Active Tense

Well, blogging has been a challenge lately – not because of blogging per se, but because I have so little “free” time. Now, I don’t mean to suggest I’m being run ragged, because I’m simply not. I take time to cook and eat and get exercise and read and see the odd movie and so forth. Law School is a full time job, but not a 70hr per week one. However, what LS effectively does is suck up your reading/writing reserves. And normally, come 10:40 PM, when I’m considering what to do with my free hour or so, looking at a white expanse on my lighted laptop screen is pretty damn low on the list. I should probably start adopting a 15 minute per day blogging regimen if I hope to endure the working world.

It's unfortunate as there’s been no end of potentially bloggable topics lately. Here are a few.

Oral Arguments

Last night, The Jude Walker and I sat as judges for the 1Ls oral arguments. Our former Legal Process prof (the Section 3 equivalent of Legal Research and Writing) produced a splendid bench memo and some good tipping point questions to get us rolling. The whole experience was a great deal of fun. We heard arguments for 3 and a half hours, and I was ready for still more at the end. TJW and I fell into a pretty good pattern of questioning with her taking the lead for some lines of inquiry and me taking the lead for others. TJW is a pretty hard core moot court participant (she’ll be in the nationals this year) and I think that greatly informed her bench-presence. I merely tried to copy a few judges I knew – with all their groping and grasping and “concerns.” I think we managed to cover most of the substantive issues in the exercise and also address a decent spread of mock judicial behavior, ranging from cutting off the attorneys to asking slightly off-topic or repetitious questions. Whatever we threw at these students they neatly avoided and moved on. Sure, there were different levels of accomplishment and each had discrete strengths and weaknesses, but they *all* impressed me at some point in their arguments (and I’m not just saying that to say it). I’m pretty grateful for the experience in no small part because it gave me a glimpse into how a judge might try to reign in and direct a galloping attorney; it’s more difficult than it looks.

Gymishness

Well, I finally and belatedly made the jump to circuit training, which I should have done earlier in the winter. I suppose my spinning routine approximates it (doing hill work at ridiculous tension) but it’s nice to isolate the muscles. I have to say that it still feels like cheating to a degree. After a round at the weight machines, I feel (and my legs look) as though I’ve been riding for an hour or so. I’m such a weight room novice though – I have no idea as to the rituals, behavior, or best way to go about things. I *was* secretly pleased with my cyclist legs – I actually got a doubletake from a weights guy with the amount I was pushing with those cordy little legs. I can’t wait for better bike weather.

Bookatude

I’ve gotten some blurbs for the book and while I enjoy hearing what people say, it’s difficult not to feel like a bit of a fraud.

I mean, I do very much enjoy talking about, even arguing, poetics. I also have no qualms about dropping names, relating conversations, talking about my experiences and even relying on those to even the playing field for my arguments, though I try very hard not to go beyond that. (Mostly because I believe there are a great number of naked emperors in the poetry world.)

It becomes very different when praise is directed at yourself from a third party. On one hand it’s useful to provide quick entry into my project, and what’s being said is not invalid. Still. . .still it’s quite hard to deal with. I’d almost much rather have done the entire thing through a persona, if such were possible, which I’m afraid makes me come of as aloof sometimes, in my non-eager courting of reviews.

I think I thought I thunk a thought

Thusfar, one of my most fascinating classes this semester has been my oft-alluded to Law and Philosophy Seminar on Emotion, Cognition, and Law – in no small part because we’re currently addressing mental states in my Criminal Law class. It’s really interesting to watch how the legal profession has created a workable theory of human psychology vis-a-vis crime: e.g., the crime of “passion,” for which a defendant becomes more culpable if they’ve gone through a “cooling off” period. And while one can easily and truthfully say that unless one is dealing with a psychopathic individual, that all thought is concurrent with and colored by many emotions and moods, and that even our “rational” thought is often deeply colored by emotion which causes us to make completely irrational decisions (smoking, driving over 55 on the highway) yet this does not deter the law from neatly splitting reason and emotion. Well, not that the law *does* but the language that the law uses seems to, which creates a tension in how potential jurors might approach issues.

The format of the class makes it all the more enjoyable, with visiting scholars each week. Norm Finkel and Jonathan Marks were the two most recent, and thus far my favorites.

Protest Notes

The school’s paper keeps printing negative takes on the protest (they refuse to print responses to those articles and letters to the editors). Two of the most recent letters were ridiculous.

One was a fairly embarrassing screed against Vietnam era protestors (?!?) as being dangerously misguided and wrong. I felt as though the protest was some kind of odd trigger for this poor man – one of those otherwise jovial uncles who was by some chance associative link catapulted back in time to refight a particularly traumatic rhetorical battle which was lost 30 years ago.

The other was from a judge who was apparently under the impression that the student protest had taken place inside a courtroom and that we should have displayed the same reservation and respect that prominent civil rights leaders had in the courtroom. ‘Cause I’m absolutely sure that Marshall and King would thoughtfully point out at *political speeches given by their opponents* that “those segregationalist racists really had some intellectually defensible points after all.”

I was also told that some of the student groups are now under surveillance. (Cheery Wave!) “Hello Alberto!”