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Journal orientation was this past weekend. The first set of assignments is out with my staffers, who even as I write this are busy verifying citations and editing copy.

The new term has begun.

And just like the start of every new year, there are jitters. The usual and expected ones are back, of course: classes, books, and the rest. This term should be good: Immigration, Remedies, Copyright, and Federal Courts. Nothing I don't want to do--but then, isn't that why I worked so hard 1L summer and 2L? At least now I'm in a position to take things easy, schoolwise, and pick my shots.

The state of the economy, oddly, eliminates one major source of stress--there are so few jobs about that it's almost pointless to worry about finding work. It's cold comfort, of course, but I can always tell myself that it's a bad year for everybody.

There's also the unaccountable anxiety of the unknown and the unknowable. I find myself unusually on edge--sometimes giddy, even--and I can't even think why.

I guess I just can't wait to get started--even if I wish I could have just a little more time before I do.

I've been pretty quiet for a while--but that's not for lack of things to do.

This summer, I'm working at Legal Services of Northern Virginia; we represent indigent clients in civil matters. I've been on the job a week now, and I can say that it's been an education in itself.

Law school didn't prepare me for a lot of things that I'm seeing on the job. In law school, I read appellate opinions, and think about complex legal problems at a pretty high level. Practice, I'm finding out, is much grittier. It's one thing to know that the relevant rule of procedure allows you to propound 30 interrogatories, and quite another to know how to draft those interrogatories in a way that will ultimately result in meaningful discovery.

My problems tend to be intensely factual rather than legal. Did the landlord provide the tenant with the correct notice? How have the children been spending their weekends since Mom and Dad separated?

As far as the law goes--I find myself having to learn a great deal in an awful hurry. I haven't studied family law, or secured transactions, or landlord/tenant--but I have to learn quick, because that's what's on my desk. The ethical duty to exert reasonable diligence in learning the law means a lot more to me. Real clients now depend on my ability to figure out what their rights and remedies are.

A good chunk of my working day is spent on the telephone, calling clients and finding facts. This is hard enough under normal circumstances. But because I speak Spanish, I tend to conduct a lot of interviews in that language. That's been quite a struggle. It's not that my Spanish is terribly rusty--although it has atrophied somewhat from disuse. A Spanish call demands my total attention: I have to listen to what the client is telling me, then think about what legal import it has. One side of my head is dealing with Spanish facts; the other is frantically trying to match them with legal knowledge acquired in English. Somewhere in between, I have to respond in Spanish, usually in a way to gain more and better facts for the whole processing loop to begin again.

It's exhausting work. I'm completely drained at the end of the day--usually I just make it into bed and crash.

Just the same, this is probably the best thing I could have done for myself over the summer. As a lawyer-in-formation, I'm thrilled to be given this much autonomy and responsibility. I'm amazed at how much lawyering I've had to do in just a week on the job. On a more personal level, I like the fact that I can actually make a difference for people who may not have much else going for them.

Many of the people I'm dealing with immigrated from countries where the law was nothing more than a tool for the powerful to abuse the powerless. I hope that the work that I do can, in some small way, show that things are different here.

They're gonna run my botnet paper, w00t!

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

Today's exam was an exercise in non-being. I ended up drawing blanks on names that I should have known cold.

It's no major disaster; I'll certainly not fail, but I could have done better. The dripping rain doesn't make things any better, either.

I'd say I was looking forward to Pacquiao v. Hatton this Saturday, but I have an exam that morning, too. UGH.

I've been looking into LaTeX for legal documents. I already use LaTeX for personal things, such as generating study outlines:


My 1L CivPro outline.

The best part about LaTeX is that it makes the structure of the documents trivially easy. I can forget about formatting, and concentrate on the content.

Of course, this is hardly WYSIWYG:



The green-and-black terminal window is what I see when I create a document in LaTeX--the finished product is shown up top.

Of course, TeX is generally a science, mathematics, & engineering thing; humanities types don't use it very much, and lawyers don't use it at all.

One problem is that we're already too wedded to our working methods. We rely on word processors to generate our documents--even though we could benefit from the more predictable behavior of a typesetting language like TeX.

Our citation style doesn't help, either. The Bluebook is needlessly complex, and its conventions are so idiosyncratic as to make it nearly impossible to use existing bibliographic styles and software to manage citations in a complex document.

That means that we're left fly-specking documents for stray commas or spaces. Not only is it annoying, I figure it's a waste of time.

Unfortunately, all the work implementing legal citation styles for TeX seems to be overseas. Jurabib was developed for German legal style--close, but not quite. biblatex doesn't quite do law. The most promising implementation, Camel, seems to have ceased development, and its lead developerhas dropped off the face of the Earth.

