The Joy of Noise

After three years in Williamsburg, I packed up all of my belongings (among which are a dozen boxes of books), bid farewell to a good place and some wonderful people, and moved to Richmond. It’s only an hour away from where I was, but it was enough to provide me with a much needed change. I am now safely stowed in the spare bedroom of a good friend and her family, who have taken me in with a generous and welcoming spirit.

Besides the new scenery, I think I also needed some noise. In my current living situation, that comes primarily in the form of my friend’s two toddlers. I am a rather quiet person; there are few subjects I will talk about at length and I generally don’t volunteer information about myself (though I will respond to questions), so during my last few years of living alone I’ve had a multitude of quiet days. But with a three-year-old and an 18-month-old in the house comes exuberance and spunk and a little bit of mayhem.

The girls are great. They exclaim whenever I appear in the morning (“Nannie!”), come visit my room if I haven’t been downstairs in a while, and make a point to tell me goodnight at bedtime. They love to jump on (and off) the couch (and the beds . . . and just about anything else). They are very fond of having their hair done (“Ponytail!”) . . . and done again a few minutes later after they’ve pulled the clips and elastics out. Their eyes sparkle with the newness of life and they laugh with all the abandon of youthful joy and contentedness. The three-year-old loves to read stories and color. The 18-month-old gets a kick out of me sticking my rolled tongue out at her. Both of them would willingly bounce and spin and build Lego towers all the live-long day. This morning I smiled as one of them cheerfully retrieved a toy octopus from the hallway by my door (“Oc-pus!”).

It is remarkably refreshing for someone who has been living alone, whose niblings are far away, and who spent the last 15 years primarily in the company of adults.

Sometimes you need a little noise. And life is just better when you’re greeted each day by an excited toddler.

Many Thanks!

I’ve been trying to write about the end of law school for quite a while now, but the post I was trying to write just isn’t coming. So I’m writing this instead.

Law school is over!

[ * cheers and huzzahs from the crowd * ]

By “over” I mean “I graduated”. I walked across the stage and received a fancy piece of paper designating me a J.D. (It’s a little surreal to see my name on a law school diploma.)

Maybe it’s weird, but “it’s over” feels more appropriate than “I graduated”. Law school seems like something I survived rather than something I accomplished. Maybe that’s why my diploma is now stored in a box somewhere.

And maybe that’s why I’m so grateful for all the support and encouragement I’ve received over the last three years, especially from my parents, siblings, grandparents, niblings*, aunts and uncles, cousins, and good friends (which includes just about everyone, I guess). If you are one of those people: Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! (You are wonderful.)

If anyone needs me, I’ll be in Virginia enjoying normal life.

_________________________

(*nieces and nephew)

Yes, I get to keep the funny hat.

Spring Sprang

Williamsburg is in spring mode. Not officially, perhaps, but I can’t call 60+ degree temperatures “winter.”

And, true to form, the season is coming in like a lion. A storm rolled through this week bringing high winds and at least one tornado. The tornado warning was a first for me (in previous years we’ve had tornado watches, meaning weather conditions indicated the possibility of tornados; the warning means someone saw an actual tornado). I was driving to school when the radio emergency announcement came on with a list of the high danger areas. Williamsburg wasn’t on the list, so I kept driving. I arrived to find the law school as empty as a ghost town, except for a few of us who had just wandered in. (Most of the law school population had congregated in the basement of the library.) I went to my classroom (which had been abruptly abandoned by the previous professor) and soon thereafter received the all-clear message from emergency services.

I later heard that there was damage north and south of us and a tornado out west, but my little corner of Virginia escaped any harm.

The other big news of the week is that I now have Virginia license plates on my car. I’m sad to give up my Utah Arches, but I am fond of the Don’t Tread On Me snakes.

Reasonable People

Oh happy day! It’s jelly bean season! (I like jelly beans.) (A lot.)

So one of the major buzz words in law school is “reasonable.” The concept of reasonability pervades the law. A day rarely goes by without me reading a case or a statute where the outcome was based on what a “reasonable” person would do.

It sounds straightforward, but it’s not. Because reasonable people can disagree. And they frequently do.

