Bring your "A" game...

I just turned in my first writing assignment as a law student. It's a legal memorandum, which is essentially a document intended to boil down the main issues in a given case so anyone at a firm who reads it can get up to speed very quickly on the matter.
Being a print journalist by training, I feel pretty confident that I can write coherently. However, this is not a newspaper story. It's a whole different kind of writing. Plus, the entire law school experience has served to knock me back on my heels, so I've gotta operate at top of my game.
My writing instructor will get the memo tomorrow and critique it and from her syllabus, it sounds like she edits pretty hard. So I decided to check out her credentials. Um, yeah. She went to Penn (That's the Ivy League, for those of you following along at home) for her undergrad. She studied law at Columbia, a top 10 school. Then, after practicing for awhile, she earned an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, which is the most prestigious graduate program for creative writing in the country.
So yeah, I'm getting a very well-qualified set of eyes looking over my work. And you know what? I'm really kind of looking forward to it. I kind of hope she takes my draft apart because I would like some suggestions to improve my writing. Plus, this first draft is just pass/fail.

Content overload

My apologies for the lack of posts. Law school has crimped my ability to think about anything other than "The Law." The Law is something that you say in a deep, booming voice. You also spend most of your waking moments thinking about it when you're studying it. I'm sure I could write insightful posts explaining the difference between assault and battery or musing about why intentional infliction of emotional distress is a very difficult tort with which to establish a cause of action. I'm not sure you'd read them. My first writing assignment is due next week. It's a five-page memo analyzing a set of three different cases about the same tort. Right now, I'm taking a break from reading about the Uniform Commercial Code, which governs transactions that involve the sale and delivery of "goods." And of course, we're going to be lawyers, so we spent half of the last class period debating what "goods" are. Are the data on a computer software CD goods? If a stylist puts gel in your hair while cutting it, that's a goods transaction in the midst of a service, so should it be governed by the statute?

That's what I've been doing for the last two weeks. But now, I have to stop and drink this all in. I'M STUDYING LAW. LAW!!! I don't have any good reason to expect to attain such a profession. My father is a tree husbandman. My grandfather was a baker. My great-grandfather was a farmer. I'm only the second generation of my family to have a college degree. And here I am, studying to join a bona fide profession. I can't believe it.

Running away with your mind

The parking lot for law students is more than a quarter mile walk from the law school. But the path is through a forest and over a gulch that has a long wooden bridge over it. It's rather scenic during the day, but at night it's a bit spooky. Of course, as a 6' 2" male, I'm not really worried I'll be mugged or assaulted, but that doesn't prevent my mind from getting imaginative when it's dark.

Last night I shut down the law library, so I had to walk out to my car at midnight. About three students from another part of campus were walking along a path that crossed mine before I entered the woods. I didn't know them so we just passed each other without a greeting. As I walked into the dark forest, my mind started its usual wandering. I told myself, "I don't believe in spooks, I don't believe in spooks." Then rational thought took over and reminded me that there was nothing to be afraid of. I crossed the bridge.

One of the threesome screamed. My back of my neck got cold. Then my rational mind took over again: I'm sure one of them was just fooling around, I thought. After all, who would take on three people? The attacker wouldn't be able to prevail against them all. Unless it was a huge blood-lusting monster with fangs and mouth tentacles and an insatiable hunger for human flesh.

If so, I thought, there's nothing I can do because I'll be mauled and eaten within minutes. So I walked to my car and drove home.