BuffaloWings&Vodka

Signing Off

There’s nothing funny about law school.

There’s nothing funny about eating at Subway 8 times a week, but only showering once.

There’s nothing funny about being called on unprepared and falling on your face in front of 120 classmates. And even less that’s funny about being called on when you’re prepared, only to fail anyway.

There’s probably nothing funny about six-figure student loan debt. Though, if you think about it, seven-figure student loan debt would be pretty hilarious.  But there’s definitely nothing funny about having your whole night ruined by an improperly italicized em-dash. Or period. Or space.  And there’s nothing funny about spending your whole life studying and taking tests only to then take a test that will allow you to spend three more years studying and taking tests, after which, as a reward, you get to study for and take the stupidest test in the history of tests.

No, looking back at it, there really wasn’t much of anything funny about law school.

But somehow we still managed to laugh. Quite a bit, I think.

So . . . try to remember that. Try to remember that, yes, we are going into a humorless business full of uptight, soulless pricks. But it can only stay a business full of uptight, soulless pricks if we all in fact become uptight, soulless pricks.

So here’s to the eternal preservation of the soul, the endless suppression of uptight prickery.

Here’s to getting a laugh out of the law everyday. And not a lame, bullshit laugh like “Heh-heh, that guy went to a state school” or “Oh man, she must have missed the bonus this year--she’s  shopping at Banana Republic.”

Make it a real laugh. 

Here’s to dropping the Ludacris footnote into your judge’s opinion, or the GHB in the hiring partner’s coffee, or your pants at the firm Christmas banquet.  Here’s to providing fodder for the hundreds of law students blogging about their clerkships each summer. Here’s to setting aside a few minutes out of each day--each of the thousands of days we’ll spend in this serious profession--to take ourselves a little less than seriously.  Seriously.

It’s been an odd but rewarding experience to inflict myself upon the world for the last three years, and during that time this blog has managed to poke into my real life in more ways than I ever could have expected. It got me a job. It got me called out in class. It got me tens of tens of dollars in advertising revenue, and one time it even got me sweet concert tickets. But I’ve needed to call it quits for quite some time, and that time is finally now.

The hope: That putting an end to my blogging activities will finally force me to finish at least one of the countless “legitimate” writing projects I’ve started since puberty.

The reality: Don’t be surprised when you stumble upon the anonymous blog of a Texas practitioner whose obsession with Russian gymnasts and his own rock-hard abs seems more than a little familiar.

 I’d like to thank everyone who’s read this over the last 40 months, particularly those who’ve taken the time to comment, or those who came here looking for porn. I liked to think of my comments section as a sort of treehouse for law students who didn’t have time to meet in a real treehouse, which, now that I type it, is sort of sad and makes me wish that I’d just built a treehouse instead. But, anyway, thanks for reading.

I’d like to thank the network administrators at each and every American law school for making wireless internet access available in classrooms. Without you, my readership would have consisted mainly of my mom. (And maybe Professor Brian Leiter, provided that I took the time to mention him so that his weekly self-Google would bring him here.)

I’d like to thank my wife, who put up with this shit, and only rarely took the time to make fun of me on my own blog.

And last, but most importantly, I’d like to thank Harriet Miers, without whom none of this would have been possible.

So long, and thanks for all the outlines.

--Mike

And done.

By the time you read this, it will all be over.

By the time I read this, I'll be in Vegas.

I'm heading out by car directly from the testing site, so I'll be missing all of the drunken revelry, but that's probably for the best.  I'd just end up hitting my face on something.

I'm looking for investors for my new bar prep company.  It's basically like BarBri, only you'd pay an extra thousand bucks or so to have weekly access to a real live MBE question writer, whom you would be allowed to punch in the face for up to five minutes.  (We might not be able to hire more than a few real question writers, but we would be up front about the fact that we employ a couple of real question writers . . .  and hundreds of actors trained to play question writers, and we wouldn't let applicants know which one they were punching, so the therapeutic effects ought to be basically the same.)

Congratulations.  See you in February.

20% Done

"How'd you do with the real estate tranaction thing on the MPT?"

"I think I got confused and wrote about rape."

Good Luck.

Bonus points for using the phrase "painfully attenuated taint" in your MPT memo.

Last Minute Questions

1.  Can I go to my car on lunch breaks? Can I have my state essay flashcards in the car so that during the break, I can look at stuff for the topics that weren't covered in the morning?

