The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I actually wish that Huey Lewis had done more to lobby for Kerry. He'd already suffered the negative consequences of having made the public endorsement, but arguably he didn't reap the full benefit he might have been able to achieve.

I wouldn't suggest that people vote based only on a celebrity endorsement, no matter how much they admire the celebrity. But as an opinion of someone whom you respect, I think it's worth considering. When certain fans said that Huey had no business endorsing a politician because he was "just a singer" I think they demeaned their own appreciation of him, robbing him of the esteem that might justify their own (sometimes tremendous) interest in his career. (In other words, what does it say about you if you spend all this emotional energy following someone too vapid to have intelligent opinions about important things?)

But the main reason I think Huey should have done more is the same reason I think everyone should have done more. Sitting on the sidelines when something of this importance is at stake is not good. This election is about a presidency that has defied the principles of freedom establishing it, that has thumbed its nose at the very premise of international cooperation, that has further subordinated the interests of individual citizens to those few who own corporations. The very future of America is at stake, and all who have a vested interest in it are entitled to, and should be, involved in shaping it.

Edited 11/6.

An Afterthought

Whether it's Huey Lewis or Bruce Springsteen, the hostility directed towards musicians who endorse or even actively lobby for candidates is misplaced.

First of all, only those who seem to promote liberal politics seem to be so excoriated. Country music has been full of conservative, pro-Bush propaganda and it gets away with it all the time, completely unchallenged.

Secondly, and disturbingly, one of the criticisms against these musician endorsements has been that these people "are just singers," and somehow therefore not entitled to have an opinion. But this view raises the question: are there any other professions where having an opinion should be so verboten? Should plumbers need to keep quiet? Surely not, so why so musicians?

The soundest argument against musician endorsements seems to be rooted in the notion that the celebrity they now leverage to make their opinions widely known was created and bestowed upon them by ordinary people, the fans, under the implicit condition that the fame be only applied to the musical space. Some of the negativity towards these musicians seems to reflect a sense of betrayal, as if being able to make political statements wasn't part of the deal when the fans made the musicians rich and famous enough to be able to command attention to their political preferences.

But this viewpoint trivializes appreciation of their talent. Why appreciate the music in the first place? Is it just that it sounds nice, or is it that there's a reason the music sounds nice? Isn't it reasonable to expect that people with the talent to create fine music might also have the intellectual power to contemplate issues beyond their professional sphere? Particularly those musicians who are known for creative autonomy, whose work represents their own artistic expression - these people may in fact be among the most capable citizens in our population.

And who better to hold a mirror up to us, to make us look hard at the issues affecting our lives but the artists? This is their job! When we instead treat them like circus acts, requiring them to perform only for our iterant amusement, we cheapen their craft and denigrate their talent. We reduce their music to a mere commercial product and deprive ourselves of anything meaningful their musical art could offer us. No wonder we don't want to let them express a broader opinion. Our resentment of them doing so suggests a problem more fundamental, that popular music has become detached from artistic expression. That unfortunate rift may well be the real issue at hand.

Edited 11/6 and slightly more 11/19.

Part IV

Since Johnny Colla made the post last year on his website concerning the Iraq war, he's subsequently made a few others, including one more directly condemning Bush and imploring everyone to vote. And Huey Lewis has also joined him in making a public endorsement of Kerry on a website devoted to the band. It was fairly mild and reasonable:

Folks-

I have never before endorsed a Presidential candidate publicly, nor do I think it's a generally good idea for celebrities to do so, but I'm endorsing John Kerry for President. I think the war in Iraq was ill conceived, has been proven to be a big mistake, and it's time for a new team to try to internationalize the fight against terrorism, and restore respect for the United States. It's so sad to remember that after 9/11 the whole world empathized with us. I don't believe Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld are malicious, but I believe they got it wrong in Iraq, and it's time for a change.

But it unleashed a hornets nest. Whereas I took the presidential endorsements as a huge validation of my own sense of citizenship, others took it as a threat. They wanted the band, it seemed, to occupy a separate space in their lives, far away from mundane political realities.

I could understand a negative reaction by the people who supported Bush (at least the reasonable people – the right wing zealots who essentially damned Huey in immediate response get little sympathy from me) because it's sort of hard to admire someone who seems to be so flawed. Surely he must be flawed if THIS is whom he prefers for President, they must have thought. This isn't a small matter of subjective taste where a difference in opinion is of little consequence. This is an opinion on something much more profound and important. These fans may very well have had the exact opposite reaction I did, but for the very same reasons: while for me the opinion validated his thoughtfulness as an individual, and consequently validated mine, for the Bush supporters it presented a conflict. Either Huey or the Bush-supporting fan, one of them had to have been wrong.

What particularly bothered me, though, in the resulting firestorm on the fan website, were the people who agreed with the choice of candidates but still took umbrage with the public endorsement. Huey had some gall, it seemed, to get involved in something political. He should have known his place and stayed in it, deferentially silent. There were many negative comments in this vein. How dare he do this. "Shut up and sing, Huey," they demanded. They can't have their favorite musicians getting all uppity and having opinions, now, can they...

I suspect, though, that what many of them feared was not the political preference itself but that they were being challenged, by the very focus of their attention no less, to pay attention to something more important than him. Pop culture swallows up an inordinate amount of resources and attention in this country, far more than more crucial things like civic involvement often do. It has its place, but we'd all be better off if the amount of resources devoted to celebrity worship was instead directed to something more meaningful. Perhaps this perceived challenge is what made those fans so defensive, because it caused them to question, whether they were ready to or not, what it meant to them to be a fan and possibly re-evaluate its place if it had consumed more of their life than it should have.

Edited 11/6 and slightly more 11/19.

Part III

Last year I posted a link to the website of Johnny Colla, a musician in Huey Lewis and the News, where he had posted a negative opinion about Bush connected to the recently-begun war in Iraq. I was so taken by it, partly because I strongly agreed with his conclusion, and partly because I was so pleasantly surprised to see him take a political stand publicly. I've followed the News a long time and their public career has generally occupied a space separate from, well, lower-case news. I guess I always assumed they'd remain separate, so I found it incredibly refreshing when he broke down the wall between them.

I think part of my reaction may stem from the validation his comments ended up making on the emotional investment I've made being a fan, or as I'd prefer to put it, an admirer. My problem with the term fan is that it often connotes a superficial, emotionally-driven and irrational attraction to the object of your attention, which has little bearing on anything of substance. Though I still use the term "fan" for shorthand, I'm not comfortable with being one by that definition because it implies a certain cognitive vacancy, a need for someone else's essence to fulfill my life, which must somehow be lacking. A fan who is an admirer, by contrast, can still appreciate the achievements of another but without such appreciation being at the expense of one's own sense of self. For me the equation is that if I'm the intelligent person I aspire to be, I can only justify my interest in someone else's work, and in the person behind it, if they are all intelligent as well.

So when he articulated thoughtful opinions about the world beyond his own career, he demonstrated his own intelligence in a way that made me feel quite proud to have enjoyed his music. I always knew he was talented, but I felt I could be more honest about my appreciation of the music because I could also more appreciate the musician.

