Quick Status Report

It finally got cold enough at the end of this week that I turned the heater on. My reaction to the nearly 80 degree weather at the beginning of the week was, “Oh yeah, I live in the South.”

I also did something this weekend that was not homework: I went to a movie. A friend invited me to go see Big Hero 6 (which is good). It was so nice to do something from normal life for a change. (Law school rarely feels like normal life.)

I’ve reached that point of the semester when my brain starts to feel full. It’s getting hard to focus on new concepts. I think that’s what makes school so mentally exhausting; my brain is always grappling with something new and never has a chance to go into autopilot.

And maybe that’s why today’s long afternoon nap felt so good. No thinking required.

* * *

Trusts & Estates professor quotation of the week: “It probably wasn’t really meant to mean anything.”

Business Associations professor quotation of the week: “This case is in here because it’s a freak.”

Counting

I recently started keeping track of the hours I spend on law during the week, mostly as an external enforcement mechanism for getting more done. I generally set a 2 (or 3, or 4, or 5) hour timer and pause it every time I need a break. And I seem to need a lot of breaks. Mental breaks, food breaks, go-for-a-run breaks . . .

It usually takes me much longer to run out the timer than the actual time counted.

I was pondering on that a while ago. Why is it so hard to sit and plow through the research and reading and writing I have to do? After all, that’s what I used to do in college.

I could probably come up with multiple reasons: a different level of mental challenge, the availability of distractions, the numbing effects of reading legal analysis . . . But whatever the case, it’s hard. I seem to run out of day so much faster than I run out of work to do.

That said, the countdown is on: four more weeks of class, three finals, two papers, and one law student who’s almost halfway through school.

Paint-Brushed Beauty

Autumn is in full swing here in Williamsburg. The trees are different colors every time I drive down Hwy 199. The range of colors runs from a few purples and a wide variety of greens to oranges, dark yellows, browns, and occasional smatterings of bright red and shining gold. The change in colors happens so calmly; it’s like watching a candle melt or a log burn. What Virginia lacks in the fireworks of an intense all-at-once fall, it makes up in quiet, plodding, almost paint-brushed beauty.

That said, autumn is a dangerous time to be under the trees in Virginia. Every time I go outside I hear twigs and acorns tumble through the branches to the ground. I’ve heard a few thunks on my car as I’ve pulled out of the driveway, but I think I’ve only been hit on the head once.

My week was very busy. I’m taking a mini class on European Union law. It’s interesting, but somewhat dense. The EU has to balance the interests and needs (and ideologies) of 28 different countries, which results in a complicated system of institutions and powers and competences. And which involves an absolute alphabet soup of acronyms. Acronyms are useful when there are only one or two, or when they are relatively familiar. They’re not quite as useful in large numbers, especially when they are composed of the same letters in different configurations. I’ve gotten lost a few times because the only acronym I could translate into a meaningful title was “EU”.

Happily, we have a good professor. He’s from Spain and is skilled at pointing out the principles that are very European (and not American).  This is especially helpful because the EU is based on civil law while the US (and every state except Louisiana) is based on common law.* It’s a little bit of a mental workout to think about law from the civil law perspective.

*Civil law is statute-based and civil law judges can only interpret the law. Common law is not statute based and judges can both interpret and create law. For a more detailed description than that, I recommend Wikipedia.

With all the reading and research of this past week, I’m very grateful for whoever scheduled this class. It was a stroke of genius to put it in the two weeks surrounding the end of Daylight Savings Time. I needed that extra hour of sleep last night.

Scholarship is not Philosophy

In Trusts & Estates, we’ve moved on to revocation of wills. Things can get complicated very quickly when someone doesn’t dispose of an old will after making a new one. Hence the following question from my textbook: “Did the revocation of the revoking document . . . revoke the revocation (of the revoked document)?” (Thomas P. Gallanis, Family Property Law, 5th Ed., 226 (2011).)

