Statements of Interest

Another repost from my old blog:

Last night I helped my dad clear the table. “Where do we put the trivet?” I asked.

Then I interrupted myself. “What a useless word, ‘trivet.’ In a way it’s nice that there’s such a precise word for this specific thing, but it’s sort of a waste of mental space to have to know a word that almost never gets used.”

To which my dad said, “Oh, I don’t know. I try to use it three to four times a day.”

And then, over the course of the rest of the evening, he did. Of course, not always in its original meaning, as a noun describing a portable flat surface upon which one sets hot dishes. Sometimes he used it as a verb or an adjective. Which necessarily involved adding some new meanings to its definition, as the context it was used in would dictate.

At first its meaning fluctuated somewhat randomly, but over the course of the evening it did seem to take on a consistent usage. As an adjective it sort of described a state of flummoxed confusion. In fact, in a way it described that particular condition better than any other actual English word did. So much so that I think the word “trivet” (or, in this case, “triveted”) should be adopted for common parlance.

I suspect it could be done so successfully, because at one point my sister had wandered into the room and overheard my dad inserting the word into conversation. It was perfectly clear to me what he was saying when he used it, but not so my sister who had never come across this word before (despite her rather expansive vocabulary). Completely trusting that it was an actual word in an actual dictionary, she asked my dad what it meant so she could add it to her repertoire. I think she genuinely expected that it would have some lengthy etymology, dating back perhaps all the way to Ancient Greece. As opposed to the backyard, an hour earlier.

The hearing involving Prenda Law that I described in the previous post soon resulted in a ruling, which I again summarized on Popehat. I’ve cross-posted that second post below:

Continue reading ‘Prenda Law’s Trip To San Francisco Turns Out Badly (cross-post)’ »

I wrote about one of the recent chapters in the Prenda Law saga at the Popehat blog last week. For posterity, and people who read this blog but not that one, here’s what I wrote.

Continue reading ‘Prenda Law, a San Francisco treat (cross-post)’ »

I’ve always been a committed fan of free speech. More than a fan, actually: it was something I believed in fighting for.

In my previous career as an Internet professional I became more and more concerned that when it came to speech taking place over the Internet, free speech values were too easily being compromised. I went to law school in order to put myself in a position to do something about it. So when I saw the Popehat Signal seeking a lawyer’s assistance to defend someone’s speech, I knew I had to answer the call.

Continue reading ‘This is why I became a lawyer’ »

Both Ken @ Popehat and “Gideon” at his blog have posts on the position reporter Jana Winter finds herself in. To briefly summarize, the contents of the diary of the alleged Aurora, CO, shooter ended up in her possession, ostensibly given to her by a law enforcement officer with access to it and in violation of judicial orders forbidding its disclosure. She then reported on those contents. She is not in trouble for having done the reporting; the problem is, the investigation into who broke the law by providing the information to her in the first place has reached an apparent dead end, and thus the judge in the case wants to compel her, under penalty of contempt that might include jailing, to disclose the source who provided it, despite her having promised to protect the source’s identity.

In his post Gideon make a compelling case for the due process issues at stake here. What’s especially notable about this situation is that the investigation isn’t just an investigation into some general wrongdoing; it’s wrongdoing by police that threatens to compromise the accused’s right to a fair trial. However you might feel about him and the crimes for which he’s charged, the very fact that you might have such strong feelings is exactly why the court was motivated to impose a gag order preventing the disclosure of such sensitive information: to attempt to preserve an unbiased jury who could judge him fairly, a right he is entitled to by the Constitution, irrespective of his ultimate innocence or guilt, which the police have no business trying to undermine.

Ken goes even further, noting the incredible danger to everyone when police and journalists become too chummy, as perhaps happened in the case here. Police power is power, and left unchecked it can often become tyrannically abusive. Journalists are supposed to help be that check, and when they are not, when they become little but the PR arm for the police, we are all less safe from the inherent danger that police power poses.