Of course, by this reasoning he could have posted anything intelligent for me to feel this way. And it's not like I thought him a dullard before. But there was something about him making the political statement that really appealed to me in a very deep way.

A few years ago I had an epiphany, that the world wouldn't run itself and people who cared about it needed to get more directly involved. I decided to be one of these people (this is the thinking that motivated me to go to law school). But I am no superhero, and I can't make the world better on my own. Other people need to speak up and take a stand as well. When he posted his thoughts, I suddenly felt much less alone in this fight. There are surprisingly few people these days with the courage to stand up for what they believe in. I'm happy he's one of them. (I wish there were more.)

His comments also helped reconcile what I sometimes feared was a conflict: I still like his music, a lot, and I've seen a lot of News concerts lately, particularly since I've begun law school. They are my favorite outlet, some respite from the buffeting and bullying of my legal education. But I am in school for a reason, to make the world a better place. I don't want to be a fan if it interferes with that sense of purpose. When he mixed politics in with his musician persona, it reassured me it didn't have to.

Edited 11/6, and slightly more on various occasions 11/9 - 11/26, 12/19 and 1/22.

Part II

I talk a lot about making a difference. This election day I really tried to.

Electionprotection.org was asking for volunteers, particularly lawyers and law students, to monitor the polls. I decided to go down to Florida to help out.

I flew down on Sunday to the Fort Lauderdale/Miami area. I met my cousin for dinner in Little Havana, where there was a raucous pro-Bush demonstration outside the restaurant (and, being Halloween, a diner dressed as Fred Flinstone on the inside). A few Kerry supporters were on the other side of the street but the Bush crowd was louder. My cousin explained that the Cuban community historically has supported Republicans, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

I had a training for the poll monitoring on Monday evening, but, not knowing they could have used volunteers earlier in the day I instead volunteered with MoveOn.org to help get out the Democratic vote. I went to the Fort Lauderdale office, which was a bustling place. Volunteers from all over the country had convened to help out with the campaign. Many of us were tasked with canvassing neighborhoods to remind previous Democratic voters to come out to the election. Others were on the phones trying to organize still more volunteers. In the morning I was given the task of rearranging the dozens of Ethernet and phone cables running all over the office. I ran new ones to reach a farther room and taped them down so people wouldn't trip. It was the kind of job where if no one noticed it meant I was successful. Not glamorous, but important nonetheless. In the afternoon I did the same kind of canvassing as the other volunteers, except it was over the phone. I generally don't like doing telephone solicitation but as I learned to hone my pitch, I got used to it. Of the people that were home, nearly all of them were friendly on the phone, and many expressed excited commitment to go out and vote for Kerry. But there were a few tough moments. One woman complained she had not received her absentee ballot, despite having made lots and lots of calls. "I'm just sick about it," she said. She didn't think she would be able to make it to the polls the next day due to a painful disability. (It turns out that disabled voters were usually able to have a poll worker bring out a ballot machine to their car, but I didn't know that yet to be able to advise her.) The other hard moment came when I asked to speak with one voter, and was told by the voice on the other end, "My father just passed away a few minutes ago." I blurted out, "I'm so sorry to hear that!" and I'm really glad that's what I said. Particularly because the first (thankfully unvoiced) thought to pop into my head was, "Had he already voted?"

I opted to do the canvassing in Fort Lauderdale, in Broward County, because I'd volunteered to do the poll monitoring in Miami-Dade county, and I didn't want to do something partisan (the canvassing) in the same county where I would be doing something non-partisan (poll monitoring). The next day I was paired up with a retired law professor to circulate among various polling places south of Miami. The idea was that there would be poll monitors stationed at every precinct (or at least every one where minority disenfranchisement was particularly feared) and the legal teams would go between them to offer particular expertise. In practice however it took a while to put all the monitoring teams into place, so early in the morning before the polls opened we went to one at a high school and settled in as the monitors themselves.

Even at that early hour it was a busy place. At 7 am there were easily 150-200 people queued up to vote. There were a lot of other people there as well, but here terminology is important. There were poll workers, who were the people who ran the polling places. There were poll watchers, who were attorneys sanctioned to be inside the precinct to watch what was going on. (These would be the people to mount the challenges if they objected to some voter, and it was feared that there would be many of these. But as I understand it the challenging didn't widely occur. At our initial polling place there was a lawyer from the Democratic Party and another from the Republican. They seemed to cancel each other out. The Republican one may not have put up much of a fuss, but the few times he came out of the polling place he demonstrated himself to be quite the asshole. It was as if he felt that he should live up to the worst liberals' stereotype of a Republican lawyer.)

Also in attendance were two other attorneys from a liberal cause to handle any disenfranchisement issues, a Republican picketer, various Democratic picketers and representatives from other liberal groups, and people handing out fliers for the local candidates in the election. There were also "good-will ambassadors" from the county, poll counters, and others who did exit polls on the voting experience. And then we were there, poll monitors from Election Protection, with our distinctive black t-shirts with bold white writing loudly informing people that they had the right to vote.

As we were monitoring we didn't really encounter any significant problems, but we suspect just being there kept the funny business to a minimum. We heard from some monitors at another precinct that earlier there had been a man from some official sounding group telling people (falsely) that if they didn't speak English they couldn't vote. But once the monitors arrived, people like that scurried away. Although we were accused of being a liberal group, and it's true the liberal causes were particularly concerned about the franchisement issues, we were really non-partisan and I was proud of that. Protecting the process was a noble cause, and one I was happy to keep separate from the politicking. It's one thing for the majority of people to choose the candidate I don't want. It's another thing for them not to choose him but get stuck with him anyway. The latter problem is much worse.

By mid-morning we had left our original polling place and gone by several more to check in on them. At all of them the turnout was huge. Up until about 10:30 lines were very long, and I imagine they grew again later in the day. The biggest problem we encountered was that people would go to the wrong polling place and not find this out until they had already waited potentially over an hour on line. Some polling places tried to minimize this problem by checking for eligibility as soon as the voter got there. Another group of polls, supervised by a Frank Hinton (whose name I want to mention because I think he should be commended), gave voters who discovered, once reaching the registration tables, that they were at the wrong place, a pass that would let them go to the head of the line at the correct place, as long as it was a polling place supervised by Hinton, who could require that his other polls recognize the passes. Most poll workers we found were serious about facilitating the vote, although some were more informed about the particulars than others. Some gave incorrect advice, for example, about using provisional ballots that we had to correct.

But even though there was no defining moment, with some great conflict that was disarmed solely because of us, there were a lot of small things we were able to do to ensure the right to vote, one voter at a time.

I had to leave by 2 to catch my flight home so the professor I was with took me back to the starting point and picked up, ironically, another law student named Cathy. He also nicely helped me change the tire on my rental car, which was completely flat. On my way to the airport I stopped to get dinner and chatted with the clerk about the election. She planned to vote when she got off work, the first time ever for her. She was nervous, but I encouraged her. I told her she had the right to vote, and as long as she was on line before the polls closed at 7 she could vote, no matter what anyone told her. I told her to bring her registration card if she had it, and if not, an ID and proof of residency. She thanked me for making it seem less daunting, and we talked about how exciting it was to be able to participate in something so important and historic.