2.  If my parents were to adopt my wife, would that invalidate my marriage?

3.  If, to put me out of my misery,  I set up a lethal injection that would be administered by an apparatus activated by my cat's pulling on a piece of yarn tied to a critical lever, would my cat be held criminally liable?

4.  Why, Baby Jesus?  Why?

Things I Did this Weekend Besides Learning Texas CivPro in 20 Minutes

1.  Got my first ever triple-triple playing online Scrabble.  inSanest for 131 points.  You just hate me 'cause you ain't me.

2.  Saw Lady in the Water.  The M.NightHaters have been out in force on this one, and, no, it's no Sixth Sense.  But what ever will be? True, to fully appreciate the movie you need to be in more of a Neverending Story Mode than a brainy film student mode, but...so?  The facts are:

The acting is good.
The premise is cool.
And the man can just flat out make movies.  We get all pissy because nothing blows our craniums like Bruce Willis being dead, but the dialog is great, it's funny, everything looks great, and I'm completely absorbed during the entire thing.

So what if, in the end, my consciousness wasn't altered? That's what studying Family Law is for.

Go see Clerks II.

You need it.

Yay.

"So . . . what are you doing for your birthday?"

"Like 300 MBE questions.  Maybe a practice essay."

Not freaking out so much as freaking out.

Any BarBri people want to give me some indications as to what MBE percentages are yielding what percentile ranks when you upload your scores?

Now Wait a Tortfeasing Second

Hypo:  A negligently crashes into B, breaking B's leg, so B has to be on crutches.

Later, B is on his crutches on at the grocery store, and slips on a banana peel negligently left on the floor by the store, breaking his arm.  Had he not been on crutches, he wouldn't have fallen.

MicroMash tells me that B can recover on BOTH injuries--leg and arm--from A, and that the grocery store is not liable at all.  It actually says that the grocery store's "ordinary, intervening act of negligence was a foreseeable result of the car accident."

WHAT?  You're telling me that the banana peel which you say was negligently left there was NOT the proximate cause of the broken arm? So if A had broken his leg while practicing karate by himself, and then been on crutches and wiped out on a banana peel, he would have had no cause of action against the store?

Vosburg? Anyone? What's going on here? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGGGHHHHHH!!!

I'm now going out to negligently kick some crutch-walkers in the feet.

"What’s in his head, I cannot fucking find in mine."

Actual answer explanation given by MicroMash just now:

Answer C is correct and answers C and D are incorrect.

This is not inspiring confidence.

But maybe if I fail the bar I can get a job as a proofreader for MicroMash.

"I ain't passed the bar, but I know a lil' bit..."

Enough to know that it's really disturbing when I find editorial notes like "Susan: Ed says answer B is too vague; fix in next edit" strewn about my computerized MBE review questions.

I'm still waiting to answer a question with something that will let me be like "Hey! I learned that in law school!"

But I don't think that will happen unless I get a question on allocative effiency, Texas Hold 'Em, or the BlueBook.

Dear MBE Question Writers

I get it.  You're trying to distract me with your crazy hypos.   The sensational details and  young ages of rape victims are meant to sucker me into finding the defendant guilty when he clearly should get off because of tainted evidence.  That the unfairly silenced orator happens to be a KKK Nazi Abortion Clinic Bomber from a Pac-10 school is supposed to distract me from the fact that he, too, has constitutional rights. And the three-page-long story where I'm a pornshop proprietor who tries to form a verbal contract for the purchase of property on which someone is going to slip and fall while committing a burglarly that will get them put in front of an all-white jury without having been properly read their rights is supposed to spin me around so much that by the time I get to the actual question--what was the name of the pornshop proprietor?--I don't remember that it was me.

But the John Wayne Bobbitt hypo today? Really? Do you really think that someone like me, this close to the bar, is in a stable enough emotional state to handle severed penis stories before breakfast?

I hate you lots.

I Fought the Law, and the Law Shivved Me in the Junk

While doing practice MBE questions (600 down, about 16glabillion to go), I make these lists of mistakes that I've made, in hopes that I'll not repeat them.  Stuff like

Is the witness's absence required for a hearsay exception?

Is this a strict liabilty crime we're talking about?

Make sure it's not a lesser included offense. 

But after spending more and more time with these jerkoff questions, my lists are starting to take on a different tone:

                Apparently, virtually anything said by anyone can be construed as being against their interest.

