Re: Why you should get an Elm City ID Card

New Haven has begun handing out Resident Cards to any persons bringing proof of identity and residency.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/22234

The student mailing list here has been getting posts urging everyone to get a card in solidarity with the undocumented immigrants this program is supposedly to benefit. And of course, Yale being Yale, someone replied accusing arguments in favor of solidarity with "illegal immigrants" of being "disingenuous." Oh noes!1 someone who doesn't love all immigrants and worship at the feet of the Mexicans coming to take the jobs no one else wants!!

Of course, the person initially starting the debate was only playing the devil's advocate, not really one of those evil, heartless conservatives we're warned about. And 53 posts later, the storm has finally died down (or so we can all pray). The consensus? Resident card good, cheap immigrant labor without taking up social resources good, ICE raids bad, accusing ICE of Nazism bad, killing Native Americans and enslaving Africans bad, dehumanizing immigrants bad, empirical studies and economics good, interrupting serious discussion with hilarious cartoons good... the point is there is no consensus. YLS students are a smart bunch (multiple Law Review articles, books, and court decisions cited in the course of those 53 emails), but really volatile. Apparently anything at all is capable of setting us off.

Oh, and among the first years there's a "small group competition" to see who can get the most people in each small group to go get a card on Friday. The prize? An autographed Dean Koh bobblehead. I'll be getting a card; they're good for parking meters and it's a royal pain to find enough coins always laying about to pay those things. Oh yeah, and, I think it's a pretty cool initiative and I hope it's successful.

Law Professors and... popular culture?

One of my professors today made an in-depth reference to Dungeons and Dragons. And another answered a question with a link to a wikipedia article.

In the latter case, that might just mean that wikipedia is being taken more seriously among academics, though, for several reasons, I doubt that is the case. It's probably because wikipedia has become the fastest and most convenient place to find information, and other, more serious sites are harder to find. But D&D - possibly one of the geekiest RPGs of all time?

Mind you, I have nothing against D&D or wikipedia. It's just that I might have expected a little more, well, sophistication from YLS. What is happening to academia?

YLS and waterboarding

YLS isn't too happy with its alum right now.

Mukasey nomination sparks debate at alma mater Yale

(Interestingly, the article says Koh did not respond to requests for comment. When Mukasey was first nominated, he spoke praisingly of him to his class and mentioned specifically Mukasey was a YLS alum. The name has not come up since.)

An email was sent to all students this morning strongly urging a demonstration of waterboarding, to establish our position against Mukasey's nomination, his apparent support of torture, and disregard for the rule of law (given that Congress has already passed statutes banning torture, Mukasey's assurances that the executive would be bound by a law outlawing waterboarding rather miss the point). And professors have suggested Chuck Schumer is a fool for continuing to support the nomination, and they continue to disagree with each other.

One wonders whether Schumer's daughter, Jess (who, by the way, is pretty much the opposite of stand-offish), is going to be taking classes offered by Balkin here (he isn't teaching any first semester classes).

As for me, I wish we would stop alienating our famous alum. Mukasey isn't really supporting torture, he's just playing a balancing act between supporting the administration and pacifying the senate committee. And Justice Thomas won't even let us put up his portrait in the law school, though he been has asked several times. Justice Alito can't be too fond of certain YLS profs, either.

I haven't felt alienated here because of conservative viewpoints, but it's little surprise that Yale is accruing an anti-conservative (rather than just a liberal) reputation.

Fall break

Thank every deity I may or may not believe in - we have a week off school. Notwithstanding the incredible amount of work I have to do by next Monday, this is going to be a much-needed release from the stress and grind of classes.

Law school is tough. It's stressful and it makes me feel stupid. I laughed at everyone else saying that when I was a naive little 0L, but it's the truth. Cases are impossible to read and get anything out of, the sheer amount of work and class time is almost overwhelming in and of itself, and legal writing is terrible. I feel incompetent and under-qualified everywhere I turn. Add onto that stresses of your personal life, and I have no idea how anyone makes it through any other school than YLS. The fact that only our reputation and our ability as future lawyers are riding on this semester make it bearable, but if everything were hanging on first semester grades - well, I'd be screwed. I thought it would be easy enough to get A's - or H's (Honors, our rough equivalent of A's but which are not awarded first semester) - after all, I've mostly done it the rest of my life - but I'll be truly amazed if I end up with any H's at all over the next three years.