What I wish I had was the ability to bang out legal documents in TeX, and then specify my citations on the fly, in a way that's familiar to me as lawyer--something like LyX, with Camel support.

Sigh.

I suppose I shall have to make it myself, if I'm to have it--but I wish I had time to learn how to do that.

I just got some exceptionally wise advice about my career prospects. Instead of merely repeating it, though, I'll deliver it in Zen koan form--because this is how it seemed to me:

Once, as the Master visited the Imperial Capital, he happened upon a group of poor law students, who welcomed him and threw a small banquet in his honor. The students, being poor, could afford nothing but a few fruits. As they sat down, one of the students asked the Master:

"'Master, what should I do? I spent 1L and half of 2L pursuing a practice area that seems to have evaporated in this economy. No one will hire me in my field. But I need a job for this summer!"

The Master, snatching a berry from the student's plate answered him:

" 'You are hungry. Eat!'"

And when they heard this, they were enlightened.

I had resolved not to check my grades from last semester until January was out--there was just no sense in getting anxious and repeatedly refreshing the registrars' web site.

Well, it's February. I checked.

More of the same. Evidence killed me, as I thought it might. PR came off worse than expected, but better than I probably deserved. Corporations was a gift. Negotiation was slightly better than expected.

Nothing spectacularly bad--just not the good result I so desperately needed.

The sidewalks by school hadn't been cleared this morning, so I had to offer an arm to one of my classmates as we walked from the Metro to the school door--she was slipping and sliding on the packed, trodden snow.

We walked and talked about Jay-Z and criminal procedure--because, you know, I'm all about that stuff now. Downer: I had to move slower, so I was late for this morning's Criminal Procedure class.

Oh well.

Well, that was just awful.

After a performance on Saturday's Corporations exam that can only be described as shameful, I've got only one exam left to go this term--the dreaded Evidence final.

And, much to my chagrin, I have discovered that I am not nearly as sharp on evidentiary questions as I have been. Of course, all that time off thinking about Corporations--or nothing at all-- has probably dulled me. But as I go through the materials one last time, I can't shake the feeling that I seemed much better at this during the regular semester.

Well, that went well, for infinitessimally small values of well.

I was a sickly child growing up. I suffered from pneumonia several times. I will never forget the feeling of terror, waking up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe--my lungs straining, my heart pounding, and me coughing and sputtering, drowning like a fish in air. It was the feeling of breathing and getting nothing, of being acutely aware of the lack of air.

That was how I felt for a fair bit of the last exam. I totally whiffed on one question. I could not have drawn a bigger blank even if I tried. I will be lucky to get any points at all.

After that, it was damage limitation. I had to suck it up, cut my losses, and try to move on to questions I could answer.

Corporations tomorrow. I have no idea how ready I am. I'm not sure I'm worried. I'm worried that I'm not worried.

Here goes.

A friend just called me in a near-panic. She is applying for a job. Part of the application process involves a writing test.

What's the problem here? The Bluebook[1], that's what. She rang me up after the writing test, worrying that she had cited an unpublished case incorrectly.[2] She also was worried that she hadn't correctly handled the fact that the unpublished opinion was quoting another opinion.[3] Worst of all, the examiners supplied her with the fifteenth edition of the Bluebook, which has been superseded by the eighteenth edition.

I tried to calm her down. First, I said, the fact that she was worried about her citation style probably meant that she had done well enough to pass. Second, I observed that unless the examiners had supplied her with the jurisdiction's local rules concerning the use and citation of unpublished opinions, she didn't really have much to worry about. Third, I noted that, given the fact that the examiners were relying on the fifteenth edition, their own citation style might not be all that good.

Crisis averted.

*****NOTES****
[1] The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (Colum. L. Rev. Ass'n. et al. eds., 18th ed. 2005)

[2] The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation R. 10.8.1(c), at 95 (Colum. L. Rev. Ass'n. et al. eds., 18th ed. 2005).

[3] The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, R. 1.6(c), at 53 (Colum. L. Rev. Ass'n. et al. eds., 18th ed. 2005)

There's something that's bothering me. Where is all the cyberlaw? It's been nearly fifteen years since the Eternal September threw open the gates of the old Internet to a massive influx of newbies, and yet the accumulates scholarship on substantive law on the Internet is extremely sparse. What treatment the Internet does receive in the legal academic world is still theoretical. The case reporters have not yet yielded much in the way of meaning for me, either.

As an 11-year-old kid with a 9600 baud modem and an AOL account (thanks Mom & Dad!), I was overjoyed when the walls of AOL's garden came tumbling down and I got to read USENET for the first time. I was terribly interested in poetry and writing at the time, and I cut my first literary teeth posting bad work on newsgroups with little traffic The 'net and I have grown up together, I suppose. We spend a lot of time with each other now. I conduct almost all of my life over the Internet: banking, commerce, academic research, communications (both serious and frivolous). I cannot be alone. And yet there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of settled law on Internet life.

