Turtles all the way down

I originally planned on writing about the changing face of copyright in a digital world. My thesis was going to be about how, once you turn content (music, movies, etc.) into zeros and ones, and/or make it available over the Internet, you lose control over it, DRM or not. Then I would analyze how the law is catching up with this basic fact, and how the law should encourage copyright holders to embrace the inevitable conclusion that content will be free (or at least low-cost). Or something like that.

But my initial research into this area found the topic and subject matter to be crowded. There are dozens, it not hundreds of law review articles discussing matters in this general area, so I feel as if I would have little to say aside that would be new and insightful.

So, I switched over to my backup topic, food allergies. My plan was to provide an overview of federal and state legislation, with a focus on how it impacts children. I would then summarize the case law surrounding and interpreting this legislation, then compare US laws to Canada and the EU. There are only about 10 on-topic law review articles that I could find in this area. So I think I have some room in which to work.

However, my attempts at finding a faculty advisor have failed so far. At this point it would be beneficial to discuss my progress with someone more well-versed in legal research.

So far so good with classes. Legislative Process was last night and promised to be the dullest class yet. However the professor seems nice, she kept it interesting, and even acknowledged its potential for dullness while arguing that we’ll think otherwise at the end of the semester. Better yet, she’s canceled class for Wednesday, as she’ll be at the Democratic National Convention.

It was nice seeing my fellow students again, and catching up with them and what they did over the summer.

Tonight is Appellate Advocacy and Civil Procedure. A reading of the CivPro prof’s syllabus appears to indicate that he is a bit formal and old-school. We’ll see.

School starts up tomorrow. I expected to spend my last weekend of freedom relaxing, playing with the kids as much as I can, and ramping up for the semester.

Instead, early Saturday morning, the kids’ computer came down with a virus. I ran the virus scanner to fix it, but it took almost all morning for the check to run. I also ran it scans on all of the other computers in the house, just in case.

Then, I bit the bullet and decided to move one of my websites to a new hosting provider. Had it up and running in a couple of hours, modulo a sticky issue with a configuration file that got munged in the transition between Linux and Windows. I cut traffic over to the new server soon after. So far I’m thrilled with the performance at the new hosting provider, and I’m giving a tentative thumbs-up to Lunar Pages.

We took our younger son’s broken dresser across town to be fixed, stopping for lunch at a crowded Subway. We were in back for a little bit of quiet time, during which my wife took a trip to the grocery store and I fiddled with the settings on my newly-transitioned web site.

Around 4pm, I headed out to play in a neighborhood softball game. Our hero went 3-for-4 with two runs scored. Of course, out of my 4 at bats, the kids only watched the one in which I struck out. Now how will I get them to listen to me when I teach them how to hit?

That evening we took in some of the soon-to-be-over Olympics and after the kids were in bed, my wife and I watched Eastern Promises, a halfway decent thriller. Mildly recommended.

At 6am the whole family was wakened by one of our smoke alarms chirping. Not going off - chirping. Although all of our smoke alarms are wired into house power, they need 9 volt backup batteries. And if one of those batteries is about to die, the alarm will chirp. Loudly. Did I mention it was at 6am? As an aside, this happens every year or so and it always seems to occur early in the morning.

Awake, I fiddled some more with the web site, fixing a feature that was broken, then after breakfast had a couple of quick games of Yahtzee with my older son, then we headed out to pick up the now-fixed dresser.

I spent a couple of hours in the afternoon working researching my law review article, then we all headed to the gym. The boys were looking forward to climbing the rock wall, but the gym had mysteriously changed its the rock wall’s hours, so we arrived right after it closed. Instead we let them play racketball, after which my wife and I hit the weights. I was still sore from softball but managed a decent workout regardless.

Once home again, we cooked steaks and had a family game night. The boys played chess, then we all came together for Carcassone (a very cool game - highly recommended) in which I got trounced.

At this point it was just about bedtime, so the boys went down to read to each other while I read a couple of law review articels for my paper research. It has begun…

One week of freedom. One week of being home early in the evening. One week of being able to play with my kids before they go to bed. One week of eating dinner at home. One week of at least having the option of getting a good night’s sleep.

Law school starts again on Monday and I’m just not looking forward to it. Sure, I enjoy the material, the challenge, the learning, the hanging out with all those bright people.

On the other hand, there are the inevitable boring lectures, the mind games, the research and papers, and of course trying to balance all of this with work and family life. Not easy.

And it will last four months.

Some days I vacillate between feeling like I know so little that I need the intense experience of another semester, and feeling like I’m doing ok at learning the law in spite of school.

Every law school has a law review, and mine is no exception. Basically, it is a student-run academic journal. Law Reviews also differ from other academic journals in that articles are rigorously cite-checked and fact-checked.

Law review is considered by some to be the most prestigious honor that can be bestowed upon a law student. Others tell me that that it’s not only boring, but a waste of time.

We’ll see.

I have two duties this year as new law review staff: cite checking, and writing an article suitable for publication.

I’ll have three or four cite-checking assignments. My understanding is that they will each have two phases. In the first, I will gather basic information on about 40 references in an article submitted to the review. In the second, I will actually obtain physical copies of those references.

