Get Your Towels Ready It's About to Go Down... at 10:06 PM

I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer since I was younger not entirely knowing everything and after learning about lawyers I have come to the conclusion that this is exactly where I belong. Not only am I in the right profession but the right school. Nothing embodies it more than the three C’s of the school: competence, conscience and compassion. The last one drives it home for me and seems to separate it from other schools.

That is enough of that sappy crap. I’ll spin a little yarn about the beginning of my trip to San Francisco to have dinner with my cousin for her birthday. So I had gotten my train ticket and was waiting around listening to my iPod for the train when this Asian lady came up to me.

She had a little girl with her and I saw her at the ticket machine. She asked me if I had a $5 bill because the one she was using did not work. It looked fine and I had a five on me so I traded her.

Bill was fake…

::Feeling welcome in the city::

in life, as in chess, forethought wins. ~charles buxton

The Law School Grind at 1:45 PM

Just finished my first week at school! It was not that bad but I'm sure it will get worse as time goes on. I can tell it's not going to be so much about the work but the memory and endurance to get all the way through. Going to try and not burn myself out though.

To start this post off I'm going to repeat a (shorter version of) joke one of my professors said the other day:

A physicist, a mathematician and a lawyer are trying to prove the sum of 2+2. The physicist and mathematician fill up chalk board after chalk board to prove that 2+2=4. The lawyer looks at the board and asks the judges what they want 2+2 to equal.

It's supposed to be a joke about advocacy and I find it funny.

What we do from the day to day is read massive amounts of pages all relating to a central topic. One of those topics we read for the other day was jurisdiction. Instead of reading a bunch of definitions about that topic we read cases. From those cases we are supposed to figure out the rule or precedent that case sets and then we are supposed to put it all together to figure out the rules of jurisdiction.

One of the steps central to this understanding is writing case briefs. When we read a case we are supposed to keep track of all the cases we read because they come into play at the end of the year when we take our big make it or break it tests. When we read case we are supposed to keep track of its citation, facts of the case, procedural context(how we legally got here), issue, holding(rule set), rules the court used to get to the holding, and the reasoning for how the rules apply to the holding.

We do that for about 5 cases a day which takes a bit of time to read and understand. On top of the cases we are assigned it usually is a good idea to look up all the cases that directly relate to the cases at hand, taking the main idea from each of them. The archaic terms are also a good idea to understand and the laws some of the cases lead up to are also a good idea to peak at. After each case there are problems and questions that help to understand the case or put the case into a larger context. How the case you are reading relates to the case you read before types of questions. All this is done for each of my five classes, so it starts to add up.

When it gets closer to exam time I'll fill ya'll in on that but I figure a good post about what I do from day to day would be helpful. The next posts will be more fun.

::Antdog outs::

Truth exists; only lies are invented.~Horatius Bonar

So Law School Starts Tomorrow at 11:19 PM

Moved out of the AZ and made my way to Cali to do law school. Things are very different being this far away from home, for rizzle. It is nice, however, doing this big part of my life on my own. I guess that was the point coming all the way out here. Fam and Lara helped me move out here and I am all situated in my room:

As you can see I have too much stuff for my room. Place is pretty nice though. It will get the job done at least. I’m sure my desk and the library will be just as important as the bed for the next couple of years. Only 3 years for law school and the first one is the hardest. “First year they study you to death. Second year they work you to death. Third year they bore you to death.” That’s the motto at least.

Those are all my books for this semester. Plus my dictionary and one more book that is on backorder. Fun stuff. I’ll go more into the process of studying next post. Just filling ya’ll in on how I’m getting settled.

::Already know half my first cases and readings before reading...::
conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking. ~h. l. mencken~

Creepiness at 2:53 PM

Just a creepy song many didn't pay attention to at the time. Weird.



::Ciroc Obama Out::
if you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live. ~james baldwin~