I was a little worried, with my trip to Florida, that Floridians might resent the influx of out-of-state volunteers. I thought they might feel a bit manhandled. But people seemed happy to see us. Wearing my poll monitoring t-shirt I was thanked by more than one person for being there and for making sure their right to vote was recognized. The election didn't turn out the way I had hoped, but I know I did what I could to help it along. Next time I will do even more.

Backdated to 11/3.

Last night I finally finished moot court. This was the second moot court I'd done, and this time it was optional. By my own choice I had to write a brief and then argue it before a pretend panel of appellate judges. My topic was on antitrust law, a very confusing subject I'm starting to know a lot about, what with this brief and my Antitrust and IP seminar. That said, it was a very difficult legal question I had to write and argue about. It involved tying, which is when a company conditions the purchase of one product on the purchase of another. This kind of arrangement can have anticompetitive effects as the company can use its dominant market power in one area to exert dominance in another. The law generally frowns on anticompetitive behavior, and on tying, but not necessarily. Tying isn't always illegal, and sometimes anticompetitive behavior isn't either. Sometimes it's even encouraged. So it's a far more complicated matter to figure out if a company doing tying would have liability for an antitrust violation. I had to argue in this case that the vendor in question was not.

Originally I felt like I'd done a poor job on the brief, because despite being able to write up to 12 pages, I only wrote 5. But the original question we were supposed to answer was unclear and contained confusing details. As best I was able to understand what was going on, 5 pages may have been perfectly adequate to lay out my argument. And after I handed it in I also discovered many other student with the same argument had only written 5-7 pages themselves, so perhaps I don't pale in contrast. Many other may have dropped out of the competition entirely as well, because that's what this was, a competition, and the best competitors this semester get to do the honors moot court in the spring.

With the briefs turned in last month, last night we finally had the chance to argue the case. I didn't do spectacularly because there wasn't sufficient enough time to do the preparation needed to be spectacular, but I think I did solidly. I'm resigned to not continuing on to the honors moot court next semester, but I hope to do some more moot court competitions in some form. I aim to keep doing it until I get it right.

Backdated to 11/4. Actually posted 11/6. Edited a bit on 11/17.

Among the many, many activities I have going this semester, I've been working with the Law School Assembly to figure out ways to improve the school. Our new dean, and the rest of the administration, has been extremely proactive and welcoming of suggestions for making the process, the building, and the experience better.

Towards that end I've mostly been involved with the Communications Committee, and we've been trying to figure out how the blizzard of information the school needs to tell us can be more effectively disseminated. We've been having meetings with various stakeholders to try to figure out what works, what doesn't, and what can be done differently.

Meanwhile, there was a latent issue related to student group use of classrooms. As president of the IP Law Society I'm well aware of the scarcity of facilities – I've often had to shuffle our meeting times in order to get a room. I'm further stymied by there being a paucity of rooms we can eat in. If we have to have a meeting over lunchtime because it's the only time we can get a room, we're going to need to be able to eat during it. Otherwise people will either not show up, or if they come they will be all cranky and unfocused. But ever since the classrooms got new carpet this year there has been forbidding food in them.

The policy has left the groups hamstrung. It's hard enough to get a group going and sufficiently congealed that it won't peter out immediately. Being able to meet, often and effectively, is critical to getting groups off the ground so that they may be a resource for students. I happened to mention in one of these meetings that the no-food rule was a penny-wise, pound-foolish policy. That we might maintain our clean carpets, but at the expense of maintaining our student groups.

Apparently the penny-wise argument resonated, and the meme was relayed to the power-that-be in charge of the rule, who reversed it. So today it seems I did make a difference, albeit in a small way. Stay tuned for tomorrow...

Backdated a day to when I intended to post it.

So this class I'm taking "Copyright and Rhetoric" (actually it may be "Rhetoric and Copyright," but whatever) is a particularly unusual course for law school. It's probably one of the most productive and useful: we're honing our persuasive writing and speaking skills, essential skills as future advocates. But it's a little free-form, more like a workshop than a class, which raises a problem with how to work out grades at the end. My professor invited us to write to her a proposal for how we thought the grades should be calculated, and this is what I sent:

I've long lamented that my education is inconducive to my education. The classes where the educational value is most bountiful are bullied into mute submission by a system that demands to be able to measure and rank its participants. Succeeding grade-wise often seems to require mastery of a different game than mastery of the material itself, which really should be the ultimate goal.

Here we have a class where learning for learning's sake is tantamount, and where that learning is somewhat ephemeral (not easily quantifiable). While you could quiz us on how many cool Greek words we've learned, the larger lessons we are supposed to walk away with probably won't reveal themselves so directly. Our thinking is being shaped, and that's a hard thing to test. Especially because the true impact of these lessons might not reveal itself until years from now when we are all supreme copyright scholars, or politicians, and have had lots of practice behind us.

The other problem with measuring things is that its validity depends on students knowing up front what those things would be. Some people may have exerted themselves in different ways if they'd known that certain aspects of their work would be more highly valued. But we were mostly left to our own devices to figure out how best to apply ourselves to get the most out of our engagement with the class.

The real problem I think you are faced with is that you need to differentiate students who may not really be differentiatable on any sort of productive basis. It's a small class, which self-selected serious, intelligent, hard working-students. If only you had a couple of complete flakes enrolled... but alas, not at this school.

As long as everyone has done what was asked, with reasonable good-faith effort (and I'm inclined to think this is true for everyone), we are all essentially equal. Nitpicking individual assignments may not be constructive because it changes how we should apply ourselves to them. To truly get the most out of this class we should feel able to risk failure. But if doing so jeopardizes the GPA game we are all forced to play as part of our larger progression through school, we will not feel sufficiently free to be able to get as much out of the class as we should.

So this is my proposal, the best I can come up with if giving all A's is not an option...

Step A: We trust you. You are an experienced educator committed to the development of your students. You have the ethos to be able to gauge potential and know when your students live up to it. So for each student, based purely on a subjective sense of how well you think we've been engaged in the class and the material generally, you determine a legitimate high grade and low grade. The test for you to use is whether, after this semester is over and we go out in the world saying, "I got X grade," you would cringe or not. Too high, it might not be deserved. Too low, you would feel it injust.

It may or may not be possible to spread these out over the letter notches (A, A-, B+, etc.) because there may not be enough for a legitimate spread, so perhaps you might temporarily use a more nuanced scale, like from 1-10, where 1 might correlate to a B and 10 an A. This is a step in a process, so that they don't quite match to the potential grades available isn't important right now.

Step B: Draw lots, throw a die. Use some sort of random device. Grades often feel like a crap shoot anyway, with the way they are so often detached from the educational experience. Let's be honest about it for a change. In the end it will be much more fair.

So the idea would be that the random device would allocate a grade distribution. You could even do this without Step A, if you chose. Just draw lots for the A's, A-'s, etc. But if you feel that someone really has a better claim to it than someone else, then use the floor-ceiling pre-qualifier to decide who even gets to be in the A pot, etc.

If you use the 1-10 system, perhaps you would pick a number from a hat for each person. If it were outside the range, you would redraw. When you have the final digit decided, then you can correlate it back to the regular grade scale.

