Does anyone else note that their prior experience gives them a distinct impression of the law school?
For instance, before applying to Columbia my last job was as project manager for a web agency. When I look at the 'Information Technology at Columbia Law School' packet and see them directing me to http://www.law.columbia.edu/law_school/info_tech/stud_sup/incomingstudent my immediate thought is: 'Wow. Someone needs to set up subdomains and virtual addresses.'
I have to chuckle that the site basically says there's no instructions available right now, check back later. I've encountered that a lot with the information materials, particularly when they reference a web page.
None of these things would look odd to me if I'd not set up professional sites. They're common 'mistakes.' Similarly, when Martin Lloyd started an MBA at Said Business School, he was surprised at how their marketing worked (and didn't). Has anyone else found this to be true thus far with other aspects Columbia?
Since law school might involve a lot of large purchases, like desks, phones, etc., I thought some students might be interested in Google's newest shopping service, Froogle.
In a nutshell, it searches webstores indexed by Google and gives you a listing of websites where you can buy that product, and at what price. It's great for comparison shopping if you know precisely the product you want. It's not perfect (Amazon is indexed poorly, for instance) but it does work.
It's taken me a while, but I've now read the entire welcome pack sent by student services. My copy of the student organisation directory has dog-ears all through it so I email questions to various societies over the course of next week.
Much of it looks fun: what, for instance, is the difference between De Vinimus and Grand Cru, which both seem to be wine-tasting societies? (Rivals, perhaps?) Several mentoring programs are on option, and they seem to work both ways: lots of groups provide advice for 1Ls, and other groups give them the chance to mentor New York children. This distracts from the fact that all the politically active societies, bar one, seem to have a decidedly liberal bent, but that's not a huge cause for worry.
Towards the end of summer is our time of expectation, but reading through this catalogue of enjoyable possibilities on a sunny weekend overlooking a Michigan lake can't get me past some trepidation: how much time, as 1L's, do we really have to do these things?
Peter Beinart has an excellent piece in this week's New Republic on how the Bush adminsitration continues to refuse to deal with the realities of the nation-building operation now underway in Iraq. Since I generally have little regard for Bush's foreign policy, or for Rumsfeld's use no troops approach to military operations, I am not particularly shocked by the fact that Bush does not want our troops ready to do their jobs. The question is: when will the rest of the country realize Bush is far from the bastion of solidity on national security that everyone thinks he is?
It is about time people woke up to the fact that Bush seems to sacrifice national security on the altar of tax cuts, and that his foreign policy is neither consistent or intelligent.
Both Hillary Clinton and J.K. Rowling have their lawyers up in arms about recent press scoops on their books before their official publications dates. Slate's Jack Shafer claims that they don't have a case, but his article underlines just how fuzzy the fair use doctrine is even in traditional book-publishing contexts like this. His article contains the statement "This subjective and maddeningly inconsistent terrain makes you glad you never studied law" -- I took it as a good sign that the whole discussion fascinated me and left me wanting more in-depth analysis of the legal issues. (Yes, I've been reading Slate and posting a lot today. I guess I'm in one of those moods.)
I am far from certain that Kinsley has it right. Most people not admitted would not be admitted regardless of affirmative action. In reality, the decision only changes for a very small group on the borderline because of affirmative action. Most applicants still have no chance and it has nothing to do with the 10% of students admitted because of racial preferences. the dichotomy between a rigid point system and using race as a factor makes sense to me, I see that race makes an impact, but I doubt it makes an equal difference for each person. Take, for example, Justice Thomas' children. For certain, they will have a positive intellectual environment to grow up with and other factors that help their admission more (such as Justice Thomas presence on the supreme court). The assumption that all African Americans are the same and that their experiences are reflexively worth a 20% bonus toward admission is precisely the reason we need affirmative action in the first place.
Is everyone else as exasperated as I am by the US Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action? Of all the cases they've ruled on recently, a few have made me angry and a few have relieved me, but none of them has left me as confused as this one. It's the split ruling that's driving me crazy -- as far as I can tell, they've given permission for colleges to continue to practice affirmative action as long as they don't talk about it or lay down actual guidelines for its application. Michael Kinsley's column in Slate sums it up best: while the supremes have ruled that colleges can consider race as long as it isn't the deciding factor in admitting a student, Kinsley points out that if race is used as a factor at all in deciding on an applicant's admission status, it is necessarily the deciding factor for some applicants.
If I've misread the ruling, can somebody set me straight? It seems to me like complete nonsense, in which case I would have been happier with a straighforward ruling either way instead of this paradox.