Then again, there are tons of really cool things about law school - nerdy inside law jokes, awesome kick-ass friends, incredible intellectual and professional opportunities, a fast-paced exciting life, and yes, even the law itself could be a positive. It's a powerful tool to effect change, which is after all why most of us idealistic Yalies are here, and I wouldn't wish myself anywhere else right now (of course, right now, 'here' is not New Haven; I'm visiting my parents for the break!).

Summer

I have no idea what I want to do with my upcoming summer (or really even what the options are), and that's starting to worry me. What do I know about the law, and why on earth am I even here?

Memos!

Just finished writing one. It wasn't the horrible project I had at first thought it would be. It is for my least favorite class, but you can't get everything you want in life. Of course, I haven't done the reading for my classes tomorrow, but I'm too exhausted to try. I just really hope I won't get called on. Overall, I think I like law school - I certainly don't regret coming or have constant thoughts of dropping out, anyway.

Bluebooking

"The Uniform System of Citation has inflicted more pain on more law students than any other publication in legal history." - Robert Berring.

He was so right. I like writing and I like editing, and I've done a fair amount of it in recent times, but this isn't editing - this is anal-retentive, deconstructive, elitist nonsense. I think of myself as a careful, somewhat rules-oriented and compulsive person, but in the bluebook I have met my match. I am not looking forward to source citing (where we go through someone's article and their 200+ footnotes to check every little detail about their citations, including how many spaces they put where and how they abbreviate certain words and when to put a comma or when to leave it out in certain forms of citations but not others).

This is cool.

Whatever else one might have to say about expensive, private, Ivy League law schools, one thing is certain: we attract very cool events and speakers.

My day? Breakfast with the Chief Justice of the New Zealand Supreme Court (she was fantastic - she has a family and was going to law school and looking for jobs in a time when both of those just weren't done, and the latter wasn't done at all by women).

Then a lecture, open to all law students (people were making a big deal about attendance and tickets, but there were plenty of empty seats in the auditorium), given by none other than Anthony Kennedy (Mr. Swing Vote on the Supreme Court, for those of you who live in a hole), who (with the aid of powerpoint!) spoke about the importance of prestige in the judiciary, coexistence between our system and other transnational systems (notably the European Union), the structural design of our Constitution, the historical forces that made our system what it is, and the design and history of the European Union courts. He spoke a lot about transnational law and whether our constitution is up to the challenges it poses. He also pointedly side-stepped questions about abortion (I wanted to boo the girl who had asked one), and justified his opinion in the flag-burning case by outlining his idea of the court as a balancing mechanism, which tempers the instant voice of the people to create a system that most closely reflects American values over time.

Then afternoon brunch with Edward Mortimer, speech-writer for Kofi Annan (also awesome - his references to speeches Annan made sometimes contained an aside of surprise that he would have written/helped write something like that!), and then a debate (hosted by the Federalist Society) on Law and Economics versus Moral Reason between Richard Epstein (who wrote our torts casebook) and Jules Coleman (who teaches here).

Oh, and all this was in between classes and workshops. I'm probably going out tonight to bar review as well. Reading and outlining - what was that again?

Gah-bage

Our professors make fun of each other here (in a nice way), and it's hilarious.

Procedure is a bunch of rituals that are created to impute legitimacy to legal proceedings - and the rest is gah-bage (says my professor, imitating another who is from the Bronx and sounds like it!).

Update

http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/21335

I don't think I can add anything to that, except to say that this really sucks, and life is not fair, and there's not much you have to fall back on when something like this happens. Religion doesn't have answers and planning your own life (and working hard in school and all that) seems so futile when death is just around the corner.

This hasn't exactly become a taboo subject around the school, but no one wants to talk about it much either. I can't blame anyone for that. It's hit our class hard - especially those of us who knew or had classes with him.