However you would do this process logistically is less critical than that it be done at all. The important ideas to keep sight of are that the grades don't inhibit our learning, and that they don't incorporate unfairness that would result if certain aspects alone suddenly became more greatly prized. Your subjective judgment, applied to the entire course and tempered by randomness, would be far more equitable and constructive.

Interestingly, the skills we've learned this semester showed up in most people's proposals, as we made our suggestions and strongly argued for them. My favorite was the one from a classmate who did a contractual analysis of the syllabus, reaching the seemingly incontrovertable conclusion that it would be unconscionable if we didn't all get A's.

Also interestingly, I didn't make the case for all A's. It's like I feel that A's are so rare and exceptional... someone naturally needs to get the B's. And I guess I feel that, such is my lot, inevitably that someone is going to be me...

Backdated to 11/8, was posted on 11/9.

The original post(s)

In the waning hours of election night a fan went onto the Huey Lewis and the News message board and posted what could basically be described as abject cheers for Bush. It was distinctive to notice, and I don't think it was just because I was in the doldrums over the apparent outcome. Her posts read as if her favorite team had just won a championship. And therein lies the problem, the problem with political discourse in general and the resulting problem when musicians enter the fray.

Our political culture seems to be very much like a sports culture, one where there are winners and losers. Every year someone wins the Super Bowl. Half the fans get to swell with enormous, pseudo-patriotic pride for being on the side of the victor, and half the fans walk away with nothing. Sure, there's some element of merit involved: the team with the most talent will likely win. But it's just a victory in a sporting match, a match that will be replayed the following year like it has for years and years before. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter who wins the game. The world will be exactly the same no matter how well anyone played. But in politics the same cannot be said: winning an election, particularly for U.S. president, is a much more substantive contest, bestowing the victor with the power, responsibility, and expectation to change the world.

So reacting to an election such as this as though it were a sporting contest completely ignores what's at stake. But that's what many people were doing. Either the winner was from their team - their guy - or it wasn't. Voters were behaving like mere fans, fans by the worst definition (with a superficial, emotionally-driven and irrational attraction to the object of attention, with little bearing on anything of substance), of the candidate as if he were their favorite sports team's star player. Their respective satisfaction in the election's outcome came more from that sense of being connected to the winner and not so much from the issues that were in play. (Nominally I think people did consider the issues, but often from a knee-jerk "Well MY GUY said this..." standpoint and less on the basis of the issues' individual merits.)

This dynamic may be another reason underlying why musician endorsements in politics can be problematic. In a political world where there are two oppositional teams an endorsement of one team's candidate is going to be seen as a slap in the face of the other and its "fans." I'm sure there are musicians for whom their endorsements should be seen that way, as little more than cheerleading for a particular political camp. I'm hardly advocating for more of this, and I certainly wouldn't so lightly suggest that musicians risk alienating their own fans just to perpetuate this kind of superficial entrenchment. On the contrary, in the examples I've referred to, of Johnny Colla and Huey Lewis and even Bruce Springsteen, the endorsements are something else, something much more valuable. More than base political cheerleading, they are rather invitations for serious policy contemplation.

If these endorsements were recognized for what they are, politically-neutral policy arguments, the risks of fan betrayal and alienation would be greatly minimized. It may be hard to see them as neutral because they resulted in a specific endorsement, but because each of the endorsements was accompanied by a thoughtful, rational explanation, I think it's these explanations themselves that are really the focal points. The resulting conclusions about whom to endorse are almost superfluous. I don't think Huey or Johnny recommended Kerry because they really, really like the guy personally. Or because they are such dyed-in-the-wool Democrats for whom party victory was the tantamount goal. I think, based on what they wrote, that they were mostly concerned about areas of public policy for whom the sitting president would not be the best choice. And I think that kind of opinion is perfectly legitimate, egalitarian, and unthreatening to any political camp. More than that, this kind of articulated statement is what our society could use more of. We need more people to talk about the issues underlying the politics without feeling so beholden to particular political camps. We need to get politics out of the realm of the sports idiom and back into the realm of citizenship.

Edited 11/19, 12/3, and 1/22.

Friday the Thirteenth?
Triskaidekaphobia!
Oh wait - it's the Twelfth.

OK, yes I was late and didn't post it until the 13th. But I wrote it well in advance with every intention of posting it on the 12th, I swear. Since it was going to be so long before the next Friday the 12th would occur I decided to go ahead and post it today anyway and just tweak the date. And really, if I hadn't said anything, people who didn't check the blog yesterday wouldn't have known any better. Given that most people on the planet probably didn't check the blog yesterday, perhaps I should just have kept my mouth shut about it. Hmmm....

BU has a decent-sized foreign program, attracting many foreign L.L.M. students and J.D.-equivilent exchange students. I'm not sure of the total numbers but I would say there are at least several dozen of such students enrolled every semester, maybe even many several dozen.

Last night the program threw a party for the participants, and I, as a "buddy" to two of the students was invited to come. Over the summer I had volunteered to be a peer advisor to two French students. One is an L.L.M., and the other is still working on her initial law degree. (In France, like in many other parts of the world, a law degree is really an undergraduate degree. She's still the French-equivilent of an undergraduate and actually just turned 21 - last night in fact.) Neither have ever really called upon me to help advise them, which I guess is good for them but makes me feel a bit superfluous. I do sit next to the non-L.L.M. one though in my International Law Process class. So far the only service I've been called upon to do is explain baseball to her. It's an amazingly complicated sport, if you start to think about it. I got as far as explaining pitch count, foul balls, and home runs to her. It might be next spring before I get around to teaching her what happens to a ball hit into play, because now she wants to learn about football.

But the point of this post was just to mention the food at this party. It was potluck, and people were encouraged to bring dishes from their native lands. It was the most eclectic meal I've ever had: Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Argentinian, Colombian, Dutch, Greek... all at the same meal (and on the same plate...) For my part I brought chocolate chip cookies because a) I make good ones (I once brought some to a Christmas party at the home of my boss's boss, and she subsequently left me a voicemail message raving about them, saying how she "came from a long line of Canadian bakers" and had never had cookies this good) and b) cookies are a very American thing. Yes, they have biscuits in England and France (and most of Europe I guess) but they aren't the same. I once bought a cookie in a French patisserie and it was horrible. Like a rock. (Good for a Chevy, bad for a cookie.)

But I realized also when I was living in France that non-Americans coveted American cookies. My colleague's wife invited me over one weekend to show her how to make them. We had a lot of trouble getting them to come out right: for one, the French don't often seem to use liquid vanilla, and the dry vanilla threw off the liquid content. The ovens are also smaller so the convection isn't the same, the proportions need to be converted to metrics, and the French also don't seem to use brown sugar either. Let's face it, the French do nice things with batter but assembling cookies is not one of them. They also have no taste for peanut butter, so the peanut butter cookies I made were lost on them. But the day after this cooking adventure I mentioned it to my French class, then comprised of two dozen people all from countries other than the US or France, and everyone got all excited and demanded the recipes.

