An article on common misconceptions with regards to law school grades. Since we're all going to care about this soon, I suppose. (From JD2B).
I see Anthony noticed blue laws on his other blog. Blue laws are nothing new for me. I live in the blue law capital of America, Bergen County, NJ. NJ leaves blue laws up to individual counties and they have been retained only in Bergen. Virtually nothing aside from food can be sold in the county on Sunday, and unlike in other places a different day cannot be substituted. One municipality goes farther to prohibit any business from being conducted at all, including regular office work. I still do not know how these laws pass constituitonal muster, though it seems that they no longer have much to do with religion and more to do with traffic. In regard to Anthony's point about liquor sales in NY, they changed the law last year to allow liquor stores to pick the day they close, on the assumption that more alcohol would be sold on Sunday, which would bring in greater tax revenues. Not sure why they did not just scrap the laws altogether.
I'm not sure if anyone else knows, but Prof. Dorf writes a column on Findlaw.com. Today's piece talks about why, due to the recall election, television stations are pulling old Arnie movies from the airwaves until the voting is done.
Can we all have a big round of applause for the voters of California, not heretofore known to have been in the business of raising the standards for public entertainment?
While we're at it, can we somehow nominate Jim Carey?
It's been over five years since I was a student, and I have to admit that getting into the swing of taking notes is taking me a while. At the moment, I'm reviewing the cases, jotting down brief answers to exercises (or doing them in my head), and then transfering cases and notes to my outline after the classes (and some review).
Which leaves me with highlighting passages in the book. Since I spend most of my time summarising the passages in the case, I don't really highlight them, and I never got into the habit while an undergrad. But everyone around me seems a highlighter addict.
Anyone have advice on to highlight or not, and what it's usefulness is? I think I'll have a better idea what's effective once I've taken the first set of exams, but then again by then it's too late...
I just ordered my first book, used from a seller on Amazon, so we will see how long it takes to show up. The guy claimed it was like new, so hopefully it is worth the 69.99 he charged me for it.
As some of you might have noticed over at my other blog, this blog supports integration with Amazon.com, due to a wonderful Moveabletype/Amazon plugin. Anything purchased through these links puts some money into my Amazon ID account, since I'm an 'associate.' As I explained, this was basically an excuse for me to learn some SOAP and XML before moving to New York and learning about 'how to worry about keeping my SOAP in the showers and where the XML the bloodly lights went.'
It works just as well on this blog, though, and if you guys wanted me to do so, I could put up a page through which we could order all our coursebooks for September through Amazon. Orders over $50 get free (if slow) shipping, and we have time if we order soon. I'd be happy to put 100% of the 'associate' money towards us authors splitting a few beers.
Oh, yeah, and also of note: I've been in town how long, and Avi and I haven't gotten together. That's got to say something about the size of this year's law school class...
For those of you who did not get the Legal Methods books for Strauss and Greenawalt, I posted the first few pages here
Wow, my first week living in New York City and we have a very historic New York event- a citywide (well, multicitywide) blackout! I’ll have good memories of this one, it doesn’t seem like there was much of the lawlessness that occurred during that 70s blackout, and it probably wasn’t caused by terrorism (although that was the first reaction of many people when we first heard just how many cities were also without power - i mean, how can one event cause so much damage?) Walking down Broadway during the early hours of the outage was pretty cool. I’ve been impressed with the character of the people here, maybe one of the few good things to come from 911. Oh, and the candlelight parties on the stoops outside 115th St and the surrounding Columbia area were fun, plus we could actually see the stars from Morningside Park. Too bad all our orientation events got cancelled. I’m afraid to ride my elevator though… any stories from someone that was stuck in a lift or subway car?
Seems like our class schedules are now available on Lawnet. Just click on the Class schedule link.
So today I decide that, heck, I need a set of bookshelves and a rug, so I'll go to Ikea, buy a whole lot of things that I just didn't bother to bring with me (glasses, desk lamps, etc.), and get the whole lot shipped back to the dormitory. Since it's a flat fee of $99 shipping, I might as well. Besides, a local friend of mine offered to split the shipping cost if we moved her stuff too. We hopped on the free bus from the Port Authority and headed into darkest New Jersey.
We only found out once everything was purchased that the 'shipping' involved is $99 for furniture items only. Since it made no sense to pay that much for $150 worth of furniture, I waited in line for an hour to return both pieces of merchandise, than dragged a bundle of 'optional' things back to Columbia.
(Yes, before anyone mentions it, this was all pretty stupid and avoidable, although none of the signs I saw before the shipping desk mentioned the 'furniture items only' rule. I mention it here so that maybe some readers can learn from my mistakes.)
In the meantime, I came back here and ordered a very nice office desk and a set of bookshelves from Staples Online... which will give me free shipping, besides the items being on sale. So at least so far, I recommend them.
SO I went down to Columbia to do the "Computer Based Training" to get a network logon. Nothing too difficult in going through the course, and nothing particularly special in Columbia's network that makes this really necessary. Law Network usernames are limited to six letters, first initial and first 5 letters of your last name (apparently, decent usernames are anathema to every Columbia department). I had some trouble getting my laptop to work on the network, which is a Novell Netware network. My wireless connection got a signal, but would not get connected to the network. I just gave up after half an hour of trying to make it work.
The New York Times reports today that New York City is terribly infested with rats. The article claims that the problem is actually getting worse, and that the city even had to shut down a firehouse because of rat infestation. Rats are often in the news in NYC, so it is hard to judge how much worse the problem is this year.
The Voice is running a story on Columbia's history on the occasion of its 250th year. It details the university's changing relationship with the neighborhood and the city, expanding on Avi's Times story posted a few days ago.
Anyone read the reviews going around for the movies starting this weekend? Apparently, the only movie worse than American Wedding is Gigli. Is this possibly the worst two movies to appear at once?
Elvis Mitchell says that American wedding is almost a film, and that it compares negatively to the film that develops on ponds.
A.O Scott makes the claim that the dialogue between Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck is the lamest of any movie he has seen.
Apparently, these reviews are pretty much the consensus of everyone who has seen the movies. If you were going to see one, however, American Wedding is apparently an Oscar winner in comparison with Gigli.
Update: This Washington Post piece reports on the two positive reviews for Gigli that Sony could find for an ad. Also, I saw American Wedding, and it was trashy but funny, which makes it similar to the two American Pie films that preceeded it.
Well, here's the latest: digital gumshoes using 'matching technology' to find file swappers.
I'm really quite amused by the RIAA's activities here. The overall music spend of an individual will on average go up when they start using file-sharing software to trade music. So now the record companies are going to start suing folks who, by definition, are some of their best customers? And embitter a whole generation of music fans?
If this blog were to have a rule of 'full disclosure,' it would probably require me to say that I've never used file-sharing software in my life. (It's a security risk, in my opinion.) But at least in the case of music, my sympathy here is with the defendants. Yes, they're breaking the law, no doubt there, but hopefully this will serve as a prod for us to change the definitions of fair use.
Update: As reported at NTK (motto: "They stole our revolution. Now we're stealing it back"), the European Union is going to be passing the IP Enforcement Directive, and is using one of the more tacky methods of assuring passage, certain to become a classic of parliamentary methodology: put the bill up for a vote on September 11th.