That doesn’t sound too hard, but it doesn’t sound very exciting either. And somewhere in this process I will have to read the article to proof it, including making sure that its citations are all in Blue Book form.

Again, doesn’t sound hard or exciting. But maybe I’ll reneg on the not-hard part because I’m told that I’ll only have three days to do the first phase start to finish.

For the article, I’m not scared. The requirements are a 25 page paper with 125 citations. I’m told the latter is not as difficult to achieve as it sounds. For the E-Commerce course I took this summer (when am I going to get my grade, eh?), I wrote a 20 page “law review” style paper with about 65 citations. It took time, but it wasn’t bad.

Speaking of time, the paper is due to be written on a regimented schedule over the course of the entire school year. So I’ll have time. Hopefully. If the crush of two lecture courses and Moot Court (where I’ll be writing an appellate brief and making oral arguments) doesn’t consume all of it.

As for a topic, I have two candidates. One plays to my strengths and the other doesn’t. The topic that I have a better background for is an analysis of the changing laws surrounding digital copyright and the near-impossibility of enforcement of most of these laws thanks to the Internet. The other is a survey of laws in all 50 states, as well as federal laws, regarding food allergies, with a focus on food allergies in children. Right now I’m leaning towards the latter.

We’ll see.

At any one point in my career, I’ve always been writing something. But now that I more or less write for a living, I’ve had to get more serious about doing it well and making sure that what I write is correct. Proofing your own work is hard, and as a bonus, also boring. But, over the last few months I’ve found two techniques that seem to work reasonably well. Neither technique is foolproof and mistakes will still slip through, but I’ve used both to improve my writing.

Read it backwards: Normal people proof their writing by starting on page one and working linearly through the document. You need to do this because you want to make sure that the document flows logically from point to point. However, this logical flow can distract you from analyzing the mechanics of your writing, such as spelling and grammar. I’m notorious for making typos that slip past word processor spell-checking as well as my own.

The solution? Read it backwards. Start on the last sentence of the last page. Read each sentence in order, but read the sentences out of order (what I mean is read the last sentence first, then the second-to-last sentence next, and so on, but read each sentence itself in order).

This will disrupt the logical flow of the document and allow you to focus on spelling, grammar, and other low-level mechanical aspects of your writing. The result? I always find those hidden typos using this technique.

Another advantage to reading it backwards occurs when you’re proofing a lengthy document. Once your document is 30 pages or longer, it’s likely that when you read it in order, you’ll concentration and focus will be far higher on page one than on page 30. By reading it backwards, your focus on page 30 will be higher than it otherwise would be, thus increasing the likelihood that you’ll find mistakes on those later pages.

Give it a break: Once you finish a draft, let it rot. Don’t try to proof something you’ve just finished writing. Give it some time off to in order for your brain to regain some objectivity. Ideally, give your document a week between passes of proofreading, but in reality that is often too long. But try to let it rot for at least a day or two. You’ll read your own writing as if it were someone else’s, and you won’t be so close to it. Your concentration and focus will remain higher throughout the task because your writing will seem more fresh.

So far my first semester as a 2L is setting records. A whopping $491 for books. And those are just the “required” books. On the bright side, if you consider the cost of books on a dollar-per-weight metric, they are downright cheap.

I don’t know which hurts more, my wallet or my arms after carrying them for several blocks.

Oh, and the campus bookstore threw in a free can of shaving cream. A small one.

For summer session I took an E-Commerce class. Interesting stuff, and highly relevant to my 20 some odd years in software and communications.

Attached is a paper I wrote for the class. It discusses the rather unintuitive current practice of selling licenses to software rather than the software itself, and what might happen if this were not the case. I don’t claim to have any particularly unique insight here, but am happy to share.

Software licensing paper

For my Spring Legal Writing course we had to write an appellate brief. Our assignment was based on a real Fourth Amendment case, where the appellant lost in trial court, won on appeal to the 9th Circuit, then lost again at a 9th Circuit panel review. He appealed to the Supreme Court, but the Court refused to hear the case.

We had to write a brief in support of the appellant (our client) as if he had been granted certiorari. The issue of law was whether police officers could arbitrarily question a motorist detained at a traffic stop without first establishing reasonable suspicion that the motorist was presently, or about to, break the law.

Our case was a loser for two reasons. The Supreme Court has grown increasingly law-and-order oriented over the last 25 years, thus narrowing motorists Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Second, our client had a shady enough past and the circumstances of the stop were such that the Court would likely find that the arresting officers had acted with reasonable discretion.

Nonetheless, it was a blast to write this brief. Ok, maybe it wasn’t that much fun, but it was a great exercise, not unlike a workout at the gym that leaves you breathless and in pain but ultimately helps you get in better shape.

In re-reading my brief for the first time in two months, I cringed a few times. It is far from perfect. So take my analysis with as many grains or boxes of salt as you’d like.

And if Mr. Lionel Mendez ever reads this…sorry, man…we tried our best…

msb-appellate-brief

Last semester’s grade are in.

I’m happy with them. I did better than I thought.

I learned two very important things this time around. First, that attending class and reading casebooks, while good things to do, are not what prepares you for exams. Studying hornbooks, other people’s outlines, and taking practice exams are usually more worthwhile.

Second, that having a good study / discussion group is key. Mine was great, and I owe a good chunk on my GPA to them.