With this in mind I brought my cookies. However, there was so much food there that they went largely uneaten. That is until I walked around with them at the end offering them to people, ostensibly to be friendly and generous but really just to troll for a compliment. Interestingly people could not believe I made them from scratch. But I did! Really! I may not be the world's greatest cook, and I may not have used a kitchen in more than a year and a half, but I do make great chocolate chip cookies.

Hillary Clinton joke redacted 11/17.

I've written before about Tyler Hamilton here. He's my favorite professional cyclist, an underrated rider whose accomplishments are sweeter than had anyone else attained them.

But he's in trouble, as this recent article in the NY Times explains. Cyclists are routinely tested for drug use, and his blood samples allegedly showed signs of blood doping (transfusions of extra blood to increase the red blood cell count and with it oxygen capacity). This finding would break a lot of hearts if it were true. And there are so many cyclists who do impermissible performance-enhancing things that at this point it's generally easy to believe such wrongful behavior plausible. But I still don't believe it is true of him.

A huge reason for my reluctance to rush to judge him is the shoddiness of the evidence at the root of the allegations. As I wrote to a friend:

I'm mostly concerned from an evidentiary standpoint. These samples are handled poorly, their results are little more then inferences yet they are regarded as absolute truths, and (and this is what really sets me off) they allow no opportunity for independent validation. Thinking about it from an American jurisprudential standpoint, I think there are huge due process problems with this testing regime, and these tests in particular. Even if they did just happen to be correctly conclusive of wrongful behavior on his part, I still couldn't believe him guilty based on what has been presented. It reeks of unfairness, and that horrible Kafka-esque nightmare that too often too easily innocent people can find themselves trapped in.

He's innocent until proven guilty, which these results in no way do.

The other reason for my doubt of their truthfulness is a greater confidence in his character. He's my favorite cyclist because of his maturity, sportsmanship, work ethic, and devotion to those close to him. While some cyclists have remained anonymous to me, perhaps seeming more mercenary, he always struck me as a guy I wouldn't mind having as my best friend. That hasn't changed.

In the final analysis I don't think his winning had anything to do with the blood coursing in his veins but rather the heart he rides with.

Backdated to 11/14, even though it wasn't posted until 11/17 and technically I didn't send that part to my friend until today. Although I meant to earlier.

Lately I've been slowly, and reluctantly, turning off the commenting feature on my blog. It distresses me to do this but the comment spammers have been getting out of hand. There have been days when I've had to spend an hour deleting all their crap. Part of the problem is that my blog software doesn't allow for easy deletion. But the other problem is that in their quest to improve their google rankings, they try to get their URLs linked to as many sites as possible. With easy access to mine they've been merrily posting away.

Since I've been turning off the commenting though it's been more under control. The older posts with known URLs to the spammers are now off-limits to them. It's too bad, because I'd really like for people to continue commenting on them, but I had to draw the line somewhere. I'm trying to keep the more recent posts open though. I really like having the comments because I like to see how people react to my writing, and I think the conversations my posts sometimes spawn can be really interesting.

Really posted 11/17.

I just got done with an agonizing tech check. A tech check (with its sibling "source coordination") involves double-checking all the cites in a paper that is to be published in an upcoming law journal issue. Because I'm on the BU Journal of Science and Technology law this is the kind of thing I get to do. Lots of.

First we look up the cited sources in the library and xerox the pages referenced. We want to make sure the source actually exists and that it says what the author claims. It's a bit like a scavenger hunt, although if the author cited correctly we should be able to find everything. Then we need to make sure that the cites themselves were written correctly. This is the tech check part, which ended up being much more aggravating than it should have been.

The reason for the aggravation is because we use the Bluebook¹ as our style guide. Most legal periodicals and other materials do as well. Only we aren't actually taught how to use this book. We are instead taught, in our first year writing class, how to use a different book, called the ALWD. I think it stands for "Association of Legal Writing Directors," and it's supposed to be a better book. It IS a better book. Although I think it overlooks certain types of documents we might need to cite, it simplifies the rules and gives better examples that cover most of the permutations explicitly enough that we can be confident in our correctness if we follow them. The same cannot be said for the Bluebook, which contains far more minutiae and permutations and subtleties to rules, and then gives only very general examples to so that you cannot so easily feel so confident in your correctness when you try to follow them.

But herein lies the problem. The Bluebook requires much more training in order to learn to use correctly and effectively. And we need this training, not only for our journals but for nearly any other legal writing we will do in our future. But are we taught it? NO!!! We are taught instead how to use the ALWD, which has very limited application.

The effect of this curriculum choice is that when I find myself (inevitably) needing to use the Bluebook, I am not equipped to. I likely miss important rules I should have been following but didn't know to look for, plus the learning curve involved means that the simplest activities, like tech checks, become massive ordeals. Like most people involved with the law, students and practitioners, I don't have that kind of time to spare. And this is important. For our journal we need to get it right lest we lose esteem in the profession. The really annoying thing is that I'm actually a very good proofreader (at least of other people's work; my own work I'm sometimes too close to to recognize the mistakes) and could easily catch all the nits and mistakes, if I knew what to look for. With this tech check I feel like I've wasted a lot of time that I couldn't really spare just to turn in something that may very well have its own mistakes.

I and my peers would have been much better off if last year we had been taught this important skill.

¹ The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (Columbia Law Review Ass'n et al. eds., 17th ed. 2000). (What the cite would look like, except that the title would appear unitalicized but with small capitals for its case.)

Posted 11/17.

Edit 12/3: It also turns out that for academic papers we are supposed to write for our various classes, we also need to bluebook. So, again, it would have been really helpful if someone had shown us how. Students that aren't on journals never even get the flimsy little rushed tutorials that I got, and yet are still expected to be able to do it properly. We could graduate without ever figuring it out, and despite what Mark has said, it may very well come up again.

Lately I've been surfing around to other law students' blogs. There's a lot out there. Some are virtual ghost towns, set-up and posted to in earnest for a week or month but now long forgotten. Some are vain and trite. But there are several out there that have plenty of thoughtful, articulate posts. I like Jeremy's blog, for instance, which seems to be regarded as one of the pre-eminent law student blogs around. He's extremely prolific, insightful, and funny. I also stumbled upon Sua Sponte, who has interesting things to say as well. She transferred law schools, which gives the documentation of her Great Change a character that most law students' blogs wouldn't have.

But I really want to talk about this post by Jewish Buddha. Apparently he had the choice to attend BU, but ultimately opted for George Washington University law school in D.C. In this post he talks about how he thought about each option, and on what basis he made his eventual decision. What stood out for me was what he said about BU, about the positive "vibe" he picked up on when he visited. Even though he ultimately chose the vibe-less GW, he appreciated what BU tried to offer him. When he described it I knew exactly what he meant.

I realize that in writing about my Great Change I never really talked about the admissions process, and maybe I should. I'll start at the very beginning. In April 2000 things were going nicely in my life: I had a good career, I had a long-term relationship, everything was fine. By April 2001 I wondered what small puppy I had run over to end up with this karmic payback. The boyfriend was gone, and with a layoff, so was the career.

