Archive for August, 2007
Scare you to death, Work you to death, Bore you to death
This maxim for the evolution of the law student’s confused meandering toward matriculation is so far all too true in my experience, by which I apologize for the relative lack of posting lately. Technology giveth where law review taketh away however - I’m composing this post on my Crackberry 8800 which I highly recommend.
Southern District of Texas Judge Sam Kent takes a Leave, Speculation Follows
As reported in Legal Trade, Houston’s Clear Thinkers, the Houston Chronicle and AbovetheLaw, U.S. District Judge Sam Kent will be temporarily absent. No reason for the absence has been given, leading many to conclude that it can’t be good, speculating that it results from some sort of complaint against Judge Kent or perhaps an illness.
AbovetheLaw […]
Affirmative Action in American Law Schools - Help or Hinderance
Following my post Not So Long Ago, Race in Law School, I stumbled across the work of Richard Sander who ignited an intense debate in 2004 with A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools, 57 STAN. L. REV. 367 (2004) (.pdf). Sander, whose son is bi-racial and has spent the majority of […]
More on the Billable Hour, Charting Your Own Course
I recent wrote about the billable hour here in The Death of the Billable Hour, Wishing Does Not Make it So. Susan Cartier Liebel left a comment with a link to her excellent post The Cockroach of the Legal Profession - The Billable Hour. The most surprising fact - one that many lawyers are not […]
Jury Duty
I had jury duty today. It was originally scheduled for February but I rescheduled to fit it in the pathetically short break between our summer and fall semesters. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m a student so I guess I could claim an exemption, but I didn’t want to get out of it. Far from the […]
A Course on the Legal Profession
“Indiana Law faculty recently voted to revise our 1L curriculum to make room for a new 4-credit Legal Professions course.”
Bill Henderson at the Empirical Legal Studies Blog: A 4-Credit 1L Course on the Legal Profession
This seems like a very, very good idea to me. Did any of us have even the inkling of a clue […]
Not so Long Ago… Race in Law School
This excerpt from a recent Texas Monthly article on the creation of Texas Southern University School of Law caught my eye -
… its original purpose was not to provide black Texans with educational opportunities but to justify denying them those opportunities. In 1946 a young black man in Houston named Heman Marion Sweatt applied to […]
Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Computer Forensics
I only have a week left of my summer “break” but I think I found one last project to sneak in - making a forensically sound copy of my hard drive - punk rock style.
Law Technology News: Do-It-Yourself Forensics
The Death of the Billable Hour, Wishing Does Not Make it So
Scott Turow notes that “[f]or too many litigators, our life increasingly is a highly paid serfdom—a cage of relentless hours, ruthless opponents, constant deadlines and merciless inefficiencies.” His culprit? The Billable Hour.
When I left the government for private practice in 1986, the hours expectation for young lawyers was 1,750-1,800 hours a year in the large […]
Recommended Reading for before Starting Law School, The Legal Analyst, A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law
Before you start law school at Houston they give you a list of recommended books, most of which are at least marginally useful. I particularly recommend the Buffalo Creek Disaster and A Civil Action if you’re looking for the most interesting of the lot. I flipped through some of the other stuff such as Acing […]