But that is why, as Ken and Gideon wrestle with the values of the First Amendment versus the values of the Fifth and Sixth the answer MUST resolve in favor of the First. There is no way to split the baby such that we can vindicate the latter interests here while not inadvertently jeopardizing these and other important interests further in the future.  Continue reading ‘A shielding law’ »

I wrote this when I was in law school. I always kind of liked it as a piece of writing. I also think it remains a perfectly sound theory…

BoingBoing has a post about an author of a book on parasites, which explains, among other things, that there is a parasite in cat feces that can affect humans – making women more friendly and men into jerks.

Perhaps that’s why my August 2000 turned out the way it did. I had been living, catlessly, with my boyfriend for 13 months. He really wanted to get a cat, but I resisted. It’s not that I object to the concept of a cat, but I am not comfortable with their logistical realities: smelly input and output, and the long-term commitment any house pet requires. How could we go places? How could we travel? Having a cat would seem to instill a burdensome complexity in our lives that I thought we were better off without.

Still, I wasn’t anti-cat, per se. Just like everyone else I thought the stray kitten we found frolicking at the bottom of the stairs of our garden apartment was incredibly cute and charming. To the point that I tossed and turned all night worrying about what would happen to it. It was not an idle concern: we discovered later that the cat had been living across the street — a four-lane street, which was hardly conducive to safe cat crossing! But she and her two brothers were all strays that a neighbor had been leaving some food out for. And that was about to end as her husband insisted that they be taken to the humane society. Word had it though that if they ended up there, after three days they’d all be put down. But this little calico seemed way too sweet and friendly to allow that to happen to.

So we brought her home — temporarily. Some friends of mine at my job worked with a cat rescue organization, and as a favor to me agreed to take her and get her adopted out. But they couldn’t do that right away so we took her in for a couple of days.

We named her Bovina because her calico spots made her look like a cow. She wasn’t too young — my boyfriend thought she was the equivalent of a teenager — but lots of things were new to her and she seemed to enjoy exploring our apartment. For this brief period I didn’t mind having a pet. She was very affectionate and nice to pet and I genuinely cared about what happened to her. But I knew I couldn’t commit to taking care of her, so instead I did what I could to find her a nice home elsewhere.

Soon my friends came to take the cat away and get her ready for adoption. Shortly thereafter, my boyfriend also moved out. We’d been having issues, but the move-out came as a surprise to me: I came home from work one day to find half the furniture gone! I was not thrilled with him, to say the least. But now I understand – perhaps this assholishness was caused by the parasite! He obviously couldn’t help himself — the cat made him do it!

It did seem bitterly ironic that within less than a month, I’d managed to lose both a cat and a partner. The apartment had rapidly gone from very crowded to very empty. But I do think it was all for the best. Look at my life now: I travel the world hither and yon, having all sorts of adventures. How could I do all that if I were tied down by a long-term commitment?

And what would I have done with the cat?

Sometimes in life you just need to run off to Paris. So I did.

It was certainly time: I hadn’t set foot in France in 10 years, which was particularly odd given that I had twice lived there, once for a month in Provence and once for a better part of a year in Paris. That’s when I got the gift of French language skills. Unfortunately, being away from France for so long those skills had necessarily gotten really dusty, and for various reasons, now was the right time to find them again.

So I just spent a little over a week in Paris. I wasn’t a tourist. I didn’t see a single museum or historic site (at least not purposefully; in Paris you kind of can’t avoid seeing them accidentally). Instead I sublet an apartment and settled into my old home.

In many ways it felt like only yesterday since I’d been there, but the truth is that I left it nearly 15 years ago, and over and over I was reminded by how much has changed since. Back when I lived there they had JUST converted to the Euro, but still used French Francs. They had JUST built the 14th line of the Metro, but not the next several RER lines or tramways. The Internet had only just become popular back then, during that Christmas when everyone got “Internet in a box” (the hot item back then was a box containing a 14.4 modem, CD with Netscape, and a subscription to Wanadoo), but otherwise it was a country still attached to Minitel.