This topic also yields itself to distractions regarding spelling. As I take notes (by hand – that is, without spell check) I find myself wondering, “Does that word have a ‘c’ or a ‘k’?”

Revocation can take place in many ways. A Virginian’s will, for example, is void if he or she “cuts, tears, burns, obliterates, cancels, or destroys” it. (VA Code § 64.2-410.) I’m guessing that the author of that statute had fun writing it.

In Business Associations we spend a lot of time talking about policy. That prompted the following question from my professor when he was trying to make a point: “Let me rephrase this question: Why are lawyers bloodsucking parasites?”

I’ve spent a lot of time researching this week. Mostly that involves the somewhat mind-numbing activity of skimming law review citations and articles. The first few aren’t too bad, but when I get to the third or fourth hour of browsing similar articles looking for a specific facet of a topic about which dozens of people have written, I start to get a little stir-crazy.

This has led me to the idea that I’m much less of a scholar than a philosopher. By that I mean I don’t care for researching and study just for the sake of research and study, but I do like thinking about and discussing ideas just for the sake of thinking about and discussing ideas.

Database of thousands of law review articles on every imaginable facet of the legal world? No thanks. Panel discussion of the very same topics where people are expressing the same ideas and asking the same questions? Bring it on. Maybe that’s why I generally prefer class time to homework.

Except, of course, when I get to read sentences full of verbal gymnastics like that one from my T&E textbook.

October in Virginia: flowers . . .

. . . and falling leaves.

On Wills

“Where there’s a will there’s relations.”

– Jill Paton Walsh & Dorothy L. Sayers, A Presumption of Death 285 (2002).

In Trust & Estates, we’ve finished discussing intestacy and moved on to wills. The main thing to keep in mind with a will is making sure it’s done correctly; courts can be exceedingly (and ridiculously) inflexible about meeting the requirements. (Some courts have loosened up a bit, but better safe than sorry.)

One of those requirements is, of course, a signature. This led to potential problems for Theodore W. Dwight, the founder of Columbia Law School. Prof. Dwight neglected to make his will until he was on his deathbed. (This was, according to my professor, despite having taught Trusts and Estates Law. My professor also claims that Prof. Dwight resigned from Columbia in a huff when the school switched from a W&M style curriculum to a Harvard style curriculum.) After finally having his will written, he began to sign it and got as far as “Theodore W. Dwi­–…” and then suddenly died.

Bad timing.

(I don’t know whether the will was ultimately considered valid.)

There are, of course, reasons to declare even a correctly executed will invalid. One example is insane delusion. It’s not simply being delusional that invalidates a will, though; the delusion has to actually affect how you make your will. For example, your will can still be valid if you believe you are Napoleon, but not if you try to leave everything you own to the Empress Josephine.

Another case we read was regarding a woman who got involved in a cult and made a will to leave everything to the cult’s leader. She later changed her mind, but was prevented from changing her will by physical duress (they wouldn’t let her sign it), fraud, and possibly murder. The court (wisely) struck down the will that designated the cult leader as beneficiary of her estate (good job, New York Court of Appeals). That’s one of the more extreme cases we’ve read in T&E.

Meanwhile in the world outside of law school, the avian population at the lake has ballooned. I ran through a large group of geese the other day to an absolute cacophony of honks. I’m not sure if they were mad at me for disrupting their party, warning each other to get out of the way, cheering me on, or protesting being caught between the cars on the street and me on the trail.

Also, the trees are no longer a uniform shade of green. Most of the change is the summer’s solid green fading into a variety of green hues, but there are also smatterings of brown, yellow, orange, and occasionally red. I prefer the range of colors more than the continuous green wall of summer.

And today we had our first day of autumn-like temperatures. Yay for the impending sweater season.

I stopped mid-run by the lake one day. The ducks
immediately and excitedly rushed over. I think they
were expecting food.