Actually, the career could have been sustained. As it was I was still able to eek out a living in the tumultuous months of the dotcom bust before I eventually began law school. But the layoff forced me to look at my situation. When the best I could do in that career was impress the president of my company, no matter how much I liked and respected the president, that wasn't enough. I needed to be able to do more in this world.

For a long time, years and years, I'd been kicking around the idea of law school. When I was much younger I tried to kick it very far away, wanting nothing to do with it. Then when I was with my boyfriend, who himself was a law student, I started kicking it around more seriously. He was miserable in law school, but somehow that didn't dissuade me. I was becoming very curious about what he was learning and started to think that maybe, just maybe, law school was the place for me after all. But I did absolutely nothing to pursue it.

Until the layoff and my epiphany, at which point I announced to myself in a fit of pique, "Screw it, I'll go to law school." I let that thought sit and fester for a few weeks. If it was really only the product of a grumpy mood it would soon dissolve. But as it set in, I realized I was more and more at peace with the idea. It was off to law school for me.

I aimed high. I picked 5 schools I really wanted to go to, well-respected institutions in places where I'd be willing to live: Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown. I didn't get into any of them. But that was ok, I knew that might happen and I'd decided to apply in two stages. If I didn't get my top choices the first time around, I would try again the next year, and this time add some "safeties." I reasoned that it was worth it trying to get into those top schools, even if it meant delaying things. But I was only willing to delay it a year. At a certain point it would be time to get on with my life one way or another.

For the "safeties," I added UC Hastings, in San Francisco, Santa Clara, and BU. I did not include GW, and the only explanation I can give for that is that I forgot. When I thought about schools in D.C. to apply to I didn't remember it was there. I didn't remember that it was a similarly-ranked school as BU, with a respected IP department, in a metropolitan area where I'd be willing to live. So the reason I did not end up in the same predicament as Jewish Buddha was simply because I had forgotten to apply to the other school. D'oh.

But as it was, I still had my own dilemmas. Of all the aforementioned schools, I had acceptances to Santa Clara, UC Hastings, and BU. Santa Clara was the easiest to decide against. Although it is steadily crawling up the rankings in terms of reputation, and it's known for its IP curriculum, it wasn't yet at the same level where BU or even Hastings were. And this is where the ex-boyfriend had gone, and he wasn't exactly singing its praises. Trickier was the Hastings-BU decision. Hastings meant I could stay in the Bay Area. It was tough to decide to uproot my life, and the doubt I had about doing that still shows up in my life and is often reflected here. But I decided, before setting anything in stone, to make one more visit to BU, just to be sure that I was doing the right thing in turning it down.

I came out on a miserable weekend in March during a miserable winter in Boston. I came out from California on the red-eye, and bleary and jetlagged dragged myself over to the school. The first person I encountered, in the admissions office, didn't fill me with warm fuzzies. But I decided to meet some more people. I talked with a current student, I sat in on a class, and I had a long and lovely chat with someone in Career Services (who, sadly for me is no longer there – but gladly for her as she has left to pursue her own horizons). I spent a long time wandering around the law tower that day, and even as I rode the elevators constantly and gazed out the window at the intractable sleet I was overcome with a strange but undeniable sense that I belonged there. I'd picked up on that vibe too.

So you already know the end of the story, because here I am at BU. It is where I belong, particularly because I can make it be where I belong. I've gotten involved with committees helping make the school an even better place. I avail myself to as many of the opportunities available to me. I connect with classmates and professors. Even on the bad days, I still sense the vibe was right.

Intended for 11/17 but written and posted 11/21.

11/25: Allusions to Jewish Buddha's sex adjusted per comment below... Oops.

One of the ways I've gotten more involved with my school is through the IP Law Society. Some classmates of mine had begun it last year but weren't interested in running it this year. I was and ran for president. I like being president of organizations. Like when I was president of the Silicon Valley WebGuild I regard it was an excellent way to support my community. I do enjoy "being in charge," and being so I like enabling other volunteers to do good work through the organization as well.

The first thing we've done this year is put on a panel in IP law careers. On Thursday we had 6 panelists, from technical patent prosecutors to entertainment lawyers to government policy setters, talk about their career paths and what others could expect working in the field to be like. We had a great turn out of students as well, pleasingly enough, especially in light of there being a competing career panel at the same time.

Originally someone from the Career Development Office was going to moderate, but I ended up doing some of it as it went on. We covered the meta issues about the lay of the field as well as specifics on how to hew out one's own career path in this area. Afterwards the panelists, who were very generous with their time, stayed around and answered individual questions from students. All in all it was a great success, and I'm particularly appreciative of the Society member who had done so much to extend all the invitations to the speakers and make our event happen.

Intended for 11/19 but written and posted on 11/21.

Like a swallow to Capistrano, every year I return to the Bay Area for the Big Game, the annual football match-up between Cal and Stanford. This year the stakes were even more exciting because Cal does not, as has been the case in recent years, suck. In fact, not only do we not suck, but we're good! We Bear fans don't quite know what to make out of this change in fortunes, so unaccustomed we've become to decent football-playing.

I came out on Friday, on an early flight for which I woke up at 4 in the morning in order to pack, since the Career Panel had kept me out late the night before and I was too wiped out to deal with it when I got home. So maybe because of the exhaustion I was a little raw. And maybe because the semester has gone on so intensely for so long I was also a little worn. And maybe not knowing quite what my future holds, or where it will hold it, had also drained some of my emotional fortitude. And maybe none of these things mattered and the weekend was just weird.

But it began well. After I landed I rented a car (Alamo lets you pick the car you want, so I chose a blue one to show my Cal spirit) and drove up to San Francisco to have lunch with a friend at an organization I much admire. It was such a positive experience: I enjoyed her company, and I was very grateful for having her support in shaping my career. Back at her office I was also conscripted to help out on one of their projects and that has me extremely excited because it's doing the kind of work I hoped to do when I went to law school in the first place.

Then I headed further north to Marin County where I was due to have a Huey Lewis and the News-esque moment. I didn't travel all the way to California just because Johnny Colla was planning to have a concert, but I thought it was awfully nice of him to schedule one so conveniently for me...

It was at Rancho Nicasio, a restaurant (dinner theater?) up in the Marin hills. I drove up after the sun had set, which is too bad because it's a gorgeous drive during daylight. I ended up sitting at a table right next to the stage. At first I thought that would be fun (I hate having an obscured view). Then the show started and I immediately emotionally bonked.

It was the oddest thing. There's nothing more certain in my life than his music - I ALWAYS respond to it. But for some reason, once that show began I was suddenly overwhelmed with the sensation that I did not want to be there. That I didn't even belong there. I should have been off working on that cool law project - THAT'S what my life was about. What was I doing going to this concert? I wasn't like anyone else there. I didn't have a boyfriend/spouse/significant other to dance with, like it seemed everyone else did. I wasn't a local and/or neighbor like it seemed everyone else was. I wasn't even (I really hope) one of his uber-fans who danced all night up front and brought the band their beers. I was there, alone, and suddenly I couldn't figure out why.

