Update from Colorado

Sorry for the lack of posting. Since my last post, I have:

• Graduated from law school cum laude.


• Temporarily moved to Denver to study for the Colorado bar exam.


• Set a wedding date and time with my fiancee and booked a venue for same.


• Started growing a bar exam "playoff beard".
  
  


• Quit my day job as a programmer in preparation for my new day job as a public defender (to commence at some indefinite future time).

Infoporn: Where people go after law school

The National Law Journal has an interesting chart that breaks down where the class of 2005 went after graduation.


Note the steep decline in large firm placement outside of the top 10 schools. Also, Yale sent almost half of it's graduating class into judicial clerkships. That's part of why the clerkship hunt sucks for the rest of us.

Being a Happy, Healthy, Ethical Lawyer

Orin Kerr posted a question on the Volokh Conspiracy from a not yet employed 3L looking for career advice. There are good suggestions in the comments, but the best one is from "Anonobvious," who linked to Patrick J. Schiltz's law review article, "On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession."*

It was written in the late 90s, so the numbers are a little off (though that amplifies the points made), but the reasoning is simple: Big law firms are driven by money. Money does not make one happy. People driven by pressure to make money are more likely to behave unethically. If you want to be happy and ethical, stay away from big law firms.

On why big firm lawyers don't give up a little extra money for a lot more happiness:

More importantly, though, the flaw in my analysis is that it assumes that the reason lawyers push themselves to make so much money is the money itself. In other words, my analysis assumes that the reason lawyers want to earn more money is that they want to spend more money and enjoy the things that money will buy. When put in those terms, giving up 600 hours of life for another $40,000 on top of a $160,000 salary makes no sense for most lawyers. What you need to understand, though, is that very few lawyers are working extraordinarily long hours because they need the money. They are doing it for a different reason.
Big firm lawyers are, on the whole, a remarkably insecure and competitive group of people. Many of them have spent almost their entire lives competing to win games that other people have set up for them. First they competed to get into a prestigious college. Then they competed for college grades. Then they competed for LSAT scores. Then they competed to get into a prestigious law school. Then they competed for law school grades. Then they competed to make the law review. Then they competed for clerkships.229 Then they competed to get hired by a big law firm.230 Now that they’re in a big law firm, what’s going to happen?
Are they going to stop competing? Are they going to stop comparing themselves to others? Of course not. They’re going to keep competing — competing to bill more hours, to attract more clients, to win more cases, to do more deals. They’re playing a game. And money is how the score is kept in that game.

On the difference between "legal ethics" and what people generally think of as ethical:

As a law student, and then as a young lawyer, you will often be encouraged to distinguish ethical from unethical conduct solely by reference to the formal rules. Most likely, you will devote the majority of the time in your professional responsibility class to studying the rules, and you will, of course, learn the rules cold so that you can pass the Multi-State Professional Responsibility Exam (“MPRE”). In many other ways, subtle and blatant, you will be encouraged
to think that conduct that does not violate the rules is “ethical,” while conduct that does violate the rules is “unethical.”
It is in the interests of your professors, the organized bar, and other lawyers to get you to think about ethics in this way. It is a lot easier for a professor to teach students what rules say than it is to explore with students what it means to behave ethically.

On how the Stoics have it right about how to truly find happiness:

This is the best advice I can give you: Right now, while you are
still in law school, make the commitment—not just in your head, but in your heart—that, although you are willing to work hard and you would like to make a comfortable living, you are not going to let money dominate your life to the exclusion of all else. And don’t just structure your life around this negative; embrace a positive. Believe in something—care about something—so that when the culture of greed presses in on you from all sides, there will be something inside of you pushing back. Make the decision now that you will be the one who defines success for you—not your classmates, not big law firms, not clients of big law firms, not the National Law Journal. You will be a happier, healthier, and more ethical attorney as a result. ... (“[T]here may be no way to permanently increase the total of one’s pleasure except by getting off the hedonic treadmill entirely. This is of course the historic teaching of the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, Buddha, Jesus, Thoreau, and other men of wisdom from all ages.”) (quoting Philip Brickman & Donald T. Campbell, Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society, in ADAPTATION-LEVEL THEORY: A SYMPOSIUM 287, 300 (M.H. Appley ed., 1971).

Please, if you are a law student or a lawyer, read this article. It may be some of the most valuable time spent in your career.


* - 52 Vanderbilt Law Review 871.

Brutal Bimodal Distribution

...or Why Law Students Get Ulcers.

The Empirical Legal Studies blog has an excellent post analyzing a salary chart graphic for 2006 law graduates. Click through to see this shocking bit of infoporn and the analysis thereof.

As an aside, I've spent about $200 in postage and burned through three reams of paper in the last few weeks applying for Federal judicial clerkships. Not because it's fun, but because it's one of the better ways to break into the second mode in the chart.

Wish me luck.

A Momentary Reprieve

As of 9:05 pm last night, I'm done with finals for this semester. Not sure how I did on my last exam, but at this point I'm placing all my faith in the professor's excellent grading skills. Wish me luck.