Sometimes the disagreement seems insignificant . For example, my Admin Law textbook noted that the FDA and other interested parties once spent nine years on a peanut butter regulation problem: whether peanut butter should be 87% peanuts or 90% peanuts. I’m not sure that question deserved the nine years it was given.

Other disagreements are a bit more significant, such as Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court’s opinion from the same-sex marriage cases, which we read recently in Family Law. The outcome of that ruling is a very different society than would have resulted from a ruling in the opposite direction.

Of course, reasonable people could disagree with me even on the importance I attach to the prior two examples. Some might say the 3% difference in peanut butter composition is significant and the societal results of Obergefell are not.

Welcome to the lawyer’s bread and butter. These things are what keep the legal profession humming.

What keeps me humming, however, is a big bag of jelly beans. It’s reasonable to eat a bag of jelly beans in a day, right?

Tidbits:

• My professor, who likes to use visual aids, didn’t have a picture of the actual teacher involved in a case we read recently. No problem, though; he just used a picture of Professor Quirrell instead.
• That same professor was very excited when we read a case about WIC chocolate milk regulations. As we discussed the case, he pulled out (and drank) the visual aid for the day: a bottle of chocolate milk, which he had been anxiously anticipating all morning.
• In Privacy Law, we’ve been discussing wire tapping and related technologies. To help with this, my professor has used stick figure illustrations. It is very helpful. Never underestimate the usefulness of a stick figure.
• Also never underestimate the staying power of Schoolhouse Rock, which is a useful bit of shorthand for the legal methodology of enacting legislation. (“I’m just a bill . . .”)
• Family Law recently emphasized the stroke of marketing genius that is the diamond engagement ring. The diamond industry has successfully co-opted the engagement business in a relatively short number of years. Well-played, De Beers, well played. (We had a very fun engagement ring discussion in class. Engagement rings raise interesting legal problems when the engagement breaks off; was the ring a free gift or conditional on fulfilling the marriage contract? Who gets to keep it? Does it matter who broke off the engagement?)
• And I met a distant cousin today. Her ancestors were the Partners of Henrieville, UT, one of whom married my great-great aunt Mary Quilter. It’s a small world, especially when your family hails from Henrieville.

Meta-Ethics and Anarchic Salad

The great thing about Philosophy of Law is that we get to discuss wacky hypothetical situations in order to clarify what we are actually talking about (or trying to talk about). This week, we found ourselves discussing demon-possessed dry-erase markers, anarchic salad, and how you can’t sue a meteorite that falls on you (courts don’t have jurisdiction for that).

The main topic of our class thus far has been philosophical anarchy, the idea that there is no moral obligation to obey the law. (This is not the same thing as the political anarchy, which is refusing to obey the law. ) A philosophical anarchist may still obey the law for a multitude of reasons, he just doesn’t accept any moral obligation in that regard. In our last class, one of my colleagues presented an extreme anarchist position; this led my professor to suggest that perhaps he’d done too good of a job on the philosophical anarchist arguments.

The other philosophical alleys we sometimes get stuck in are meta-ethical problems. My professor occasionally has to remind us that we have to accept some basic ideas (that there is such a thing as morality, for example) in order to have a meaningful discussion about legal philosophy. When we start heading toward meta-ethical questions, he quickly redirects the discussion.

My Admin Law professor recently used a more straightforward approach to instruction. We were discussing due process of law and a Supreme Court case about corporal punishment in schools. He asked whether we thought corporal punishment was a silly topic for the Supreme Court to address. When some students said yes, he pulled out his very own wooden paddle and started rolling up his sleeves. His paddle is the same size as the one that was at issue in the case, surprisingly large and heavy. Unlike the original, however, my professor’s paddle is decorated in W&M yellow and green and says “Due Process” on it. (After seeing his paddle, we conceded that there could be  valid reasons for the Supreme Court to address scholastic corporal punishment.)

During the next class, my professor told us he’s always sad he only gets to use his paddle once a year, so he displayed it a second time for our enjoyment and edification.