And the worse I felt, the worse I felt. There I was, right up front, being a vortex of negative energy, and that didn't seem fair to him. Part of me wanted to sneak out the side door to go get my head on straight. Part of me wanted to sneak out and not come back. Eventually, near the very end, I warmed up a bit and went out onto the dance floor and flaccidly danced. I felt like my soul weighed 15 tons, I could hardly move. On top of the embarrassment, I also became worried that maybe the magic of his music has started wearing off and no longer would work for me. Given how important his music is in my life, this change would be awful. But this is probably not the case: my troubles occurred because I do so respond to his music. When he tells his story my mind starts to wander. It kicks up mental dust in my mind, scattering poignant particulates throughout my brain. I was just in no condition to process them, so I got overwhelmed and shut down.

Things improved after the show, though. I chatted a lot with the guys in his band, people I'd met before but hadn't seen since before going to law school. I apologized for being a wet blanket but they weren't too bothered by it. I also talked with another friend I hadn't seen since before I'd started school either, and it was good to catch up with everyone. By the end of the evening things felt much better (mostly). Still, the whole experience felt unexpectedly strange. Little did I know that wasn't the last time that weekend unexpected strangeness would kick in...

The next day I headed over to Berkeley. My friend has, for years, hosted a tailgate party in the same spot in the middle of campus so there's a whole bunch of us who know to converge there on Big Game Day. As we've gotten on with our lives and scattered to the wind I rarely see many of them, so it's nice to have this occasion to bring us back together.

After dining on yummy ribs, I started walking up to the stadium. It seemed like a perfectly innocuous journey... for the first 20 feet at least. Then, there at the top of the stairs, I suddenly nearly bumped into my ex-boyfriend.

I always thought it inevitable that I would run into him somewhere. It's not that big a world, and we'll both be (at least roughly) working in the same industry eventually. But there??? He IS a Cal grad too, but he'd never gone to Cal games except at my instigation. And on this particular day there were 70,000 other people converging on the stadium. The odds that I would have run into him right there, not even six feet away, seemed quite slim.

But there he was. I was initially too stunned to know how to react. The way we were situated though meant that while I saw him, he hadn't seen me. The question then was whether to say hi or not. To my retrospective chagrin, I immediately became befuddled by the relative pros and cons of doing so. It was ridiculous, the same self-doubting garbage that had infected the relationship. But by the time I'd shoved it all to the side and decided to say hi like a normal person, he'd already peeled off to take a different route.

I wasn't inclined to follow him, but then further up the hill I could see our paths would once again converge. As it happened I ended up in front of him, but not in a position where I could just turn around and say hi without it being massively awkward and contrived. But HE could see ME and say hi if he wanted. He didn't. He peeled off once again and was lost in the crowd of 70,000 people.

I couldn't decide what to make out of this. Part of me was disappointed. Part of me was relieved. I'd sometimes wondered about what would happen when I saw him again - since I knew it would happen someday - and how I would feel. I just didn't expect to find out quite so soon. But maybe it was all just as well: that neither of us could cut through the crap to just say hello like normal people makes me think that neither of us was really ready to.

The encounter did seem to fit the strange emotional theme of the weekend though. And I still wasn't in good shape to be able to easily shrug it off. But there was a game to go to and so my attentions were soon preoccupied by more pleasant things. Cal tried to make us nervous by only leading by 10-3 at halftime, but then it squashed Stanford to a pulp in the second half to win 41-6. We still have the Axe, the trophy from the annual match-up, and we all daydream about what sort of Bowl game we might finally get to play this year...

After the game I went down on the field with three friends, and then accidentally lost all of them in the crowd of thousands of celebrating fans. Had I realized my friends all needed to leave so soon, I wouldn't have lost them so readily. I would have said good-bye at least, but I figured we'd meet up again when the band marched out. But they'd apparently all left by that time. It was disappointing, but I did bump into another friend I hadn't seen yet down there on the field. Then I went to Bowles Hall where the band always serenades the crowd and saw another man from my past. I'd had a crush on him for a while but fortunately (on retrospect) he was such a complete jerk so early into the acquaintance that it was pretty easy to get over him. Though it's been years since we'd last spoken, an already poignant weekend didn't seem like a good time to change that.

I walked down afterwards to meet up with my tailgating friend while he was packing up his car. We were in the center of campus, which is up on a hill on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay, with a view straight out the Golden Gate. I suddenly looked up and caught a spectacularly gorgeous scene. The waning hours of the afternoon had given way to a most provocative sunset, one that was begging me to stay when I knew I had to leave.

Posted 11/25, written earlier.

Today I went to a library I've never been to before, the Science and Engineering library. Despite its best efforts to evade me I eventually tracked it down. I was there to get a book on TCP/IP for research for my note. It was a nostalgic moment, holding a computing book in my hands. What a nice change to carrying law books. I read it right away, and while computer textbooks used to bore me, having been lately so inured to legal texts, reading about TCP/IP now kind of tickled...

Posted 11/25, backdated to when "today" actually occurred.

I'm still wandering around other law student blogs. It's interesting, when I poke around the archives of the better ones, the recurrent topics and themes common to so many. For example, pretty much every 1L writes about the same thing in the same month (eg, moot court, interviews, etc.) Same thing with the 2Ls, etc. It's like if I pick the November month of their first year, I will find posts strikingly similar to my own of that same time. Even if we weren't 1Ls in the same calendar year. There's variation, sure, for school differences, personality differences, political differences... but we're all wrestling with roughly the same things. Not just in terms of pedagogy but also the meta issues that give this experience context.

It is interesting to note, although it's only an impression gleaned from cursory poking-around, that there are more posts that are more curious about the law in people's first years. There's a certain sense of wonder in the experience, of finally getting to look under the veil and see what's going on, and then getting really excited to see how these legal principles apply to other things. By the second year we seem to be over it, although maybe it's just that we have no time for such decadence. We have to play up our own confident bravado, that we're law students and we know lots of stuff. More stuff than most people, and enough stuff that you should hire us.

It's kind of a shame, though, because I think a lot of the innate curiosity has been drummed out of us. I think some of the bloggers, maybe by virtue of the blogging exercise, still cling to some of it, still being somewhat inclined to peel back the layers of issues so we can have something to write about. But it's difficult. It's not encouraged. What is encouraged is to churn our massive amounts of work (at least in our second years) and not so much indulge in the luxury of just learning for its own sake.

Posted 11/25.

I decided that my "Law School – The Process" category was getting too disproportionately big. (And it would only get bigger, since most of my posts talk about it, what with it being the ostensible focus of the blog.) So I split it up by year. I figure a year will run from July to July. The dates of my posts suggested that split, and I think it also makes sense. In July you start anticipating the upcoming year. In June you are still getting over the previous one.

I also finally (I think) figured out how to syndicate my site. I'd meant to do it before, when someone commented somewhere here that she'd really like me to do it. I'd like to write her back and tell her I have, but I can't figure out where her comment is to find her email address. (Edit: found it.) What I'd really like is for someone to tell me if I did it right. There's a link on the front page for the syndication, which links to here: http://www.cathygellis.com/mt/html/index.rdf. This is just my best guess though since I don't really know how RSS works. Poking around the MoveableType manual has not so far been helpful on this front.

