Week 29 4/15/03

My last quarter of my first year of law school has begun! And let me tell you, this quarter started off so nicely. Since I had 3 new classes, each class started off nice and slow. My Constitutional Law (Con Law) class didn’t even meet for most of the first two weeks because my professor was on a trip. So the first two weeks of Spring quarter were like butter.

Things are picking up more now, but 4 classes is still way better than 5. I’ll tell you about my classes.

First, at 9:30am, Monday through Thursday I have Con Law with Professor Fitzpatrick. So far, Con Law is my favorite class of the quarter. Fitzpatrick is a very good lecturer - she marches right along, she’s enthusiastic, she’s organized and she’s very smart. She’s well known in International Law circles apparently. Right now we’re studying the limits of the power of the Judiciary to review and rule on “the law.”

Then, at 10:30am, Monday through Thursday I have Property (same as last quarter). Property so far has been very difficult this quarter (and the end of last quarter). We’re studying all this arcane stuff about fee simples subject to open, or fee simples subject to condition subsequent. The problem is that there is a lot of vocabulary to learn. And of course the case books (and Professor Hicks) just march right into the theory and application before telling us what the terms mean. Like the beginning of law school, we’re learning a new vocabulary while learning complex legal theory and policy at the same time. It has been somewhat frustrating. Professor Hicks has been sympathetic to our plight, he’s very nice. But he’s also somewhat abstract, so it’s hard to pay attention to him sometimes. I’ll look around the room and see people staring off in various directions. I fight the urge to play chess on my computer (the computer beats me every time).

Then, concluding the morning marathon of classes, is Criminal Law (Crim Law) at 11:30am, Monday through Friday. I have Professor Junker. He’s a very nice guy, and funny. He’s somewhat of a scatterbrained lecturer though. He so far has been going very slowly. He reminds me of my Civ Pro professor (Schnapper) in his lecture style. It’s obvious they are both smart people, but not so good at lecturing. The Crim Law reading has been the most interesting though. That’s because people get prosecuted for crazy things.

I have Basic Legal Skills (BLS) on Wednesdays at 2:30pm and Fridays at 10:30am. The big BLS assignment for this quarter is writing an appellate brief and arguing in the Moot Court Appellate competition. We just got the assignment for that today. It is a very interesting case about the “under god” phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance. (It’s based on a real case, the Supreme Court is deciding whether to hear the case) The plaintiff is suing the state, Congress and the school district in which his daughter is enrolled, claiming that the “under god” is state supported religion, and the use of the phrase in public schools violates the Constitution. Cutting edge stuff.

There’s a funny story about our Spring class schedule I will tell you. On the last day of classes last quarter, we got an e-mail from the administration that it would be changing our Spring quarter schedule to have class every day at 2:30. The e-mail said that the change was because the professors thought there should be a “substantive” break between classes (i.e. that we couldn’t handle having three classes in a row). Well there was a BIG uproar about that. We’d had access to the Spring schedule for many weeks. The schedule had been available to the professors since last summer. And they decided to change it (for poor reasons) at the last minute. They must have gotten many, many e-mails from us because the very next morning the Assistant Dean met with the professors and reinstated the previous schedule, citing lack of notice. What were they thinking, changing our good schedule to a crappy one? We were a bunch of cranky, stressed out law students with very short fuses.

In other nail biting news, grades are available by tomorrow evening. I may be a happy, sad or indifferent little thing the rest of this week. I’ll keep you posted.

Things are moving really well on the summer job (internship) front. Professor Ramasastry (remember her? The one who wrote me the e-mail about my journal? And the one for whom I’m volunteering?) asked me what I was doing for the summer, and I told her I didn’t know, but that I’d like to do public interest tech law stuff if possible. She told me she knew someone who ran a privacy activism nonprofit in Seattle and that I should contact her. So I did, and this woman (Deborah Pierce) was interested in having me work for her. I talked with her on the phone on Monday and we’re meeting in person next Friday. The phone conversation was great. She was very cool and I liked what her organization did a lot (www.privacyactivism.org). Basically she founded Privacy Activism to promote consumer privacy and to educate the public on privacy issues. The really interesting thing they do is they create “games” that are meant to educate people about privacy rights and issues as they “play” them. The only game up and running right now is Carabella, which is about a girl (Carabella, pictured here) who buys music and her privacy and fair use rights. Not only do I think the organization is cool, but I also liked the things she thought I could work on. One of those is researching the law and writing for the web page and the Carabella game. I’d be writing both for legally trained people and for the public. This appeals to me because I want to keep in touch with the outreach side of legal public interest work. It’s hard to disentrench myself from the legal writing style my BLS professor has hammered into me. Gotta remember my roots! Possibly the coolest thing about this job is that I could apply for a public interest grant that the Shidler Center for Law, Commerce and Technology funds (it’s $4500!). Ramasastry told me that working for Privacy Activism would be a “shoe-in” to get that grant. I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, but those are encouraging words. $4500 is way more than a drop in the bucket and could really help offset rising tuition costs.

The final (discouraging) news is that the UW Law School ranking in US News and World Report dropped 19 points (from 26 to 45). Though many people know the rankings aren’t the be and end all, such a big drop is bad news bears. One reason for the drop is because the Dean’s office gave US News the wrong job placement numbers for the class of 2001. They gave a number of 75% when it was actually 93%. Job placement refers to how many people have jobs 9 months out of law school. There were some other numbers that dropped as well, but that is the obvious one. The worst part is that US News contacted the Dean’s office and asked them if they were sure the job placement number was correct since it was so much lower than previous years’ numbers. Well, the Dean’s office said “yup, it’s right.” And then, months later, the day before the school ranking issue was published, the Dean realized the mistake. Grrrrr. It would all be ok, because rankings would just go back up next year, except that the drop in ranking could affect the quality of students who matriculate here (ESPECIALLY in light of the drastically increasing tuition figures. Yeah, that’s good business practice, raise the price while lowering the quality.). Having less good students lowers other numbers making it harder to climb out of the hole. So, in an effort to mitigate the potential damage students (including myself) have offered to contact admitted students to tell them why the ranking dropped, why we like it here and answer questions they have, in order to try to get the good ones to come here. I’m really starting to lose confidence in the Dean. I know people make mistakes, but the combined administrative experience I’ve had makes me wonder.

Generally things are good here. The weather warms, the sun sets later (it sets at like 7:30pm now!) and more flowers bloom (these are the Cherry trees on UW’s quad).

I’ve convinced Cedar to entertain the possibility of thinking about maybe getting a dog sometime. That would be fun and exciting.

I had a yucky cold last week and before that I played ultimate in Walla Walla. That was great fun.

That’s all for now. Until next time then!

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