Now, as a law student, that fact bugs me. Surely there are torts on the internet. There must be private wrongs that can be redressed. The volume and complexity of human interaction must generate the same sort of legal disputes and resolutions that real life generates. But fifteen years into the Eternal September, we're still looking at Internet law as an 'emerging' phenomenon.

Why?

And I just got home. No, I haven't been partying or anything--I've just been editing.

OK, not the whole time-- I did go to mass and later I went out for a beer (one of my former sectionmates is transferring out to a sunnier place). But after having one beer--unusual for me-- I went back to the L. Rev. office.

I have a feeling that I'm going to be putting in a lot of hours this semester.

On the tort side, it's lucky for this idiot that he's in CT, which is a comparative-negligence state. In DC/MD/VA---NO RECOVERY.

Didn't make the grade. I've passed, but the marks are unimpressive.

I've just gone upside-down on my education investment. Like so many other high-risk, highly-leveraged investments made during the boom times, I've failed to consider what might happen if I underperformned.

Of course, everybody's telling me not to worry. The grade doesn't define you, the saying goes. That may be true, but it correlates pretty closely to my ability to pay off the staggering debt that I'm taking on.

Another thing: I'm an alien. I can't even file for naturalization until October 2010--at which point I'm going to be eyeballs-deep into loan repayment. That means I can't work for the Feds. So I really needed every private-sector chance I could get--and with this last round of marks, I'm certain to have pissed away a good many chances.

I love how many of my friends utterly fail to understand the immigration issue, as well. "Well, hurry the hell up and get naturalized," is their answer. But short of extraordinary intervention by either the President or the Congress, I can't. It's days like this I wonder why I didn't volunteer to be IED-fodder in the sandbox--at least they're naturalizing GI's as soon as they sign up. Of course, there'd be the small matter of my fat ass actually qualifying (obviously, Uncle Sam only wants my body) and then surviving the time in.

Ah, well. At least I didn't fail spectacularly. Maybe that might have been better: a clear, painful smackdown from the Almighty; a chance to cut my losses. I'm too committed to this enterprise to leave now. But the way things seem to work, I've just lost the most important round of the game.

I had spent days preparing.

My professor had already told us that our Constitutional Law exam was going to deal with the issues in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. I had read the opinion several times. I spent two days locked in a room with a classmate going over possible lines of attack, working through hypotheticals, pushing through all the doctrine we could manage.

I left the law library late on the eve of the exam, exhausted. I could barely think about anything except the exam. As I came down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, I was siezed by a sudden overwhelming panic. It struck me hard, a terrible punch in the gut that doubled me over, breathless and nauseous. I stopped and dry-heaved once, wondering whether I was about to throw up the contents of my stomach--and then remembered that, other than coffee, there was nothing left to throw up.

I went to bed and slept fitfully. I was able to arrive at school early enough to stop by chapel before the exam. I knelt and prayed silently. I was not alone.

The exam began. I had prepared, but I was not ready. I fumbled issues, mismanaged time, scrambled to address all my major points. All of my preparation boiled down to a few badly-scrawled words that I hope only my examiner will ever read.

It is fitting, then, that the last sentence of my exam is unfinished. It is as incomplete as the arguments it was meant to advance, and as inartful as its author.

Given my sorry performance, I will be lucky to survive.

Constantiter construo constitutiones constitutionaliter, cum constitutionaliter constitutiones construendae sint.

In criminal prosecutions, the prosecutor is obliged to prove every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. The defendant, for his part, is not obliged to raise any defenses at all; he may simply assert that the prosecution has failed to meet its burden of proof. If a jury sides with the defendant, the case is over.

Law school exams, I have decided, put me in the shoes of the prosecutor. Not only do I have to make a case for myself--sit the exam-- but I have to do it well enough to overcome a powerful presumption that I cannot succeed. All the examiner has to do is sit there, point, and laugh as I fail.

I'm dropping too many "gimmies" in my practice tests. I'm getting blindsided by issues I should have seen coming.

The only chance I have is that there are enough people out there who are even worse off than I am.

I know I've been here before. I made it through last semester. I made it through grad school and undergrad--both on wicked curves. But each successive exam period feels harder, not easier. Is it because I'm more self-critical? Has time eroded my self-confidence? Maybe it's a positive--maybe I've learned enough about myself by now to know where I am likely to fail, instead of blindly plunging ahead, heedless of my own weaknesses?

Whatever it is, it's not pleasant.