The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I just got back last night from 2 weeks of international travel, which unfortunately prevented me from posting regularly. I plan on posting a travelogue, so I might not go into many details about the trip here until I have, but I wanted to say something about my absense lest all my "fans" be worried that I'd abandoned my blogging. Nope, no such luck ;-)

This week will be my last in Washington and it will be intense in its own way. Lots of miscellaneous errands to run, school stuff to start coordinating, more job search activities, packing, finishing up some work from my job, and, since, 'tis the season, some Huey Lewis and the News concerts. I thought I was up for it, but jetlag and a nasty cold is not going to make this week very much fun.

When I was away on my travels I was in parts of the world that, though perfectly fine while I was there, aren't particularly stable places. During that time the terror level in the US was raised to orange, which made me wonder if perhaps I was better off staying where I was.

But then it came out that the warnings were based on old information, and once again it felt like the American public was being used as a pawn in the politics of fear. For a brief moment I feared terrorism, but it quickly gave way to a more plausible and real fear of my government.

I got back to the United States and endured an arduous journey on the Super Shuttle while it dropped off a bunch of people at hotels near the Capitol before getting to my erstwhile home in DC. My ordinary culture shock from two weeks away suddenly multiplied at the sight of all the roadblocks and checkpoints. I thought things were bad before I left; when I came back they somehow managed to be worse.

I don't mean worse in terms of being vulnerable to hypothetical terrorist acts. I mean worse in terms keeping the people even further away from their government. The ability to freely access it, to "peaceably ... assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances" (see the First Amendment) is fundamentally important to our notion of freedom. We need to start asking ourselves how many incursions onto it can be tolerated until there's no freedom left to protect.

Posted on 8/11/04 but really should have been on 8/10.

The summer is wrapping up, gosh darnit, and I'm running around trying to get ready. Hence the lack of blogging.

This week I left Washington and returned to Boston, moving into my new home for the duration: my mom's.

This is an unexpected twist in certain ways. She used to live in New Jersey, and still did so when I began my first year. But she's always wanted to live in Boston, may have been jealous that I was getting to, and so moved into my neighborhood - two blocks closer to school than I lived.

So I did the only logical thing - I moved in with her. Unlike my last roommate (well, not the DC one), she cleans up after herself... she doesn't smoke in the house... and perhaps most importantly, she does not have a crowing alarm clock that goes off at 5:30 in the morning.

Of course, I'm 30 years old, I'm still in school, and I live with my mother. I was commenting to friends, "Where did I go wrong?!"

But so far so good, we've survived the week. Amazingly my room is all essentially unpacked and organized. I'm astonished, I can't remember having a room that was organized. I think it's been years. This is still a transition though: I'll be up and down the East Coast next week in the waning hours of my summer vacation. September is the beginning of normal life. To the extent that life in law school is ever normal...

Actually posted 8/21.

I finally finished my travelogue from my two-week trip halfway around the world [link to the post where I alluded to it]. I went to Israel, the Balkans, and Germany. It was about 14 pages in a word document so I split it up into the three sections.

Edit 8/23/04: I'm working on making some edits so, for instance, ALL the sentences make sense grammatically, and things like that. So check back...

Edit 8/25/04: Most of the sentences should now make sense. I may still clean it up and clarify, but I think it's generally safe to read now...

I spent the day on campus running school errands and attending an orientation for the journal. The new 1Ls were there in force as well, running around looking a combination of proud and bewildered. Sitting in the lobby watching them pass by I could immediately identify them, although granted I was aided by the fact that unlike lots of the 2Ls and 3Ls I'd never seen them before. Their body language was different, more upright in a way. They had not yet become stooped with the burdens of carrying their books or the stress that slowly weighs you down the first year.

More interesting were the 2Ls. We greeted each other and compared our summers and our courseloads. This is where we finally get interesting and differentiate ourselves, where for better or worse we are finally in charge of our own destiny (at least more so than 1Ls with their prescribed regimen). We're a year apart from the incoming 1Ls, but somehow it seems like a lifetime.

Edit 11/26: Per request below (and it's a good idea anyway) I finally syndicated the blog.

I milked it for all it was worth, down to the waning moments. Three and a half months, spent working with international IP in Washington, visiting Cambodia, Israel, and the places formerly known as Yugoslavia, and, for good measure, because I could, indulging in 12 Huey Lewis and the News concerts... I also spent time with friends and family, including some relatives I hadn't met before.

It was probably one of the most interesting summers of my life. People have been asking me how it was and I've been responding, "Thorough." Unusual opportunities were presented to me, and I was lucky enough to be able to seize all of them.

Edit: posted on 8/31.

My course schedule for this semester has not yet solidified, even though classes began yesterday. I know I am enrolled in one called "Copyright and Rhetoric." It has several focuses: one, on the presence one needs to comport oneself with to physically deliver an argument. Another is the study of rhetorical techniques in writing, and at the same time there's also the study of the policy arguments behind the copyright debates.

The class meets for three hours straight, and in the final hour of the first meeting Richard Stallman (RMS) of the Free Software Foundation gave a guest lecture about how words are deceptively used by those who would have intellectual property be, well, property. (I was happy to see RMS again. A few months before heading to law school I'd met him and told him I was going to law school. He tried to dissuade me, concerned that while I was off in school real battles would be won and lost without my assistance. Three years of uselessness while obtaining degree seemed a steep price. But I was steadfast in my commitment and he wished me well. Now he's concerned that my financial needs - read: loans - will further stymie my altruism. I'm having a harder time reassuring him on that point because my own concerns are so similar. Still, the idealism itself remains unscathed.)

He made several excellent points, the kind that sound completely obvious but you wouldn't have considered before they were pointed out, at which point you wonder how you didn't manage to think of them on your own. One such objection was that it makes as much sense to lump the discrete legal doctrines of patent, copyright, and trademark under the heading of intellectual property as the discretely different legal regimens of water regulation, rules for blood handling, ordinances on disposing of chemicals, and milk subsidization under the title "fluid law." Of course, with the "fluid law" example you at least base it on the fact that all the aforementioned objects of regulation are, in fact, fluids, whereas "intellectual property" is not actually property in any way that we've considered property to be in our law before. (Or at least not in the American legal tradition.) RMS also noted how insidious, superfluous words kept ending up sneaking into the policy discussion. Words like "protection." Will the song be ruined if it's played? he asked. Of course not, he answered himself. Then why does it need "protection?"

Although I have my definite leanings, I can still see merit in the policy discussion of whether it's best to treat "intellectual property" (using the term for the moment myself as the shorthand catchall of common parlance) legally the way it had been at its Jeffersonian origins, or if it's better to pursue a more comodified approach, as the advocates of "property" term would have it. But no amount of discourse will result in a reasoned decision if the discussion is warped by rhetorical pejorative.

Edits made 9/1. More 9/7.