                Obviously, any conversation you have with a social worker would count as being psychotherapy. Obviously.

                Well of course there's a special exception for statements made in connection with the purchase of a home brewing system, douchebag.  How could you forget to remember that?

                Argalflab? Pensghjaiging wakasaisoaisdjhosiaj!!!!!!

I did, however, get to see Fiona Apple and Damien Rice over at the Nokia Theatre the other night, and they rocked my nuts off.  So, yeah, I got no nuts.

Attenuation of Taint

Ouch.

18 Days

I've avoided blogging in hopes of creating the perception that I was studying hard.

I fear this is not the case.

I have until Monday to be finished with the MBE topics, at which point I have to grudgingly acknowledge the fact that there are other sections to the exam, or at least that there's a state essay portion.  (I may just go commando on the MPT and P&E.)

Also:  While you're waiting for me to finish my Commercial-Paper-Study Version of Jay-Z's "Encore," don't forget about the hearsay study aid.

Did he just say "Gizig 'em"?

Stupid Aggie tricks go hip-hop here.

Do Me a Favor

Anytime you see some dude (because it's invariably a dude) wearing his Bluetooth earpiece out in public, point at him, scream "HE'S A KILLER ROBOT!", and run away.

We're trying to start a trend.

We Can Do This

I got my bar exam ticket and info today.  My understanding of the scoring of the Texas Bar Exam is as follows:

1.  They grade our MBE's, subtracting or adding a few points to everyone's score based on previous years.
2.  They assign us grades for the Texas Essays, MPT, and P&E by rank ordering the raw scores for each test, and then converting a given raw score to the raw score of the same rank from the MBE scores.

So, if your raw score on the Texas Essays is in the 20th percentile, you get whatever the 20th percentile score is on the MBE.  Which means, the better everybody does on the MBE, the less it matters what happens on the rest of the exam.  This has to be at least partially responsible for the great pass rate here; the greater number of people taking the test who think that all you have to do is rock the MBE, the more all you have to do is rock the MBE.

And more specifically: If we could guarantee that everyone in the state got at least a 135 out of 200 on the MBE, then we could all write nothing but "Screw the Board of Law Examiners" on the other three sections of the test, and still pass.

Who's with me?

Caffeinous Envy

I was feeling nominally good about myself, having finally tamed my espresso machine and gotten to a place where I'd actually rather sit at home and drink my own creations than mix among the masses at Starbucks. Then I had the misfortune to go over to my brother-in-law's house, where I was confronted with the $800 Espresso Machine of Doom that is not only pump-driven, so as to churn out a much higher quality of espresso product than my own machine, but also stores and grinds beans on demand, obviating the need for the separate grinding step and apparatus.

I was broken.

That is, until I found this badboy, who does all of the above, and will also store and chill milk for up to 18 hours.

Now I just need to find one that will harvest and roast beans to my specifications before grinding.  And clean up after it's done.  And help me understand commercial paper.

The Legal Has Been Very Good On Me, Yes? Okay!

Nosing around the National Conference of Bar Examiners Online Store--looking for a sample MPT and perhaps some commemorative MBE buttons--I found what I think might be the saddest testimonial in the world:

"I Love the sight it has motivated me to try to raise money to take the test after having graduated and failed many times."

I count seven independent reasons to start crying.

Won't You Be?

Got what I thought was a poorly written contracts question wrong just now.

Kind of yelled a lot.

Neighbor knocked on door to see if I was okay.

I'm not.

No more grades.

At long last, I no longer have a reason to check my grades on the web.

I feel like a part of me has died.

But bar results will be good for at least a week of compulsive clicking in November.  And then again in the spring.

Mnemonics

Since I'm still really not past ConLaw, I haven't gotten into the business of hardcore mnemonic design. (Though, if anyone has a good rhyme to help me remember the three branches of the federal government, I'd be grateful.)  But I did find this thread from last year that seems to have a lot of ready-made memory aids for people too lazy to make their own.

Still Failing

The MBE is basically like taking 8 LSAT logical reasoning sections in a row.  Think of that as taking two LSAT's, back-to-back, with all four sections being LR.  Or as taking one really long LSAT.  Or as taking a multiple-choice,  multi-state bar exam with 200 questions.

At this point, I've been able to make myself do 34 questions in a row.  200 is a much bigger number than 34.

I'm a Traitor. So?