Classes are cancelled today...

...and we think someone might have died. I really hope it isn't because someone in our class got too drunk last night and tried to go home by themselves and got mugged and shot. I haven't actually heard of that happening, but... we do live in New Haven.

(I know, I said earlier I loved it and it wasn't scary at all... well, it isn't scary by day, or if you're traveling in groups...)

Law school is hard.

I'm pretty sure everyone is going to be saying "I told you so," but the conclusion is inescapable: law school is hard. Studying and case reading has taken over my life, and we haven't actually have any assignments beyond that. I wouldn't have believed four classes could be this much work. My life outside law school has come to a screeching halt - this weekend I participated in a hike with the Dean along with most of the rest of my class, and I watched a football game, which means that I haven't finished my reading for tomorrow and will be up virtually all night. Also, I think I need a new keyboard for my computer - and computer repairs is definitely the last thing I need to be worrying about right now.

I love it here

Not having grades and class rankings is very cool. Obviously, professors do demand excellence here, and they want your very best work, but competition is virtually zero and the small groups into which we are all divided are a lifesaver (ours continually exchanges advice, class notes, and outlines by email). I've talked to a few students starting at other law schools, who are already in the "must get such-and-such a GPA" mindset, and this makes me grateful that I chose to come here.

I haven't gotten the impression (which several people warned me about this summer when I told them where I was going to law school) that people are arrogant and ultra-liberal. I have yet to run into someone with an irritating sense of entitlement, or anyone talking about their trust fund (even if someone I knew had that kind of money, this is not an atmosphere which encourages bringing that up... ever). And there are plenty of conservative students here - though while I was used to being more liberal than everyone else back home, here I definitely feel that I'm to the right of most people. However, regarding the complaints that I've heard - that conservative students don't get a voice, that the Federalist Society is failing, or that professors are so liberal they alienate some students - I have so far seen no evidence of this. I love my classes and my professors.

The social life here is great, and it's so easy to talk to everyone about anything. I have yet to get drunk at bar review, although apparently I'm one of the few. I think our class is going to be a lot of fun.

Day One

I was neither completely lost, nor absolutely bored in classes today. I only had two (although that was plenty). I attempted to brief the cases, but I have a feeling the practice will soon be abandoned. I got cold-called, without major embarrassment ensuing. And I discovered that everyone was right in warning me that a one-page case can take hours to understand properly. What law student on the first day of class is seriously expected to know what "trespass on the case" means, or how to explain the legal machinations behind complicated early-nineteenth-century-opinion language?

Orientation

So far, there isn't much to dislike about law school (not that I've even started classes yet). What has distinguished this phase of my life from others so far is the ease of making friends. Once you get past the obligatory usual introductions (name, undergrad, home city/state), you either find you have nothing to say and move on to the next 1L, or you make a great friend. I've never before in my life had an automatic pool of friends where you expect everyone to get along with everyone else, and while those speakers who, at orientation, painted an almost scary picture of how intertwined all of our lives will be with everyone else's lives from now on, it's really quite enjoyable. The law building is beautiful and the town is not as bad as everyone told me it would be. In fact, I have quite an affection for it in some ways (and the Sound is beautiful).

Orientation was actually really useful and kind of even fun. I was a History major in undergrad, and I'm sorry to report the speech on the history of the law school was the most boring of the lot during orientation. Professor Alstott spoke on her book and her views on family law, and being perviously unfamiliar with any of it, it actually shocked me. Another professor who gave us a speech surprised me again simply by opening his mouth - where I come from, people who sound gay (to put it crassly) didn't hold important roles like that. I thought the east coast wouldn't be that much of an adjustment, but I was wrong in quite a few ways. To clarify: I'm not as conservative as my background and I'm not implying a value judgment on stripping the family of its economic role or on homosexuality. And no, I didn't come to Yale thinking it would be like the midwest.

I have a weekend of reading ahead of me, which is slightly daunting considering we haven't even had one class yet. Spending more than $500 on casebooks was not fun, but I'm eager to start something I've been planning on doing for a long time: studying law.