The Last First Day

One week down, fourteen weeks and three finals left.

Yes, it was the first week of school and yes, I’m already counting down the semester.

My week didn’t go as badly as that comment implies, though. Overall, I found my classes reasonably interesting and my schedule far from onerous. Even the day I spent reading the ominously titled book The Hanged Man was intriguing and pleasant enough.

It was strange to have my last first day of school. During my other last years of school, even in college, I always expected to go back to school at some point. This time I don’t. Unless there is some plan for my life that I’m not aware of, this will be my last year of scholastic endeavors. As I was laying wide awake (unable to sleep) in the early morning before classes started, I considered taking a picture of myself on the deck, wearing my backpack and a big smile as I headed off to school for the last first time. (That idea died when my alarm went off about four hours after I finally fell asleep.)

My panacea for not being able to sleep is usually a story. Often I tell myself a good enough (bad enough?) story to put myself to sleep. Other times I read a book. On Monday, I pulled out Ramona Quimby, Age 8. It was a good choice because one of the first few chapters tells about Ramona’s first day of school – in third grade. It was a nice reminder of what first days were like when I was a kid. And in some ways, my last first day was the same: the mental worst case scenarios didn’t happen; neither did the heroic daydreams. The last first day went by as it usually does, with a little anxiety and self-consciousness, a little amusement, and an overall sort of contented moving onward-ness.

And that held true for the rest of the week. I worked my way through it, all the while trying not to think about how long it felt, trying not to go crazy, and enjoying the new subjects in equal measure.

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Here’s a run-down of my classes:

Admiralty Law:

• I wasn’t sold on this class after reading the introductory materials (which were waxing somewhat rhapsodic about it), but I think it will be interesting enough. We spent part of the first day watching a video for maritime professionals about several ships running aground. The one involving drunk sailors, a birthday party, and an inexplicable u-turn was a classic example of a the-weirdest-things-only-happen-in-real-life-and-law-school event.
• Admiralty is uniquely universal. It may involve an American ship, a Panamanian captain, a German owner, a Russian first mate, and a South Korean crew (or any other combination of nationalities). This raises the issue of language barriers. Usually they aren’t a problem, but (as was remarked in class) when something goes wrong, everyone panics in their native language.
• My professor gave us a mnemonic device for remembering some maritime jargon: “port” has four letters; so does “left”; so, port = left. “Starboard” has more than four letters; so does “right”; so, starboard = right.
• Maritime jurisdiction can be a little unexpected. For example, a plane that crashed in a Great Lake (after running into a flock of birds) did not fall under maritime law, while a train wreck in the middle of Georgia did (for contractual transoceanic shipping reasons).

Comparative Law:

• This class discusses the differences between legal systems (Asian verses Talmudic verses European, for example), including underlying motivations, prevalence, sources of law, etc. We’ll spend most of our time on non-Western systems, which appeals to the part of me that is a geography nerd.
• As an illustration of cross-cultural differences, my professor showed us a gesture (similar to the American single-handed gesture for “give me some money”) which means different things in different parts of the world. In Egypt it means “be patient”; in Greece it means “that’s so great!”; in Italy it means “what do you mean?”
• My professor claims that this class produces students that drive everyone else in the building nuts. (We start asking questions about things everyone else takes for granted: why things are done a certain way and why they can’t be done differently.)

Copyright

• My first day of reading for this class was a little dreary, but it was not as dreary as I expect Federal Tax Law would have been.
• I anticipate that the class sessions, at least, will be entertaining. Our first class involved several audio and visual aids, as you might expect would be useful for this subject. (My professor mentioned that she should find out who teaches next door and apologize for the noise.)

First Amendment: Free Speech & Press

• I’m a little leery of the offensive material that will be (unavoidably) covered in this class, and I still think modern Constitutional law is somewhat made up, but Con law always generates interesting debates. And it has a tendency toward the sort of policy and big picture arguments I like to think about (as opposed to the minutiae of some other areas of law).
• On the first day we read the text of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Our professor said we might look at it again during the semester, but not because the Supreme Court cites it. The Court apparently skips over the text and jumps straight to the principles.
• The Court is also in love with mingling fire metaphors into its free speech doctrine. This is where “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic” comes from, after all. (Schenck v. United States, 249 US 47 (1919).) In our first few cases there was much discussion of conflagrations, matches, and the like.

History of the Common Law:

• This class will likely be a never-ending source of amusement. My professor mentioned to us that barrister’s wigs (the big, curly, grey-hair kind) are expensive. “I’ve looked into this,” he said.
• Apparently, avoiding jury duty has always been a thing. In some instances, judges have just told the sheriffs to just find some people standing around and put them on the jury just so the case could finally go forward.
• Then there’s the memorable story of a defendant who was so outraged at receiving a writ summoning him to court that he made the man who delivered the writ eat it – wax seal and all.
• And, for those who want to sue someone while they are in Williamsburg, you can buy a writ from the colonial printer on DOG Street. I think you can even get it signed and sealed after you fill in the person’s name.
• My favorite line from The Hanged Man: “English courts [as opposed to French] did not allow the use of torture on suspects and this was a great obstacle to obtaining confessions.” (Robert Bartlett, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 132)
• The Danes, though they didn’t impact English very much, did give us one valuable snippet of language. “Law” comes from the Danish word “laga.” As has been pointed out by someone more familiar with classical languages than I am, prior to the Danish addition, the word for law was the Latin word ae (or æ). So without the Danes, lawyers today would just be called “ers”.