So...I've been cheering for Miami since the finals started.  I know that I live in Dallas now, but it would have been almost as lame for me to just start being a Mavs fan after being in town for only three weeks, right?

I initially felt bad about this, and felt guilty about my mancrush on D-Wade.  But not any more.  Because Avery Johnson is now officially the stupidest coach in the history of the NBA. 

I don't really care about the timeout--though, why he felt the need to tell his players to call a timeout after the second free throw, risking that one of the brainiacs on the floor might misinterpret his meaning, when it's a safe bet that at least one of them would have called the intended timeout unbidden, is beyond me. 

I'm talking about the emmingeffing Hack-a-Shaq.

Stupid #1:  Pulling it out at all.  For the weakass coach who pulls it, the Hack-a-Shaq is simply a message to your own team, a message that says "I don't think you chuckleheads can play defense."  So he sucks for that.

Stupid #2: But why, oh why, did he pull it out in fucking overtime?  Once with less than four minutes left and once with less than three minutes left, he has someone foul Shaq off the ball.  WTF????  They weren't in the penalty, and they  didn't immediately foul him again after the inbound, so there was no way they were actually forcing him to the line.  Were they just being lame for the sake of lameness?  Or was this another miscommunication problem, because, you know, Avery Johnson's voice is just so hard to pick out from a crowd?

"Well, they were using the fouls they had to give to throw off the Heat's rhythm."

Okay...but how about using those fouls to at least try to accomplish something useful, like going for a steal?

Avery Johnson is a joke.  And much like his Spurs, his Mavs are a bitch team.  And Dirk Nowitzki is nothing more than a 7-foot-tall shooting guard, a latter-day Matt Bullard who just happens to get the ball a lot, a big silly goatfucker that tried to kick a stationary bike on the way out of the stadium. 

But I still wouldn't really put money on Miami being able to win here.

EDIT: I honestly wasn't aware that calling Dirk a "big silly kraut" qualified as a full-blooded ethnic slur.  I thought it more of a quaint, throwback sort of slur, like calling someone a "vile, bloodthirsty Hun," a "goddam date-worshipping Hittite," or a "slack-jawed Sumerian lackwit."

But a quick thought experiment involving "throwback" terms for groups more frequently the targets of ethnic slurs quickly brings one to the conclusion that the relative mustiness of a term by no means excuses the singling out of someone on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin, no matter how much they suck.

The post has been amended accordingly.

Quick! Someone help me detrimentally rely!

I just got a statement from my bank saying that the $2000 loan I took out at the beginning of law school to get my laptop--which carried, I thought, a 10.8% interest rate--has, in fact, a .108% interest rate.

Sadly, this mistake is just a part of my consolidation paperwork, on the list of private loans that I do not wish to consolidate.  But there has to be some way to make it work for me.

Apparently, There Are Parking Garage Problems at Bar-Bri

For all of you who have been pained over the last few weeks by the parking/security/boredom situations in your respective Bar-Bri centers, I tell you now: I feel that pain.

Why, just today, when I woke up around 11 am after sleeping off a full night of rum and conga, I walked to the coffee shop across the street to get my morning mocha, and there were, like, four people in line ahead of me.  So I gave up on the mocha and headed back to my apartment.  But then, when I walked into my bedroom to do some practice questions, my cat was sitting in my chair.  So I couldn't even study.

It's okay, though.  I think it's healthy for everyone to be venting their Bar-Bri-spawned rage here, seeing as how nobody would listen to my wise, sage, Yodaesque advice and go it solo. 

Just make sure that somebody else's comments section is available for me to bitch in after I fail.

Abstention! Ripeness! Mootness! Screw ConLaw!

I seem to have plateaued on my road to total MBE domination.  I'll have to up my grueling study pace to, gulp, 34 questions a day. 

Could be worse.  I could be Tbag.

MicroMash: Day 2

I don't trust you, MicroMash.  What the hell is  Coloflornia, and why do I care about its citizens?
Where in the world is the country of "Zugi"? And what the shit is this supremacy clause you keep harping about?

MicroMash, I think you're lying to me.

Granted, I could only bring myself to do 17 practice questions today. But, still, I'm suspicious.

Next thing I know, you're going to tell me that the bar exam is closed book.

Silly, silly MicroMash.

Anonymous Law Firm

Anonymous Lawyer comes out in book form on July 25th (perfectly timed for that post-barzam present to yourself), and an Anonymous Law Firm website has just sprouted up to support the release.   The site is complete with attorney profiles and Anonymous Law Firm news clippings, and is frighteningly mistakable for a real firm site.

