The Rogers News

Author: Chris

  • Last Day Of Class

    Today is my last day of class for this semester. I’m actually sitting in it right now. It’s Evidence and we’re talking about the admissibility of scientific evidence.

    I can’t wait for exams to be over in a week and a half. Studying for them will be fine, but I’m burnt out on reading for classes. In law school you rarely feel overwhelmed by the amount of work you’re required to do – at least after you get into a rhythm. What you don’t realize is that you’re constantly studying or thinking about studying. The reading assignments are relentless.

    I’ve been fortunate to not have writing assignments this semester. This is a polar opposite from how I felt about midterms and exams in undergrad (I majored in Economics). Back then I loved courses that required me to write papers instead of taking exams. I preferred to have time to think through the papers and felt that writing them gave me a deeper understanding of both the principles I was applying and the topic the paper was based on.

    Legal writing is different. It’s a chore. It’s mechanical. It’s dull. However, it is clear. If I had to write an term paper for an Econ class today, it would be better organized and make clearer points (I hope). At least, those would be goals of mine.

    All of my exams this semester are in-class and two or three hours long. Most are a mix of essay, short answer, and multiple choice. Professors do this because they want to provide a mock-Bar Exam experience.

    I don’t care much about the format. Multiple choice are easily my least favorite because they are the easiest to mess-up. Professors can dupe you easily, which is annoying. The pro for MC is that it requires the test taker to know exactly what they are looking for. Precision is good, however difficult to obtain under test-taking conditions. An essay on the other hand allows a little more leeway for the writer and places the burden of precision on the professor, who must grade precisely and consistently.

    Anyway, I can’t wait for the semester to be over. I’ll be halfway through law school. At times, it has seemed to pass slowly, but overall it has been a fast year-and-a-half.

  • Avoiding the Salvation Army

    I avoided a Salvation Army donation bell-ringer for the first time tonight. I passed the old man in his knit hat on the way in. He wasn’t ringing the bell. He didn’t say hello. But neither of those facts are why I didn’t give. I just didn’t have any change on me and I didn’t want to deal with saying, “Sorry, I don’t have any change,” so I went out the far exit.

  • Commerce Clause

    A Con Law based refresher for myself.

    Commerce Clause – express power to Congress to enact legislation that affects interstate commerce.

    Dormant Commerce Clause – prohibits states form enacting laws that impede interstate commerce.

  • Ban Laptops in the Classroom?

    We’re talking about whether laptops should be banned in class. We read this article.

    A few of the problems laptops (and their users) cause are that they are a distraction to other students, students watch porn, and professors don’t have students full attention.

    I’ve been reading news during this discussion.

    Update: I’ll be taking my Copyright final on my laptop. That will be the first time I’ve ever taken an exam on a computer and not in a blue book

  • Identity vs Efficiency

    I read 300+ blog posts a day thanks to Google Reader. It’s my homepage. Every time I open my browser I’m bombarded with new postings. I’ve done this for almost a year now. Before that I visited the individual blogs.

    Jakob Lodwick makes the following point in a post today:

    This urge to make everything automatically syndicated and aggregated into custom streams does have a trade-off. You’re trading identity for efficiency.

    This provides a few shocking realizations for me.

    1. All that I’ve done online lately is consume and reorganize. I don’t create enough. Sure, I’m creating right now. But, it’s not enough. This is partially a result of being in law school, which has significantly squashed the time I have to think about meaningful creative endeavors. Or even read a novel.

    2. In the past I’ve spent hours modifying the look and feel of my other blog – Yugflog.com – so that it is appealing and appropriate to the subject matter. If all of that was never seen because it was only read through RSS feeds, that would be a lot of wasted work on my part.

    So what? While the 2D web-space is becoming increasingly visually stimulating and full of rich content, my way of dealing with it is to reduce it to uniform text in a linear stream. Not only that, but no one blog, micro-blog, tumblelog, video site, or website stands out. All of the information is slurred together.

    I should care more about who is saying what.

    I should care more about what it looks like.

    I should care more about giving back as much as I take in a qualitative, not quantitative, manner.

    To do that I’m going to stop reading my RSS feeds every spare second. I’m going to evaluate what I can do with my time that would be either (a) more productive or (b) more creative.

  • How To Edit Anything

    Understand the history of the medium you are working in.

    Understand the best work that has been produced in that medium.

    Balance your work against that understanding.

    Balance your work against the best of your work.

    Continually revise that understanding.

    from Clusterflock.

  • Funny Quotes From Boo

    Book Weekley, one of the guys representing the U.S. in the Omega Mission Hills World Cup played in China November 22 – 25, is notorious for his quotes. Here’s a recent sample:

    Q: Boo?
    BOO WEEKLEY: I’m excited to go over there, and like Heath said, it’s an honor to represent your country. I wouldn’t have gone by myself, though; it’s not that I didn’t want to represent my country, but I ain’t into traveling, especially during hunting season.

    Q: What season is it?
    BOO WEEKLEY: Deer.

    Q: It would be deer season if you were at home now?
    BOO WEEKLEY: I would have gotten up at 4:30 in the morning, and I’d probably still be in the woods right now.

    Q: You would be looking around and —
    BOO WEEKLEY: I’d be up a tree, about 35, 40 feet.