Fridays are Fun, and Saturdays Satisfactory, but Sundays Suck.

So, I haven’t updated this blog since October, and with good reason. My life is not that interesting. As a law student, I spend 40+ hours a week reading cases depicting varying stories. “A US citizen in Afghanistan is arrested. Constitutional challenge: can he be indefinitely detained as an enemy combatant under the AUMF, or does the Non-Detention Act supersede?” Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004). Eh, politics. The Mastersons sell the Sines a ranch and orally tack on a safeguard: the Mastersons can buy back their ranch at any time. The Mastersons go bankrupt, and the bank tries to re-purchase the asset, their ranch, for $50,000. The Sines say no, this buyback could only occur by a family member. Can parol evidence be allowed? Masterson v. Sine, 68 Cal. 2d 222 (1968). Eh.

I go to work in the morning, which is fun, because I interact with undergraduates who actually enjoy what they’re learning (artsy things like religion in America, because they don’t feel the need to be practical quite yet). Then I go to school for 6 hours, which isn’t bad, unless the Internet for some reason isn’t working that day.


A by-product of a day at work: guess which one I am?

“I don’t care about this,” seems to be a familiar law school phrase. A majority of students say it. “I don’t care about this oral argument,” or “I don’t care about the reading - I have outlining to do!” The sad thing is that everyone lies. We all care about what grades we get. We all care about the 15 minutes of oral argument – will we forget Federal Rules of Evidence 702? What if I say “I” instead of Appellant? We all care about getting cold-called only to realize that whoops, I didn’t read X v. Y today. ☹

I gained 25 pounds since starting law school, and I finally came to the conclusion while here that maybe I shouldn’t drink alcohol if I don’t like throwing up. Casual invitations to lunch or to go out drinking on Thursdays aren’t really so exciting when your only menu option is a salad with fat-free dressing and grilled chicken and when you order diet cokes and pretend like they’re rum-and-cokes so you don’t have to be the only sober one at the table. Moments spent neither studying nor at the gym seem like wasted time.


Waiting for Oral Argument.

I went to the Museum of Natural History a few weeks ago (despite a sudden deluge and my tragic lack of an umbrella) to see a special Human Origins Today lecture about Homo floresiensis, the midgets of Flores. My complete lack of any academic questions, combined with the group of Deaf students signing to one another all around me without my understanding a single word, led me to realize that maybe it is better to stay in my room and read more about claim preclusion (which seems sort of exactly the same as issue preclusion) rather than facing the world filled with so many wonderful things that I love that I will never have the opportunity to examine in-depth.



Homo floresiensis casts