As for the book, this blogger had the good fortune to read an advance copy, and it was definitely funny.  I'm usually more of a starter of books than a finisher of books, but I read Anonymous Lawyer in two sittings.  Buy it.

MicroMash: Day 1

10:00 AM--Wake up.

10:02 AM--Open MicroMash Box.

10:03 AM--Open Reference Volume I to section titled "Constitutional Law."

10:05 AM--Quietly, gently, throw up in mouth.

10:07 AM--Return to bed.

What's Worse Than Still Not Having Your Last Three Law School Grades?

Renting a U-HAUL truck to move from Austin to Dallas, and blowing a tire about four minutes after you pick it up from the rental place.

Waking up the morning after you move into your new apartment, and somehow managing to lock yourself out of your own bedroom, half naked, with no phone or keys.

Realizing that you have only six and a half hours to get that write-on essay turned in. Hop to it.

Have Fun at BarBri Tomorrow

I'm moving.  Almost finished. I'll be back in a few days to sign off before disappearing for a few weeks.

If the practice of law doesn't work out for me, I'm going to start a new business where I rent out babies for people to carry up on stage with them at graduate school commencement ceremonies.

Fill in those outlines real good at BarBri, y'all.  I'll be thinking of you.

The Graduation Ceremony

Look.  I don't need any airhorns.  I don't need anyone hooting and hollering. I don't need a row of guys with "Mike Is The Coolest. Ever" spelled out on their chests.   I'm not going to have Christmas lights attached to my suit or a blowup life vest underneath it, and I don't expect any of the ladies to flash me. Much.  I don't intend to do a pratfall, and I'm not really hot on the idea of "raising the roof" or "milking the kitten" on stage. 

If you want to clap a little harder when they say my name, that's fine.  And if you feel like starting a slow chant of "Wings...and....Vodka....Wings...and....Vodka," a low chant that slowly builds to a mid-sized roar, the kind of roar that makes them stop the ceremony for a few seconds so that everyone can catch their breath, well, that's fine, too.  I won't stop you.

But this is a serious occasion, so let's try to be civil. 

Good Sign?

Okay.  Grades started showing up, and they're supposed to have notified us by now if we failed something.

One has to wonder what kind of agressive measures one would have to take to fail at this point.

I'll let you wonder about that while I finish packing.  I'm skipping town on the 24th, and I still have the entire collection of elven erotica to contend with.

Big Brother

They won't show me my grades online.

I think it's because we're graduating 3L's, and they don't want us to ruin our weekends with a crappy grade.

That is paternalistic bullshit.  Sweet, caring, paternalistic bullshit.  But paternalistic bullshit nonetheless.

Done.

With law school.

LiveBlogging Secured Credit

1:51 I'd originally considered taking the exam outside of the law school, perhaps taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi at a McDonald's or Chili's, but instead I'm holed up here in a storage closet.  I may or may not have accidentally locked myself in here.  I'll post asking for help if I need it.

2:09 Just lost 15 minutes wondering if an e-mail I sent out last week detailing the exorbitant amounts of money owed to me as a result of various law school poker games would qualify as electronic chattel paper under 9-102(a)(31), and, if so, whether or not anyone would be willing to buy it from me.

2:29 Rapidly losing steam.   Considering answering (A) for all remaining multiple choice questions, and pasting the text of last spring's jurisprudence final into the essay questions.  Just did 400 crunches.

Blog Position Open

The folks over at De Novo are faced with the difficult task of replacing me as this year's only graduating 3L.  Though some might say that my output as a member of the premier scholarly law student group blog whose name doesn't sound like a Star Trek planet was less than spectacular, I did lend a much-needed touch of class to the operation, and I was also in charge of bringing the cheese-and-bacon scones to our bi-weekly strategy sessions.

It looks like the plan is to run a Survivor-style tournament, which  we did two (good gyad!) years ago when I joined the  squad.  I'd encourage any student blawger interested with keeping their voice heard without having to keep a stick up their ass to think about trying out.  It's a good time.  And the site really needs to keep a second UT blogger around, if only to A) remind Armen that the Pac-10 still sucks, and B) remind PG that she made a terrible mistake when choosing law schools.

Good luck.  I'll be back tomorrow morning, when I expect to be liveblogging my secured credit take-home.