Strom Thurmond, former US Senator, is dead at age 100. I've always been repulsed by the attitude that Slate's David Plotz calls "a twisted Inside-the-Beltway version of ancestor worship" but which was best expressed by John Huston's character in Chinatown -- that "politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough" -- and Thurmond is no exception. I assume that even the staunchest conservatives reading this, if they have the intellectual resources and moral character to make it into Columbia Law, will confirm the man's despicable political legacy. If we are obligated to seek out the good in this man's life as it ends, we might look past the corruption ,cronyism, unparallelled racism and divisiveness, complete mental incompetence for his last few decades in the Senate (his aides regularly had to shuttle him from the hospital to the Capitol and tell him how to vote), and personal abuse of authority (he was known to grope women in the Capitol elevators into his 70's, including fellow senators) to say at least this: before he passed, he managed to get Trent Lott out of the legislature.
Yesterday I was watching CBS News about the new national Do Not Call list. The list is a way for people to register with the government to eliminate unwanted telemarketing phone calls. The marketers are complaining not only because they will cease to be able to call all those who put their numbers on the list, but because of some higher principle. They claim that they have a free speech right to drive everyone nuts with their incessant calling and almost equally ornery tendency to not even be on the line if you pick up the phone. All I can say is that if this was a legitimate claim (although I doubt it since commercial speech is not protected) then I guarantee that majority of Americans would be willing to scrap the first amendment.
Just another comment about buying a computer. I always check this site before making purchases: The Fatwallet.com Hot Deals forum. At this site people list all types of good deals they find, and often there are some excellent deals on computers, and a lot of other stuff.
I've had a recurrent worry today as I read a piece by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post and an article by Kendall Thomas in Looking Back at Law's Century: to what extent will it be possible to avoid politics at Columbia?
OK, I'm relatively certain that most of our courses will have politically-neutral content (or maybe this is more a hope than a conviction), but as someone perhaps more ideologically-suited to the University of Chicago than our own University, I worry a bit the extent to which I'll be able to keep my head down, learn the practical knowledge, and keep the political out of it.
This is speaking as a Republican who spent much of the last decade in Europe as a fairly outgunned conservative and not wanting to spend a lot of time tilting at windmills. Is anyone else concerned about this?
Please welcome two new authors, Russell Klein and William Nichols!
I should have an 'about the authors' page implemented this week. At least, that's the hope.
There's been a bit of discussion as to what the 'purpose' of this blog is, and whether we want to have political discussions within it. I have an idea about this I'd like to put forward.
First, however, I'd like to point out that I'm not editing this web log: any of the authors are free to post whatever they want, subject to the caveat that anything that starts getting me in trouble as a host will probably be deleted.
Secondly, I'd like to propose that I create a 'politics' and 'non-politics' version of this blog, such that people who want to read about how President Bush is whittling away our rights to hard-won veganism, or how the left-wing media is giving a walleye'd version of the truth to the gullible masses can talk to their heart's content, whilst giving an option to filter it out for those who want restaurant reviews, worries about exams, and other concerns. It wouldn't make life any more difficult for authors (it's the same blog with two views), but would allow those who didn't want politics to avoid it.
The rest of this post (click the link below) will explain how this would work. I've already implemented the technology for this: you can see what it would look like at The No Politics Index Page.
At the moment, CC2006B authors have the option of assigning 'categories' to postings, but they don't do much because I haven't implemented them. However, it would be simple enough to create a 'Politics' category into which political issues could be placed.
When you arrived at the Columbia weblog, by default you would see all entries. However, a link at the top right would say, 'Don't want to read the political discussions? Click here.' This would lead to the same page, except all entries related to the 'Politics' category would be removed. On that page, there would be a link saying, 'You're viewing this weblog without the political stories: Click here to see what we're saying about political events.'
This is fairly easy to implement (it'll take me a couple of hours), and mean that politics is an open topic for discussion--but it can be avoided by those who find it contentious. Sound fair?
As part of my 'summer reading', I'm trying to find books about the law that are both enjoyable and informative. Nothing that's going to revolutionise the world, nothing that's going to get me ahead on our courses, but just things to get me thinking about law and being a lawyer.
For this week's book (in between translating standards on Japanese food labeling laws) I've been reading Looking Back on Law's Century, edited by Austin Serat, Bryant Garth, and Robert A. Kagan. The main emphasis of the essays within stress the role of the legal profession in the change and continuity of American life over the last 100 years. So far I've read mostly the final essays, which focus on how the role of the lawyer has changed in the last 100 years, and more entertainingly, how the role of law professors has changed.