Back then I knew the rare places where you could find sushi (mostly in the 5th and a few spots in the 6th), but now it’s on every block, while bistros and other local cuisine has become much harder to come by. And now when people “take a coffee” it may well be from a Starbucks or McDonald’s “McCafe.”

It’s also much harder now to practice one’s French – English is everywhere. The Internet is everywhere, even in the Metro. What I noted about Germany seems true for France too: pan-Europeanism has replaced a lot of local cultural identity.

But, as a French friend reassured me, that is what the French want. Tastes have changed, he said. What you now see in Paris is what they have changed into. And to be sure, plenty of profoundly French hallmarks remain. There are still boulangerie-patisseries and boucheries on every block. Even supermarket food is French in style and reflects the local demand for quality and French ingredients. The Metro runs well, except when it doesn’t, just as it always has. The streets are still French, the buildings still French, and the people still French. But French life now includes a kind of global cosmopolitan openness it didn’t so much have before.

As well as far more bagels, donuts, cupcakes and burritos than there used to be.

As long as I’m reposting items from the blog I kept while I was a law student, I should include this one because there has been an important update.

For some context, I did a semester of my 3L year in Hamburg at Bucerius Law School. The first private law school in Germany, it funded itself in part through the sponsorship of large law firms.

The Clifford Chance Napping Room

The other day some German students were discussing how Bucerius really needs to build a “napping room,” perhaps with an LCD screen that should easily show new nappers which beds were available. In case of high demand, they could also be put on a timing mechanism, kind of like the showers in train stations. (I used one once in Copenhagen: you get 30 minutes for your shower, and when the time’s up, the door is going to open whether you’re ready or not…)

One student then suggested that perhaps Clifford Chance could sponsor the “napping room.” After all, other rooms in the school had been sponsored by leading law firms, like Linklaters and White and Case. But Clifford Chance does not (yet) have a room of its own, and the students thought this might provide the perfect sponsorship opportunity.

“Do you have napping rooms at your schools in the US?” the students asked me.

“Yeah, but we call them libraries.”

Anyway, the upshot is, apparently Bucerius does indeed now have a napping room. I’m not sure if Clifford Chance sponsored it, but if it would like the opportunity to, every law school everywhere could certainly use their own…

I’m visiting France for the first time in 10 years, struggling to get my French skills back up to the moderate fluency I’d had before. In thinking about foreign languages I wanted to repost something I’d first blogged when I was still a law student at the end of my semester studying in Germany.

I recently read a cute blog post written by a law student whose toddler son just uttered his first sentence.

“I am struck, as I march wearily through Evidence, at how effortlessly Nathaniel learns. We adults, we must choose to learn something new. We dedicate ourselves to learning consciously. If we didn’t want to learn anything new for the rest of our lives, we could. Plenty of people drift unresisting along that route through life.”

Certainly there is something marvelous, as she goes on to describe, about how children are so inexorably drawn to learning new things, and how they do it so easily. But for grown-ups, maybe it’s not that we’re any less adept at learning but that what’s left for us to learn is things like Evidence. Something that’s learned in a much more mechanical, deliberate, and less-rewarding fashion than the really cool, substantive stuff like walking and talking.

The other day I went back to the bike shop I’ve visited several times since I’ve been in Germany, including in the first few weeks when I had almost no German skills whatsoever. Back then I had to make the staff speak to me in English, since there was no way anything would get communicated otherwise. But on this day I strode in confidently. I asked my German friend for just one word, the particular one for the part I needed. “Why don’t you just ask them for it in English?” he asked. But I couldn’t do that. Not here, anyway. I needed to do this in German. It was a matter of pride.

