According to Boing Boing, after two years, Google has modified its algorithm and defused the Google bomb that made George W. Bush the first result in a search for “miserable failure.” It’s true that Bush no longer comes up first. But the top 9 results all talk about the fact that he used to. A small victory at best.
Interesting op-ed in today’s WSJ arguing (not very controversially, I would imagine) that law schools aren’t really very good at training people to be lawyers. I mostly agree, particularly with statements like:
By reading about the law rather than engaging in it, students end up with the misperception that lawyers spend most of their time debating the niceties of the Rule Against Perpetuities rather than sorting out the messy, somewhat anarchic version of the truth that judges and courts care about.
and
By giving students the false idea that being a lawyer is all about intellectual debate, we also drive the wrong students to law school in the first place.
On the other hand, I think that, without the intellectual debate in law school, new lawyers would lack some very basic argumentation skills. While its true that law involves sorting out messy versions of truth, it also involves making the sorts of finely honed doctrinal arguments that the case method teaches. Certainly the current balance, particularly at elite law schools, is skewed very much towards doctrine. But I’m not sure that skewing things in the other direction would improve the situation. I see lawyers every day who have an argument to make, but don’t know how to marshall the existing caselaw to support it.
This is very much apropos of my earlier post on the difference between district courts and appellate courts. Appellate courts are very doctrinally oriented and well-suited to the skills taught at top law schools. District courts are terminally complicated and provide a crash course in “sorting out the messy, somewhat anarchic version of the truth.”
Hat Tip: How Appealing
OK, actually the proud day was last Friday, but I just noticed. Statute of Frogs is enormously pleased to have warranted a mention on How Appealing. Apparently Howard Bashman really does read absolutely everything.
A few days ago, the judge told me a joke:
A supreme court justice, a court of appeals judge, and a district court judge are duck hunting. After a while of sitting in the boat, a bird flies up out of the marsh. The supreme court justice says “In 1789, would the founding fathers have considered that to be a duck?” As he ruminates on that question, the bird flies out of range.
A few minutes later, another bird flies up. The court of appeals judge says “We have a six-part test for what constitutes a duck.” As he begins to apply the factors, the bird flies out of range.
A third bird flies up out of the marsh. The district court judge takes aim and fires. The bird falls from the sky. As the dog swims out to retrieve it, the district court judge says “I hope to God that’s a duck.”
It’s sort of like that around here. Unlike the appellate courts where legal issues are well-defined and can be examined with surgical precision, around here it’s always messy. We try our damnedest to get it right and we almost always succeed, but sometimes we just have to come to a quick resolution and hope we’re close enough. I quite like the chaos and uncertainty of it.
I realize it’s been awfully quiet here for a while. I’ve been working on a monster of an opinion (which, of course, kept getting interrupted with other stuff). But it’s signed and on the fax machine now. Just in time for the happy parties to declare a champagne happy hour.
Now I can get back to the rest of the to-do list (which has been growing by leaps and bounds while I wasn’t looking).
You may recall that, because my firm requires everyone to, I took the bar exam in two states. One of them (hereinafter, “Happy State”) doesn’t require new attorneys to complete CLE for between 18 and 24 months. So I’m good until August of 2009. The other one (hereinafter, “Evil State”) requires all new lawyers to complete a basic set of skills and methods classes.
Basically, I’m in favor of “Bridge the Gap” programs that help new attorneys make the transition from the law school to practice. I really am. Evil State’s program, however, requires me to spend five Saturdays in an overcrowded hotel ballroom listening to lectures on areas of the law I’ll never practice. And then I have to do homework, to boot.
This past weekend, for example, we spent six hours talking about family law. And now I have to draft a complaint and a motion for relief. The odds that I will ever find myself filing a divorce complaint in Evil State court are vanishingly small. I can only think of two married friends who are residents of Evil State and they’re both lawyers, so they’re not going to ask me to represent them. Since I don’t plan on holding myself out as an Evil State matrimonial lawyer, I can’t see where the clients are going to come from.* But I’ll be prepared.
* Indeed this posting would be, if I actually identified “Evil State” or myself by name, my most likely source of matrimonial clients.
