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'.

Per Slurpees

In Trusts & Estates this week, we’ve been talking about intestate succession, that is, what happens to your property if you die without a will. This has involved a bunch of examples such as “If D dies intestate and is survived by B, C, X, Y, and Z but is predeceased by A…” It also involves looking at family charts and using a handy thing called a consanguinity table (a visual representation of how extended family members are related to a specific person).

And it requires a lot of mental division of inheritance shares, which can be tricky to keep track of. When one of us gets the proportions mixed up, it is often (as my professor phrases it) “a math problem, not a legal problem.”

One of the inheritance systems we’ve learned uses “parentelas.” The first parentela is the decedent and his/her spouse and children; the second is the decedent’s parents and their children; the third is the decedent’s grandparents and their children; etc. So if there are no living members in the first parentela, you look in the second. If there are no living members there, you look in the third. My professor suggested we think of it as the “tarantula” system, which has been an effective image for getting it stuck in my brain.

We also learned about “per stirpes,” which rhymes with Slurpees but is much less exciting (and not worth explaining.)

When all else fails, there’s the usual fall-back: if there are no living relatives, the property goes to the state. The official word is “escheats”; I don’t know whether its similarity to the word cheating is a coincidence. Virginia, however, is dedicated to the idea that the Commonwealth should not step in and take private property. Virginia will apparently keep going down your family line to infinity looking for relatives to give your possessions to.

In any case, intestate succession is all potentially very complicated and messy. Moral of Trusts & Estates: make a will.

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Professor quotation of the week (during Business Associations): “You’ll see this happen all the time if you go into corporate law, which I hope you DO because if you don’t defend faceless multi-national corporations, who will?”