So armed with my word I went up to the counter and asked for what I needed. The whole conversation only consisted of a few sentences back and forth, but it was indeed back and forth. I asked for what I wanted, the clerk responded with a question, I answered it, and then he provided the information I needed. By the end of it we both understood each other perfectly.

Outside my friend marveled at how quickly I’d learned to speak that well. Now, let’s not kid anyone: I’m only barely functional in German, and my conversational ability is strongly limited by my tiny vocabulary. And what I can say I may not always say quite right, or quite smoothly. But I can communicate in this language, that is clear. And maybe my friend is right to be impressed.

The thing is, it was easy to learn. Surprisingly easy. And much easier than learning things like Evidence. Because unlike rote, mechanical things like Evidence, learning a language is a dynamic process full of reinforcing affirmations. It wasn’t something I learned abstractly and then took a test for, after which I needed to wait days or even weeks for feedback on whether I’d learned anything at all. Learning German in Germany meant that I got feedback immediately, on the spot, with every word I uttered. That dawning look of understanding on the other person’s face, it helped to immediately cement in my brain everything new I’d absorbed.

It does matter, of course, tremendously, that I learned German in a German-speaking place. Learning a language in a rote form, far removed from anyone you could connect to with it, is much like learning Evidence. I gave up Latin in high school for that very reason — it always felt like learning algebra, something with memorizable formulas but no spark of life. But I switched to Spanish in an environment where, although it is a living language, I was so detached from anyone who lived in that language that the educational experience was just like learning Evidence too: a discrete set of material to be learned and memorized, but nothing more than that. And so while I can truthfully say I’ve learned Spanish – I studied it quite a bit over several years – it’s still not a language I can (so far) in any way say I truly know how to speak.

But in the right environment, somewhere where you can explore and decode language with each breath you take and be rewarded for your discovery almost immediately, language is amazingly easy to learn, no matter how old you are – whether you’re toddler in your parents’ arms or a grown-up in a new neighborhood.

Or at the very least, it’s much easier than Evidence.

In walking through the Frankfurt Airport yesterday I was struck by how difficult it was to tell that I was in Germany. The only hallmarks seemed to be the volume of Lufthansa flights boarding and the proliferation of pretzels at various eating establishments. Otherwise there was very little to indicate it was a German airport. For instance, English was not only ubiquitous, but at times it was the default language (ie, the airport even refers to itself as the “Frankfurt Airport,” and not the Frankfurt “Flughafen,” and some advertisements lining its corridors were written entirely in English with no German whatsoever – like the one for Avis car rentals…). Meanwhile the currency is all the same as many of its neighbors, cell phones roam easily from one country’s carrier to another, and traveling between countries is a simple matter of walking on and off a quick flight and then right out the door.

I don’t describe all this as a complaint, per se, but it did prompt a “kids these days” sort of reaction as I recalled my own first serious backpacking trips traversing Europe. Back then (1995 and 1996) Europe had already just changed rather drastically in that the Iron Curtain had just fallen, which opened up areas and cultures that had previously been walled off (often literally) from the rest of the continent. But even in western Europe passports still needed to be shown at country borders, money changed in each one, and separate phrase books consulted. Each country seemed very far away from every other one, and each retained a very different language, culture, food, coinage, telephony, and general aesthetic from its neighbors. Half the point of a European travel adventure then was to have to get to and cope with each one throughout the journey.

Which, as one must now imagine, was often difficult. Pan-European travel is undeniably much easier today, and certainly MUCH easier than it has been for so much of history. And in many ways the new status quo is definitely a good thing. The more separate and distinct each European nation was, the more likely it was to war with its neighbors. Having a common sense of European community is tremendously important to the overall success and stability of the entire region.

But how much needed to be overcome in order to reach this point is an important lesson of history, and one that can so easily be forgotten as the challenges, and with them even some of the charms, of a more localized Europe fade so quickly into the past.