Statute of Frogs

I think the hardest part for me about studying for the bar exam will be remembering how low the threshold is. Yes there’s a tremendous amount of material. But it really is a test of minimum competence. Thus, I have to counteract my basic desire to do everything as well as possible. When I do a round of practice questions and get 12/17, my response should be: “Good. That’s passing.” Instead it’s: “Damn! I really have to go study the separation of powers stuff more.” But that way madness lies.

I decided several months ago that if I had nothing to do but study for the bar for 10 weeks, I would:

1. Kill myself, and
2. Not get much studying done

So I decided to go back to my firm for 6 weeks at the beginning of the summer. This made sense for other reasons as well. First, the money was hard to pass up. Second, because I’m doing a 2-year clerkship before I go back, I was a little worried they’d forget who I was. So I start work on Monday.

All of that means that I’m doing the BarBri lectures on tape. Actually, they now send a slick little iPod Nano with all the lectures on it. In any case, my major project for this week is to get a jump on studying. So far, so good. I’m most of the way through the ConLaw lectures. I should probably go back and get some more done before dinner with the last of the gathered family.

As of Monday, I’m officially a JD.  Now that the family is mostly dispersed back to their respective homes, the postings should get more frequent again.

In a Reuters wire story about the latest domestic surveillance reports, this paragraph caught my eye

Sen. Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he would ask phone companies whether they were providing Americans’ records to the NSA. “We’ve got to … figure out what is going on,” the Pennsylvania Republican said.

Why, pray tell, does the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee have to ask phone companies for this information?  Presumably, if the phone companies are giving information to the NSA, it’s because the NSA asked for it.  (I know I’m going out a limb with that assumption, but work with me.)  So why not ask the NSA or the White House?  The only reason for Specter to go to the phone companies for this information is because he no longer believes the Administration’s continuous denials that the information is being collected (for more of which, see the story linked above).  That doesn’t bode well.  I’m pretty sure when his own party’s congressional leaders no longer believe the President, that’s a bad sign.

For various reasons, I’m pretty sure that Dan over at The Fatalist Review doesn’t go to my law school.  Nevertheless, if this post is to be taken at face value, he’s somewhere nearby.

Whatever you think about the judicial qualification work of the ABA Standing Committee on Federal Judiciary (and it’s clear there are some people who really don’t like it), it’s apparently been 25 years since the committee unanimously voted to rate a nominee unqualified.  But they did it yesterday with Michael Wallace, a nominee for a seat on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.  Since the committee doesn’t generally issue reasons for its ratings, it’s not clear why they found Wallace unqualified (though we can expect that they will be asked to issue a statement for the hearings if the nomination gets that far).  As much as people may complain that the ABA can’t in good faith claim to be non-partisan, a unanimous vote that hasn’t happened for 25 years ought to at least give some pause.  I would think the Administration has bigger (or at least more appetizing) fish to fry without spending political capital trying to push this through.  On the other hand, they don’t have a great track record of putting their mistakes behind them.  Maybe Wallace will take one for the team a la Harriet Miers and remove his name from consideration.

Graduation is Monday and it’s starting to seem real.  I picked up my cap and gown yesterday and verified that all my grades were in.  As far as I can tell, there’s now nothing to keep me from graduating.  The family starts to arrive tonight.

It’s still weird no longer to think of myself as a law student, especially because I also can’t think of myself as a lawyer yet, either.  I’m sort of in limbo passing from my student days to my professional days.  There was a similar period when I made the transition the other way.  I quit my job of eight years at the end of July and school didn’t start until late August.  But I had been thinking of myself as a law student for months by that point.  This time, it’s pretty clear that I’m not yet where I’m going, but the longest part of the trip is definitely over.

Since there’s family coming to town, I imaging updates will be few over the next 5 or 6 days.  More when it’s all over.

I don’t have much to add to the reports here and here about Michael Luttig’s resignation from the Fourth Circuit, but it’s such big news that I think I have to at least mention it.  It’s true that his new job at Boeing will likely pay nearly ten times the $175,100 he was paid as a federal appeals court judge, but I can’t really imagine giving up the constitutional job security of life on the federal bench to go to the corporate world.  Maybe it’s just that I think this is one of the best jobs imagineable, but I can’t see it.  I think this must have been running through Judge Luttig’s mind for a few years now and, in the wake of the Alito and Roberts nominations, he’s decided it’s not worth waiting around for a SCOTUS nomination that’s unlikely to ever come.

I feel bad for his clerks, though.  The surest path to a Supreme Court clerkship passed through Judge Luttig’s chambers.  Though I’m sure they’ll have no shortage of opportunities available to them, it may derail a few Supreme Court clerkship dreams.

Last Saturday, when I should have been studying for my “Church and State” exam, I went out with some friends to take pictures. It was a gorgeous spring day. Here are a couple of my favorites.