Watching TV for Mother's Day

Season Finales.  Series Finales.  My DVR hasn't worked so hard since they ran a My Sweet 16 marathon at the same time as the Flavor of Love marathon.   Doesn't bode well for my taking the secured credit final tomorrow morning. 

Happy Mother's Day, Mom

My mom reads my blog. 

Sometimes, this leads me to be a little more careful about what I put on the web.  If I'm doing a post about transsexual strippers, for example, that $4900 I spent in the Cristal Room will probably be downgraded to $750 spent on relatively tame table dances.  Or if I'm talking about how I'd like to murder the tool that's always working in the Central Market produce section, instead of writing that I'd like to "disembowel him with a $3.95 wooden lemon reamer," I'll probably just talk about "beating him over the head with a $14-per-pound organic cantaloupe."  It was basically the same deal back when I had to be on my best behavior in junior high on days when my mom was volunteering in my school library.  Only, back then I didn't really have the money for the Cristal Room. Or organic cantaloupes.

I also have to watch my grammar and usage a little more.  A few misplaced modifiers and I won't hear much.  But if I drop a compulsory comma, I'll get a polite phone call.  Misuse a fancy Latin term?   Probably an angry postcard.  And if my Flesch-Kincaid score ever drops below 11, well, let's just say that I work unfathomablistically hard to make sure that doesn't happen.  Back when I was editing the college humor magazine, I was forced to publish a letter from my mom castigating us for not knowing that the correct phrase was "for all intents and purposes," not  "for all intensive purposes." But she did make up something like 33% of our total readership at the time, so we were thankful all the same.  (And I'd bet a $3.95 lemon reamer that at least one person will read this post and say "Wait--it's not 'for all intensive purposes'? Are you sure?")

So, it's nice to know that no matter how vile the imagery, how low the readability index, or how frequent the malapropisms, there will always be at least one reader for whatever I write.

Thanks, Mom.  I love you.  Happy Mother's Day.

And if anyone is going to be in the Las Vegas area, and happens to be a knitter or quilter, be sure to drop by Nancy's Quilt Shop, the ONLY quilt shop worth visiting in Las Vegas.

 

Professional Responsibility--Again

You are informed that 10 or so 1Ls attempted to cheat on their conlaw exam by stashing outlines in the bathroom.  Please answer the following questions:

1.  Isn't the energy it would have taken to hatch this brilliant plan and sneak the secret outlines into the bathroom roughly equal to the energy it would have taken just to memorize the outlines in the first place? See, e.g., Joey Russo, I Hid the Answers in My Head, 12 J. BLOSSOM & ECON. 332 (1991).

2. Where do you hide the outlines, anyway? Ceiling tiles? Too obvious.  Toilet tank? Too Godfather.  Toilet paper holder? Too fake urine-y.  Taped to your own spleen? Now we're talking.

3. Assume that the administration doesn't have the stones to kick 10 people out of law school based on accusations that they're the stupidest exam cheats in the history of the world.  Isn't it still possible that certain student-run journals might be willing to err on the side of integrity and immediately ban anyone credibly charged with participating, if only to be even more spiteful and elitist than they already are?

4. True or False: The kind of people that would say "Hey! Let's try to cheat on a closed-book essay exam!" are the same kind of people that would say "Hey! Let's try to hide $500 million in losses by burying them in an off-the-books special purpose entity! We'll call it....GreenLaserMegatron!" Explain.

5.  If presented with the choice of A) cheating this way by yourself, or B) bringing in 9 other people, as to increase your chances of being detected while decreasing your expected return, which way would you go, assuming that you're not legally brain-dead?

6.  If you were, hypothetically, a member of this elite group of douchebags, how, exactly, would you go about explaining your actions?  Not justifying--just explaining.  I just want to know why it seemed like a good idea.  Really.  I've spent the last five hours with my head buried in the UCC, and by comparison, the UCC seems way, way easier to understand.

Official UT Cheating Rumor Mill Thread

Okay.  So Ruth has mentioned it, as have some of the comments here.  What's going on with the 1L cheating at Texas?   There have been allusions to accusations, but we want hard, sexy, soundbyte-worthy rumors.

Cheating on law school exams is HARD.  Sure, you could all work together on a take-home exam, and I have my own opinions about the soft cheating that goes on when professors fail to properly define the word "prepare" in relation to old outlines. But is that stuff really that helpful?

