Grades continue to leak in, although one of mine still hasn't been reported. Consequently I've still not bothered to check the ones that have come in. Of course, I'm not sure I'm going to check them even when they are all reported. However, I may have inadvertently discovered one of them when I went to meet with a professor yesterday. It seems I may have gotten a B+ in Antitrust and IP. I have to laugh at my utter pathos. It was a seminar class, which therefore had no curve, and I STILL couldn't get a damn A. (It's possible, however, that I may have gotten an A-; he didn't remember precisely.) But screw it, the grade just isn't the point. I really liked the class and it opened my eyes up to a whole body of law that I'd been avoiding, fearing it was dry and arcane. It turns out you can do interesting things with antitrust laws, things that people (like me) who think that the IP cartels have gotten too powerful may be able to use in their arsenal to help restore a more reasonable balance. So I'm glad I got to take the class because in the long run I got something more valuable from it than merely a boost in my GPA (which even a B+ would do).
As I may have mentioned before, it was the first course for which I wrote a paper. I met with the professor in order to get advice from him on what I could have done better. NEXT time maybe I'll get the A, but this time I was really feeling my way in the dark. Still, it wasn't a bad paper. He acknowledged the value of some of my arguments, but his general criticism seemed to apply to structure. He said that my strongest argument was buried and that I took too much time making points that didn't really promote my contention. To a degree, the nature of the assignment drove this approach: it wasn't really a research paper. We were only expected to use the cases we'd read. So I took my argument and (more or less) lined it up one by one against those cases' holdings. A better approach, I agree, would have been to have come out, guns blazing, in support of my main argument, and then used the cases subordinately to simply buttress the analysis. (On the other hand, to do that properly would probably have required more research.)
In the course of making this recommendation he related this (paraphrased) exchange between a lawyer and Justice Frankfurter:
Lawyer: There are 11 reasons why this statute is unconstitutional.
Frankfurter: Give me one good one.
It's a good allegory to keep in mind for the future, I think.