Edit 11/26: Today I played with my first RSS newsreader. I'm using Thunderbird. It didn't like the URL above, but it did like this one so I've added it to the side navigation: http://www.cathygellis.com/mt/html/index.xml.

Beware with syndicated readings, though, that I frequently edit new posts. I almost wish there was a way I could keep things from going out on the RSS feed until 2 days after the post or something. I think the way it works the headline will go out, but when you click on the article you'll get the latest and greatest version that's posted. Which is fine, as long as you are aware that there may be a later version and don't just delete the article and move on. But I guess that could happen on the real site. Why would you reread an article you've already read? Maybe I'll just have to get better at editing up front...

(The other hazard of the syndication is that those horrible comment spams will go out if I haven't had a chance to delete them. Sorry. I don't mean to be the authority on penile implants and texas poker...)

Speaking of editing, my Musicians for Kerry posts have had some work done to them since first posted. I may still make some tweaks, but they're better than they were before 11/19.

Edit 12/2: It's interesting to note that even if a blog does not have a syndication link on it, it probably still syndicates. The blogging software seems to set up the xml pages automatically, whether the author explicitly advertises the links or not. For instance, apparently my blog was syndicated well before I got around to syndicating it...

Edit 12/8: The dark side of RSS: bandwidth consumption. The BoingBoing post referred to talked about only allowing one RSS download per day/update/other iteration. But I'm not sure how it was achieved. This isn't a huge problem for me though as a publisher - yet. I'm just not that popular... (darnit).

BU law professor Randy Barnett will be arguing before the Supreme Court on Monday in Ashcroft v. Raich over the legality of medical marijuana. (See this CNN/AP article for an overview*, and for a very readable explanation about the issues in this case, see this blog entry at Salon.) I haven't had a class with Professor Barnett, but I met him last year to discuss a curriculum issue. I found him approachable and passionate about what he believes in. Although from what I gather he leans more libertarian than I do, when it comes to civil liberties he and I might likely agree in many instances.

But like many cases that topically seem like civil liberties cases, although this one focuses on the ability for a patient to use medical marijuana, the actual legal argument has little to do with that liberty. The argument he will make focuses on whether the Federal government has the ability to regulate (in this case to ban) activity that takes place entirely within a state, with no implication of interstate commerce. His argument has support even from states disinclined to permit medical marijuana usage because the Federal government's argument, should it prevail, could negatively affect other states' rights issues. The Salon blog article is worth reading for more detail. Comments by Professor Barnett and another professor can also be found at the Volokh Conspiracy (a law professor blog), and a Harvard Law student posted a summary of the practice argument he made there recently.

I'm personally in favor of medical marijuana, in no small part because US drug policy as a whole is so completely dysfunctional. Its dysfunctionality is manifest in so many ways: disproportionately high sentences for non-violent but possessory offenses; a puritan self-righteousness that demands to regulate private behavior; the foreign policy (and with it, the domestic security) negatively affected by drug laws; the arbitrary choices between what is forbidden and what is not; the suppression of critical thinking in any anti-drug education... And for medical marijuana in particular the decision to forbid it seems incredibly unmerciful, ignoring substantial evidence that its usage can be indispensable to the health and well-being for some seriously ill citizens, often in a way that no "legal" substitute can. That local populations, via the states, can recognize this need and choose to permit the drug's use in this context is a triumph of self-government, and not one that should be overturned by a more distant federal one.

Of course, I say all the above with absolutely no desire to take drugs myself, and a tacit disrespect for those who (for no medical reason) would choose to. But I see no reason to use the weight of the government to perpetuate my personal judgment on the point, at least not in the indiscriminate, inequitable, unjust, and counter-productive way it currently does.

I also don't generally have a problem with federal power. I think it can be handy. I think it can be handy in ways that many states-righters would disagree about. But I don't think refusing the will of Californians to permit its people from seeking relief this way is in any way "handy" at all.

* In the small world department, I've been in Dr. Lucido's practice (the doctor mentioned in the linked CNN article who had prescribed the marijuana). In my experience he's an extremely enlightened practitioner, amenable to alternative homeopathic remedies when the standard treatments are ineffective. This is not to say he eschews conventional treatments. On the contrary, he pursues them, but he seems to recognize that if they aren't resulting in wellness there's no point in sticking with them, certainly not just because they are the conventional treatments. In my case I had a recurrent case of strept throat that I could not shake. Course after course of antibiotics resulted in nothing but my homeostasis feeling like it was dissolving. I asked for something else instead, since I clearly wasn't getting better under the usual regimen, which was just making me feel worse. So he took me off the conventional drugs and recommended Echinacea and large doses of vitamin C. It worked. I'm grateful. Not only that it worked but that he was so responsive to his patient's needs. A truly effective physician indeed.

Edit 11/29: Professor Barnett gave his argument today. By all accounts it sounded like a tough row to hoe, but the bits of transcripts (as opposed to the newspaper summaries) suggest he held his own. For what it's worth, yes 100,000 people is a lot of people who may need medical marijuana (Bush administration estimates) but in a population of 34 million, it's not all that many at all.

Edit 11/30: I just read this longer transcript. A comment by Scalia stood out:

Scalia: But isn’t it true that among the users of medical cannabis are whole communes with lots of people in them smoking marijuana.

The comment may have been facetious, but it reminded me of a bias I've noticed having lived on both coasts, that people living east of the Rockies tend to think of Californians as nothing but a bunch of hippy stoners living in communes (or movie stars). Of course the stereotype hardly holds true for the majority of the population. But Scalia's comment made me wonder if that subtle bias might reveal itself in the outcome of the case. Would the Justices be inclined to rule any differently if the state in question was Nebraska? How about New Jersey? In other words, might the perception of the state affect how the legitimacy of its local law is perceived? Or what about, if the state in question, standing alone, is the 5th largest economy in the world, might that change the analysis too?

Law schools are abuzz with yesterday's appellate court decision finding the Solomon Amendment unconstitutional. This is the law that denies federal funding to schools who prevent the military from recruiting on-campus. Why would law schools want to refuse? Because of the bias of the military preventing gays from serving. Many law schools have policies not to provide recruiting privileges (access to qualified law students is quite an asset to many organizations – note the phalanx that regularly converges on Harvard, and the insanely high salaries and expensive lunches they use to ply these sought-after candidates to come work for them) to organizations that discriminate. But they have been hamstrung in their attempts to apply the same standard to the military because of the law's blackmail, requiring them to either give the military full access to its students or risk losing substantial government funding.

The majority found this policy to be a matter of compelled speech, impermissible under the First Amendment. While scholars may debate the legal analysis underlying the decision, if there is a legitimate criticism of it, it was not made by the dissenting judge Ruggero J. Aldisert, who wrote (via the NY Times):

"What disturbs me personally and as a judge is that the law schools seem to approach this question as an academic exercise, a question on a constitutional law examination or a moot court topic, with no thought of the effect of their action on the supply of military lawyers and military judges."

On the contrary – it is the military who is unconcerned about the supply, drumming out legions of qualified, willing personnel simply because they are gay. Standing up to this policy may be the only way to compel a more reasonable one, one that puts the nation's true interest – being defended by the best people we have – ahead of hatemongering.