Meanwhile in Privacy Law, I can’t help feeling a little sorry for the plaintiffs  in the cases we read. They brought lawsuits, after all, to protect their privacy; and now hundreds or thousands of law students are reading those cases and the very details they sought to protect. Call it a meta-privacy law problem.

Outside of school, I allowed myself the nice distraction of watching Hamlet one evening.  This put me on a bit of a Shakespeare kick and I later watched Much Ado About Nothing (while cleaning my apartment in order to feel productive). It was refreshing to do something literary instead of legal.

Williamsburg also had a taste of the recent big northeast storm, though it was less boisterous in this part of the state than it was up north. Here, the snow turned to sleet then back to snow, leaving a thick crust of ice-snow on everything. I didn’t shovel off the driveway so much as an ad hoc ice rink.

It was a weekend storm, so we didn’t get a whole snow day, but the college did cancel Monday morning  classes. Since then, the temperature has jumped above sixty degrees, the snow and ice has mostly melted, and I’ve been left free to ponder meta-legal problems, Shakespeare, and the due process implications of large wooden paddles.

Homestretch

For a distance runner, reaching the homestretch is always a relief. That’s how I feel about this semester: relief that it is the last one.

And I feel like I’m actually going to make it now. I’ve always more or less known that I’d get through law school, but it’s nice to feel like it’s actually going to happen. There have been times when I wondered if I could actually finish. And there have been times when I really, really wanted to quit. So it’s nice to see the finish line, so to speak.

It’s also nice to know I passed my classes last semester with adequate grades. I was worried about one of them; my brain kept reviewing scenarios of what to do if I ended up needing to tack on three more credits this semester. But I passed the class. (Cue sigh of combined gratitude and relief.)

Last semester, my History of the Common Law
class visited Special Collections at W&M's
Swem Library. We saw lots of old notebooks
(written longhand, the same way I take my
notes), law books (including a replication of
the famous Domesday Book and a corresponding
map), and a display of Chief Justice Warren
Burger's office (apparently, he used to hand out
pocket Constitutions for Halloween).

St. George Tucker, a W&M professor, often wrote
his signature in his books, along with the price he
paid for them. Swem also has (in what I'm pretty
sure is a nod to DoG Street) the second largest
U.S. collection of books about dogs.

So, this semester I don’t have any extra credits. I have exactly the 12 remaining credits I need to graduate. (It took me all of 10 seconds to register for my classes at the end of last semester, by the way. All those years ago when I was learning 10-key, I had no idea how handy it would be.) Twelve credits breaks down to four classes:

• Family Law = the law of adoption, marriage, divorce, etc.
• Administrative Law = the law governing administrative agencies (FDA, SSA, IRS, etc.)
• Privacy Law = essentially invented by two authors of a 1890 law review article and gaining traction in the legal realm ever since
• Philosophy of Law = as my professor put it, not a law class, but a philosophy class (what is law, is there a moral obligation to obey the law, etc.)

So far, I’m most intrigued by Philosophy of Law. The others will present a decent mix of legal notions with which to finish my schooling.

Fireworks around the Capitol during the
Grand Illumination right before Christmas.

In other news, I’ve decided I don’t want to actually practice law when I get done with school, so the practice certificate I received in the mail last summer is quite possibly the closest I’ll ever be to becoming an actual lawyer. My post-graduation future is a big blank space waiting to be filled.

My new little lighthouse model.
Very fun to put together.
Needle-nose pliers are highly recommended.

There’s another sense of “homestretch” that has been a relief lately. I spent almost three weeks at home over the holidays. I got to play in the snow with my nieces and nephews, spend time with my parents, enjoy a Christmas snowstorm (and family pictures in the snow the next day), visit my grandparents, go climbing, play Sjoelbak, run with my sister, have a good one-on-one talk with almost every member of my family, visit with friends, go to the temple, catch up on some good movies, go to a trampoline/obstacle course warehouse (where I was getting very good at the slackline) . . . I could go on and on. Being at home made a world of difference.

And I did not get stuck in an airport overnight on my way back to Virginia this year. I take that as a good omen.

Dear Virginia, This is what winter is supposed to look like. Please oblige. Many thanks.