I'll try to post a more complete review later (or maybe I'll write a truly complete one, post it on Amazon, and link it--I can always use the $5 gift certificate), but if you're looking for something to read over the summer, you could do worse. I don't know if it's useful, but it's been enjoyable so far.
Now that we're a few entries in, I'm beginning to form a set of opinions about what I'd like this blog to be. The strongest of these is negative: the last post alerted me to what I don't want it to be, namely a forum for debate on sensitive political, religious, moral, or aesthetic topics that don't bear directly on the experience of attending Columbia Law School. (Note to Avi: This is not a criticism of your entry, the motivation behind it, or its appropriateness. Since we haven't yet talked about what belongs here, it is as appropriate as any entry so far.)
The entries on computer purchases typify the ultimate unobjectionable, relevant, appropriate topic for discussion here, but I can imagine threads on:
According to that laundry list, the other entries to date would all fit: we have a piece on the cultural experience of living in New York, a pointer to a law essay, a pointer to a news story about law schools, and discussions of resources available to law students.
Comments? Please, please: comments. And to Anthony: thank you for setting this up.
The Bush administration has finally recognized that the Road Map is on life support. Today's New York Times has a piece saying that Bush is sending high level diplomats to save his plan . The question is, why bother? The Road Map is such a pie in the sky dream that it really makes no sense to keep pushing it. Colin Powell can go to Israel 1,000 times, but can do nothing Mahmoud Abbas until Arafat is put out of his misery for good. No sort of propping will work until Abbas can and will destroy Palestinian terorism on his own. With Arafat around he feels too insecure to take serious steps to control Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al Aksa Brigade. While erstwhile peace processors like Martin Indyk suggest an international force to root out terrorism, they ignore the basic facts of the situation. The Palestinians refuse to disarm the the terrorists, and will fight American troops like they do the Israelis, and we saw in Iraq that American troops are no better (and probably worse) at dealing with guerilla terrorism.
An article on New York law school acceptances this year. Just in case someone's not seen it already.
Also, a few bits of housekeeping:
A) If anyone wants to suggest some links to put in the links section, leave a comment here.
B) This site can now take syndicated RSS links. What this means, in non-techie English, is that if you've got a Livejournal or other diary-type blog and would like to have links to it updated on this page, please leave a comment or email me at columbiablog@housevirgo.com and I'll add it. It doesn't work perfectly (the list only updates when someone makes a new entry), but it's better than nothing.
C) If you want to be an author and I've not added you, please contact me at the email address above. I'm sorry if you've gotten skipped--apparently someone left a message for me on the Admitted Students page and I missed it.
Hope everyone's having a fun summer.
They might not be the New York area's favorite hockey team, but the Devils are certainly the best. As difficult as hockey is to follow on television through an interminable regular season, the playoffs are always fun to watch. It is probably the beards.
For all interested, I bought myself a Dell Inspiron 600m, and I am quite happy with it. It is pretty light, and seems to be pretty well constructed. I like Dell's support, so this is generally pretty good machine. The only downside is that the speakers are not great, but sound is ok with headphones. It does not have a built in floppy drive, and I made the mistake of not getting the floppy drive, so I had to order it later, which cost about ten dollars more than it otherwise would have.
Since this is now being used, can I ask: does anyone think we should change the name? Technically, this isn't the 'Columbia' blog--it's just one made up of Columbia students.
If anyone has a good name, feel free to put it here and we'll put it to a vote...
Thanks for setting this up, Anthony.
One of the things I'm interested in (and one of the reasons I'm excited to study in NYC) is law and the built environment, broadly considered (zoning, real estate, land use, affordable housing, environmental law, etc.). I did an M.Arch, and quickly realized that legal constraints were a large determining factor in what actually ended up being built, and how it ended up being occupied.
There's an interesting article in the NY Times online today, about lofts in SoHo/NoHo and the impact of regulations requiring artist certification to live there (the regulations are routinely ignored, and there's disagreement in the neighborhood about whether they should be enforced): http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/realestate/08COV.html
Before you buy a computer for law school, I'd highly recommend that you check not only some review sites on the PC in question, but the support forums for the vendors.
I can say this because I didn't: I didn't check Dell's support forums before purchasing an Inspiron 8500 notebook. There's a lot of things I love about it, but apparently it's plagued with monitor problems, keyboard problems, and (least worrisome for me) faulty speakers. If I'd seen that, I might have chosen other options.
Just a word to the wise.
The Columbia Class of 2006 weblog is now in progress. We have five potential authors who have expressed an interest. If you would like to participate, please feel free to contact columbiablog@housevirgo.com and I'll try to set you up.