Breaking the Silence

I finished my first cite-checking assignment Sunday night. Somehow I found about 25 hours above and beyond my normal work and school duties to find sources in three different libraries, copy and collate them, and edit 20 or so pages of scholarly article. All that, and I still don't feel like I did a good enough job.

Thank you to everyone who has been patient with me over the last week or so, especially the lovely girl who made me dinner on Sunday night.

It's six o'clock on a Tuesday and I still have a ton of work to do, so I'm going to get back to it.

Yours truly,
Mr. X

...alive, barely...

Corpus Delicti

According to the 'Lectric Law Library Lexicon, "corpus delicti" is defined as:

The body of the offence; the essence of the crime.

It was a general rule not to convict unless the corpus delicti can be established, that is, until the dead body has been found. Instances have occurred of a person being convicted of having killed another, who, after the supposed criminal has been put to death for the supposed offence, has made his appearance - alive. The wisdom of the rule is apparent; but in order to insure justice, in extreme cases, it may be competent to prove the basis of the corpus delicti by presumptive, but conclusive, evidence.

My criminal law professor had a more succinct definition:



I like his better.

Yours truly,
Mr. X

...the law comes alive...

UPDATE
For those of you who, like Steve, were confused by my post, the backstory on this post is as follows:

My professor came into class and said, "For those of you who might be confused, I'm going to show you what corpus delicti is."

He grabbed a plastic shopping bag from behind the podium and started opening it, saying, "If you don't have a strong stomach, you might want to look away."

He produced a doll with a knife through its neck, exclaiming, "This is corpus delicti," and showed it around to the class.

We all cracked up. Probably the funniest incident all semester.

Scalia v. Breyer

Having to work, I caught most of the discussion between Justices Scalia and Breyer held at my law school via C-SPAN (first on the web and then in the car), but I got to school in time to see the last bit from one of the multiple viewing rooms on campus.

As I was telling John, "I heart Scalia". I was quite pleased when he referenced the Framers' dim view of, "Continental powers who didn't trust their subjects with arms," as an example of why looking to foreign law was not necessarily a positive thing, even in 1789. He has a clarity of thought and delivery that was refreshing and insightful. Justice Breyer is also wicked smart, but in more of a gentle thinking out loud kind of way.

The event was highly entertaining, but it seemed as though the Justices were really talking past each other. Scalia was saying that foreign law citations should have no force in American Constitutional jurisprudence, whether one is an originalist or not. Breyer was saying that reading foreign opinions was helpful to understanding the law. They're both right, but in the end I agree with Scalia's conclusion of this exchange (from the Washington Post story):

"What does the opinion of a wise Zimbabwean judge . . . have to do with what Americans believe," Scalia asked Breyer, "unless you think it has been given to the courts" to make moral judgments that properly should be left to elected representatives. "Well, it's relevant in this way," Breyer replied. "They are human beings there, just as they are here. You're trying to get a picture of how other people have dealt with it."

"Indulge your curiosity," Scalia joked, "just don't put it in your opinions."

On the other hand, Breyer had the most stirring quote, a paraphrase of James Madison, saying the the American Constitution is, "a document of power granted by liberty, not liberty granted by power." The original Madison is longer and less eloquent, but the sentiment is the same.

I recommend watching the whole thing, which can be found at C-SPAN's website for the next 15 days or so.

There was a reception afterwards, but I had Constitutional Law class to go to (oh, the irony). I ran upstairs to get a soda before class. The soda machines are in an alcove behind the dining room (which had been screened off for the reception). As I was about to turn down the hallway to walk back to class, a Secret Service agent asked me to stand out of the hallway for a minute. I backed off and about 30 seconds later Dean Claudio Grossman, Justice Scalia, and Justice Breyer walked right in front of me, no more than five feet away. I got closer to the Justices by grabbing a soda than I likely would have in the press of the reception. More irony.

Yours truly,
Mr. X

...back to studying...


UPDATE: Professor Kenneth Anderson has posted an excellent analysis of the implications of Breyer's position at his blog.

UPDATE: A full transcript has been posted on the WCL homepage.

Contracts Killa

Well, I survived my first class last night. Contracts, with professor Teemu Ruskola (it's Finnish). We did lots of hypothetical scenarios involving promises of pens and party invitations and explored some of the different theories behind contract law. Interesting subject matter.

It's really starting to hit home that the left side of the bell curve didn't get accepted to law school (at least not at WCL with me). Even the people who sit in the back of the room seem like they're sharp and up on the class readings. This is in stark contrast to my last brief foray into evening grad school, an Organizational Behavior class with a bunch of government workers looking to pad their resumes (and their salaries) with another degree.

I stayed up until midnight reading for my Legal Rhetoric class tonight (and I'm still not quite done). Looks like no free time for a while.

The Tofu Hut has a link to a really good funky protest song, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings doing "What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes?". Imagine, if we didn't give the government money to prosecute wars, how would they pay for the bombs? Hmm...

Tonight is Torts and Legal Rhetoric. Whee!

Yours truly,
Mr. X

...sleep deprived...