sociologist.

I'm taking Texas Civil Procedure with the same adjunct I had for Legal Profession. He's a pretty cool guy and a good teacher, but I sincerely hope that I perform much better in TCP than I did in Legal Profession. TCP is about 10% of the Texas Bar Exam, and since I do plan on taking the Texas Bar regardless of whether I return to Texas or remain in Oklahoma, I figured I take the class so I wouldn't have to place an undue reliance on the BarBri prep courses.

My school requires all students to take Corporations, so I'm getting it out of the way this semester, but I've been pleasantly surprised by the class. The professor is absolutely outstanding, and is conscientious of the fact that most of her students haven't got the foggiest idea about what goes on in business. She's also got the knack of asking for questions and then waiting long enough for people to actually ask the questions they have. In my experience, in the law school classroom, that is an exceptionally rare ability. Law students, on the whole, have question asking issues, and it takes longer than is comfortable for them to ask them, especially in the class room. On Tuesday we discussed the latest opinion in the Disney litigation that was a result of the Michael Ovitz snafu... yes, that was back in the 90's, and yes, the litigation has just recently ended, more than ten years later. She guided us through a really interesting exploration of both the business issues and the legal issues that arose during that lawsuit and given the subject matter, was able to make a couple of tasteful jokes that help cement the key concepts in the memory.

For my upper-level writing requirement I'm taking a seminar on Firearms Law and Policy... Yes, I'm from Texas. Yes, I'm attending school in Oklahoma. No, I don't own a gun. I have no plans for assuming the responsibility of gun ownership either. But, I'm in the seminar for a variety of reasons, one of which is simply that I trust the professor to tell me if my writing sucks at the end of the term and provide helpful advice for fixing that problem.

My only complaint with the class at this point is that no serious anti-gun proponents chose to take it. The class would be much better if there were at least two of them in there. It's really hard to engage in a critical examination of a topic when virtually everyone in the room shares substantially similar opinions. I'm not a person at either end of the spectrum; I'm kind of in the middle.

I have persuaded my contracts professor to supervise my student note for law review. I'm writing about legal pedagogy and "literacy" in law school. More details will be forthcoming in future posts as well as the claim I will be making and summaries of the supporting evidence I've been able to accumulate for it. But as a preview to those posts I will make the following reading recommendation for anyone who is contemplating graduate school or professional school-- How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren.

That's it as far as the coursework goes, but I've still got jobs and student organizational stuff too. Oh, and I'm moving at the end of February. So, life is going to be crazy, crazy, crazy for the next month (well, seven weeks because that's how long I have to get the student note written).

Until next time, Happy Trails!