There’s a great article in this morning’s Times about a performance in Germany of John Cage’s As Slow as Possible.  It’s being performed at St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt and is scheduled to last for 639 years.  The performance began on September 5, 2001.  The first 20 months, however, consisted entirely of silence.  There’s more information on the performance and its changes on Wikipedia.

Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy makes the case for abolishing the Bluebook and talks about why it will never happen. Many people have commented both agreeing and disagreeing. The arguments against the bluebook largely break down into two categories

1. The Bluebook is too complex and dealing with its intricacies is an enormous waste of professors’ and students time
2. Lots of portions of the legal world (and the non-legal academic world) do just fine without it

These statements are both in some sense true as far as they go, but I think they miss the point.

First, the Bluebook is not to blame for the huge amount of time that law review members spend editing articles. Once an editor is reasonably familiar with the Bluebook (which is, after all, the reason for write-on competitions), the vast majority of citations can be looked up within a minute or two. What takes far more time is cite checking. In fact, Bluebook citation formats are as complex as they are largely to ensure that all the information needed to check an article’s citations are present. We can discuss the merits of having armies of law students checking the citations for legal scholarship separately, but the ills of that practice shouldn’t be heaped on the Bluebook.

Second, any publication needs to have a style guide. Style guides are, by nature, big and complicated. The Chicago Manual of Style runs to over 900 pages, including over 200 pages devoted to citation. The Bluebook is complicated because it aims to be comprehensive and because law review articles cite a dizzying array of sources. If the Bluebook were simpler, editors would have to make judgment calls more often.

The Bluebook doesn’t get used in the “real” world because consistency is far less important. If a lawyer’s citation style in her filings with one judge don’t match those she files with another, no one cares. If two articles printed in the same issue of the same journal have different citation conventions, that look shoddy and unprofessional.

Don’t get me wrong. I would never argue that the Bluebook isn’t picayune and extraordinarily anal. And many of the editors who use it are even worse. But it serves a useful purpose and isn’t responsible for all the ills of the way in which legal journals operate.

Incidentally, Somin’s economic argument about why the Bluebook will never be abolished is spot on. The people who would have to make that decision (the editorial board of a given journal) are the very people with the least to gain (since they’ve already gotten pretty handy with the Bluebook) and the most to lose (since they’d have to deal with the chaotic editing that would result in the short term from any change).

A couple of good pieces I read in Slate this morning:

First, as usual, I think Dahlia Lithwick has the right read on the day’s headline legal issue, the Zacarias Moussaoui verdict. She’s also got a link to the whole 42-page special verdict form in case you, like me, just have to see it for yourself.

Second, there’s a good piece by Troy Patterson on the Stephen Colbert kerfuffle.

I recommend them both.

Just finished “The Well of Lost Plots,” the third of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books. I really love these books. They’re full of the sort of geeky, literary humor that makes me laugh out loud and feel smug at the same time. Well of Lost Plots is no exception: it’s got an anger management counselling session with the characters of Wuthering Heights, several outbreaks of the mispeling vyrus, and the villain from The Squire of High Potternews (say it out loud a few times…if that doesn’t work, think Pythagoras).

This book deals with Thursday Next’s apprenticeship with Jurisfiction, the police force of the book world. They’re responsible for investigating all sorts of literary crime: characters who are trying to change their stories, infestations of grammasites, the plot device black market, and the theft of all the punctuation from the last chapter of Ulysses. Miss Havisham and the Cheshire Cat are back along with several new characters, both from real books and from made up ones. Fforde’s conception of the Book World, which sometimes seemed a bit vague in the first two books, is now fully formed and wonderfully inventive. Unfortunately, this book isn’t as tightly plotted as the previous ones, so it sometimes seems like there’s not much holding all the puns and literary references together. It gets going at the end, but I wanted a bit more of a story to keep it all moving. Still, none of that is going to keep me from going out and getting the next one, Something Rotten.

My favorite quote from Stephen Colbert’s much blogged about speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner:

Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, “Oh, they’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

I really don’t get the continuing flap about “Nuestro Himno,” the Spanish language version of the national anthem.  I admit, it’s a less than literal translation, but it’s hardly offensive.  But more to the point, it’s not as though the words are the most important thing about the anthem.  The defense of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, important as it was, is hardly the defining moment of American patriotism.  And I imagine most people don’t even know what the words refer to.  If we were talking about translations of the Constitution, where the nuances of the words really matter, I would be concerned.  But we’re not.
It is certainly true that, any time words are translated, their meaning is altered.  But the words of the national anthem can hardly be as important to most Americans as those of the Bible, a work almost all of us only know in translation.  It seems to me that we shouldn’t discourage immigrant populations from displays and expressions of patriotism, even if that patriotism isn’t exactly the same as the officially sanctioned version.

I’m reminded of the time I stumbled into a fireworks show for Italian-American day.  The show closed with a stirring rendition of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” complete with much waving of both Italian and American flags.  That display of patriotism was no less heartfelt because it acknowledged its roots in another culture.  I think the same is true of Nuestro Himno.