Making Things Light

My last classes of the semester will be on Tuesday. The sad part of that news is two of my favorite classes, Property Theory and Religious Clauses of the Constitution, will be over (I’m somewhere between ambivalent and glad regarding the end of my other classes). The good part is I’ll have plenty of time to tackle the research hours I need to complete by the end of the semester. I’ll be spending much of this week staring at my computer as I reformat citations and annotate law review articles.

Reviewing law articles can be a bit mind-numbing. The topics are frequently hair-splitting and obscure. (To be honest, it makes me feel a little like the biblical Pharisees of old.) I recently came across one professor who recognized the tendency toward minutiae in the law. He gave a false paper title as an example: “What’s Wrong with the Twenty-Ninth Exception to the Hearsay Rule and How the Addition of Three Words Can Correct the Problem.”* It’s a fantastic title; one which I wouldn’t actually be surprised to find in the database.

My Trust & Estates professor used to joke about this tendency as well. When someone asked a question to which he didn’t know the answer (for example, can you leave your possessions in trust to an unborn pet?), he would suggest the question was a good topic for a student “note” (the term used for a student legal research paper). “Note topic!” he’d say.

(“Note Topic!” is just waiting to become a party game for the niche lawyer market.)

I appreciate lawyers who can poke fun at themselves and the profession without being disparaging. Actually, I appreciate that ability in anyone. A member of my ward recently described it this way: he said his son is the type of person who does not make light of things, but makes things light. That, I think, is a mark of good humor and strength of character.

And that is why I hope I will always enjoy a good lawyer joke. (Feel free to send them my way.)

_____

*Richard Lempert, The New Evidence Scholarship: Analyzing the Process of Proof, 66 B.U. L. Rev. 439 (1986).

I found this little message as I was walking down DOG
Street the other day. Someone is very excited about
the state motto: "Virginia is for Lovers."

The spring weather has been beautiful.
This is the Christopher Wren building
on one of the many gorgeous days we've
had of late.

It's a little startling to pull up your blinds and find a
lizard. Especially when your windows haven't been
open in several months. Happily, this little guy
readily complied as I escorted him out the front door.

This tree gets by with a little help from a friend.
What makes me curious is how it survived sticking
out sideways like that long enough to get a post to
rest on. Or maybe someone just inserts a new
support post every few years. In any case, this seems
like a group portrait waiting to happen.