Little did the ducks know, I stopped
mainly so I could take a picture of the
heron. I did feel bad, though, so I
walked down the next day to feed the
ducks (and a lot of geese) some Chex.

Jokes and Doodles

Joke of the week (shared by my Business Admin. professor):

A CEO was hiring a new accountant for his firm. He brought the first applicant in and told him he only had one question: “What is two plus two?” The applicant answered, “Four.” The second applicant came in and was asked the same question: “What is two plus two?” The second applicant answered, “Four.”

The third applicant arrived and was asked the same question: “What is two plus two?” The third applicant leaned forward a little and said, “What kind of number did you have in mind?”

(The joke was used to illustrate how we can’t always put implicit trust in people just because of the position they hold.)

Public International Law this week was interesting. We had a guest speaker from Nigeria who is earning her doctorate in law in South Africa. Her study concerns internally displaced persons (people who would be refugees if they weren’t still in their own country). She talked about the unique challenges faced in helping IDPs. Because they are in their own country, they are still within the jurisdiction of their own governments; but if the situation isn’t addressed, it can spill over and cause international difficulties.

PIL also reminded me why I like geography. We discussed the creation of states and the criteria required for a state to exist. In conjunction with that, we talked about the dissolution of Yugoslavia into the various currently existing states and a little bit about Palestine and Kosovo. My geography brain found it fascinating. I love learning about the way spatial relationships (and now international laws) affect people.

There’s an extra benefit to PIL: it’s the kind of class I can doodle in. This week I tried drawing Africa. I’m not going to win any art prizes, but I enjoy doing it.

Conference, Choir, and a Cockroach

“My friends, I’m here to tell you the lawyers won!”

That was the statement of Democratic Party chairman Ron Brown to a meeting of the American Bar Association (see A Nation Under Lawyers, Glendon, Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 3). It was also the first sentence I read in preparation for the Citizen Lawyer Seminar I attended this week.

During the seminar, we spent a couple of hours each day discussing the hows and whys of being a citizen lawyer. The idea of a citizen lawyer started with Thomas Jefferson and George Wythe; their purpose in setting up a law school at W&M was to train leaders for the new country. Given the pervasiveness of law in American society (much more so than in other cultures,  especially non-western ones), it is important to have lawyers who can use their skills and knowledge to make a positive difference in the world through leadership and public service.

Most of the seminar sessions were in the evening, which meant I was driving home in the dark. I had forgotten how dark in can get in Virginia at night under the trees on a street with no streetlights. While I was driving down South Henry Street on Monday night, my side mirror caught my eye because it was completely black. It’s a pleasant phenomenon, but a little surreal.

As interesting as the Citizen Lawyer Seminar was, it was no match for this week’s Stake Conference. Saturday night I had the pleasure of driving the four local sister missionaries to the Stake Center. Then I sat on a bench with a dozen or so sister missionaries and thoroughly enjoyed the meeting. It feels good to be surrounded by sister missionaries.

When it was over, we had a little side show: a cockroach was forcibly escorted out of the church by one of the Elders.

I spent the Sunday morning session on the stand so I could sing in the Stake choir. The choir had a short existence. We had one quick and effective morning practice, sang the prelude music, and sang our special musical number: Behold a Royal Army, arr. by David A. Zabriskie (it can be found at http://www.ldsmusicsource.com/music/1188/SeeHear.html).

I found it interesting to compare the citizen lawyer seminar with Stake Conference. My professor had hopes of giving us a life-changing (or at least profession-affirming) experience during the seminar. It was good and interesting, but I often felt somewhat like an observer. It was as though my classmates were moving forward, ready to tackle the complexity of the ever-expanding American legal system while I was on the sidelines – interested, but not really sure how or whether I was involved.

Stake Conference, on the other hand, had the depth and power that really makes a difference. There is no substitute for truth, revelation, and inspired leaders.

I don’t know how my career will turn out, but I hope I can ever be found doing the work of the Lord.

The leaves, they are a-changin'.