I want to hear something about an elite squad of 1Ls using a stolen exterior key to break into the law school under the cover of darkness, sneak into their civpro professor's office, copy the answer key to the exam, and have the answers printed on #2 pencils, which they then sneak into the proctor's materials just before exam time, but still manage to distribute selectively in the exam room, securing them all A's (plus an A+ for the chick who thought up the plan in the first place.)

That would be a good story. 

Wait a second.  Where the shit is my key to the law school?

Tarlton...we have a problem.

Passed Over--Again.

As I'm sure you've heard by now, I have, once again, been passed over for the position of Dean of the UT School of Law.

I'm not bitter.  Congrats to the other guy.

On a lighter note, this is being passed around again, and it just might have been long enough that somebody could use it to get a job. 

Graduation Stuff

We get 25 words to be read as we walk across the stage at graduation.  I may or may not have accidentally included 25 words from Eazy-E's "Eazy Duz It."  So that should be fun.

Also, there's been some inquiry as to the status of my graduation speech.  It will go up on the site a few days before graduation.  The question is whether I just post the text, or post a recording of myself actually giving the speech, or pay a few thousand extras to show up so that I can film myself giving the speech, or just crash a lesser graduation--the School of Social Work, perhaps?--and give the speech there instead.  They all sound like good options, though I don't know if the School of Social Work can afford the kind of pyro budget I'd need.  We'll see.

There is a strong presumption against failing graduating 3Ls, but that's a presumption that I'll be seriously putting to the test if I don't get back to synthetic puts and the Capital Asset Pricing Model.

Vote Elliot.

Professional Responsibility Exam

Question #1

One hour into a 3-hour Professional Responsibility Exam, Mike decides to take a break. He uses the restroom, and then goes to grab some coffee. Explain the implications of the following under the ABA Model Rules, the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, and the law school honor code.

a) Because there was no coffee made in his office, he has to make it himself. Is this a problem?

b) Once the coffee is made, he's about to head back down to his exam, but then remembers the words of the proctor: "You may leave the exam room, but you may not take anything out of the exam room, nor bring anything back in." Assuming that a coffee mug would qualify as "anything," he chooses instead to drink his coffee upstairs before returning to the exam. What gives?

c) If the coffee mug qualifies as something he ought not to bring back into the exam room, then what about the coffee itself? And should we consdider his bathroom break, in which he certainly "took something out of the exam room" with which he did not return? Is the logical extension of this line of thought that anyone wishing to leave the exam room during the exam would have to first disrobe entirely, and is this necessarily a bad thing?

d) In your opinion, would most law school exams be made more enjoyable if they included a 30-minute coffee break in the middle?

True/False Questions

1.  An agreement not to decide not to purchase a student's securities reg outline in the event that said student doesn't not get a B+ or higher on the exam wouldn't not be something that wasn't not a security.

2.  Unicorns do not have spleens.

3.  FuseTV has a new show called Pants-Off Dance-Off, in which contestants strip in front of a popular music video, and viewers vote for their favorites.

4.  The above-mentioned show was originally titled PantsPants Revolution.

5.  The apparent opinion of CNBC's Erin Burnett notwithstanding, the word "cacophony" does not rhyme with "Whack-a-Pony."

6. Chris Daughtry is a ridiculous poser, as is Chris Daughtry.

Heffalumps & WKSIs

Sometime between 2 PM and 6PM this afternoon, I blacked out at my desk while going over securities reg, and when I came to, my outlines and statute book had been completely covered with sticky tabs.  Like, hundreds of them. In several different colors.  It looks to be my handwriting, and my wife swears that nobody else was in the apartment, but I just can't imagine that: 1) I would ever have come to a point in my life where doing something this anal would seem like a good idea, whether or not I was conscious, or 2) that this many tabs could be even remotely useful for anyone during an exam.

It looks like a peacock molested a casebook that then bore the illegitimate child and, unable to care for it, seeing as how she was an unemployed, unwed casebook, chose to place it on my desk, thinking that I might give it a better home.

I'm embarrassed.

Whither Goest Thou, Svetlana Boginskaya?

In case you were wondering, Stick It falls somewhere in between Center Stage and Bring It On on the scale of awesome.  It didn't have that many good lines that you haven't already heard in the commercials, but it did have a surprising political agenda.  I had no idea the gymnastics world was so complicated.  Or that Jeff Bridges was in the movie.