Category: Law School

My thoughts on the law and law school.

Academic Cred?

Robin Hanson posits that we go to school both to learn and to get credentials for learning. Depending on the type of person you are, the value of either may vary.

The basic assumption is that credentials indicate how much you’ve learned, however I believe there is a flaw in this reasoning. Credentials (grades, test scores, etc.) may indicate how much you have learned, but more likely they indicate how well you are able to learn. And from my experience the later is as important as the former. I read somewhere that education exists to teach us to tolerate undertaking tasks that we abhor. That’s a bit pessimistic, but there is some truth in it.

Are we hired for our knowledge or for our ability to acquire knowledge? It probably varies based on the position. High skill positions will likely require you to implement the tools acquired while in school, however a firm often requires you to reformat your knowledge. In other words, if you’re better able to adapt and learn their process you will excel.

Hanson suggests to grad students that they focus on content instead of format. That is great advice that I wholeheartedly agree with, however my personal experience is mixed. Compelling content was vastly more important that the format it was presented in when I worked at a digital entertainment company. Whereas in law school there is a huge amount of emphasis on format and structure – it’s suffocating at times, yet it is in the interest of clarity and efficiency.

The balance between learning for the sake of learning and learning to excel often conflict, and that has proved to be one of the most difficult things to cope with in law school. But the pursuit is rewarding and keeping the big picture in mind helps when you lose focus of the content and get stuck in the format.

China: Cleaning Their Internet

CNN reports (link):

Chinese President Hu Jintao on Monday launched a campaign to rid the country’s sprawling Internet of “unhealthy” content and make it a springboard for Communist Party doctrine…

I will be studying intellectual property in China over the summer. The idea of censoring the content so that it better conforms with a doctrine seems to run against the principles of free thought, imagination, and entrepreneurship that I regularly associate with cutting edge technology.

I’m beginning to think I have big issues with such an approach. However, I’m keeping an open mind as to the possibilities and hope to be surprised when I’m actually there.

Party Walls

In England a long time ago someone important decided that the buildings should be made of brick and mortar instead of wood. In order to support the increased weight of the upper floors, wider walls were needed. To avoid significant loss of square footage on the lower lever because of thicker walls, “party walls” shared by neighbors were erected. Each neighbor had a duty to maintain the wall and to refrain from damaging the integrity of the “party wall.”

New England’s adoption of the “party walls” approach to fences and other such developments between property owners was the inspiration for Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” which ends with, “Good fences make good neighbors.” (link)

Applying for a Mortgage

Interesting tidbit from Property Law, which may be obvious to home-owners. (I don’t own a home.)

Often we hear people say they have a mortgage, or they’re going to get a mortgage. But, they actually give a mortgage as collateral to get a loan.

Definition:

A charging of real property by a debtor to a creditor as a security for a debt (esp. one incurred by the purchase of property), on the condition that it shall be returned on payment of the debt within a certain period.

I just saw in the news that mortgage applications have fallen for the fifth week in a row.

Content-Neutral Ban on Billboards

Sao Paulo recently banned all billboards from its city limits. (Pictures with billboards)(Pictures without billboards) Although the city is in Brazil and not the United States, it highlights an interesting point in my Constitutional Law reading. A “state” may place a content-neutral ban on an entire medium if:

1. The state interests are sufficiently significant,
2. The interests do not suppress the freedom of expression,
3. The law is narrowly tailored, and
4. There are viable alternatives available.

The United States Supreme Court has stated:

A majority of this Court found [in Metromedia] that [aesthetic] considerations would be sufficient to justify a content-neutral ban on all outdoor advertising signs, notwithstanding the extent to which such signs convey First Amendment protected messages. Lakewood v. Plain Dealer Publishing Co., 486 U.S. 750, 783 (1988) (White, J., dissenting)(citing the plurality opinion and the dissenting opinions of Burger, C.J. and Rehnquist and Stevens, JJ.)

In Sao Paulo’s case, they are seeking to clean up the aesthetics of the city and are not targeting a specific type of billboard ad, but all billboard ads. The fact that an entire medium of communication is being banned could be seen as a content-based interest, however there are likely equally viable options to advertise other than billboards.

Indentured Deed

Here is an interesting excerpt from my property text book that reminded me of those heart shaped best-friends-forever necklaces that split into two pieces.

In the days before typewriters and carbon paper, and centuries before Xerox, lawyers were faced with the problem of providing duplicate copies of deeds in certain instances when both the grantor and grantee wanted a copy (for example, in case of a mortgage). They found the solution in an indenture. The deed was written out twice on a single sheet of parchment (usually made from sheepskin stretched, scraped, and scoured) and signed at the end of each copy by both grantor and grantee. The parchment was then cut into two pieces in an irregular line, leaving a sawtooth or indented edge. The two halves, forming two separate deeds, one for the grantor and one for the grantee, could be fitted together to show their genuineness.

Big Decisions

Most of the last eight years of my life have been trying to figure out what I want to do with it. Getting an education was always a driving force in my decision making. At the end of high school the persistent question was where to go to college. For half of college the big question was what to major in. And after deciding that, where to work when I graduated. Working after graduating was interesting, however it wasn’t settling because it reminded me I had a lot more to learn, and kept me eager to go to grad school. So, during the two years I was working I was also focusing on where to go to law school. Now that I’m in law school, I’ll be looking for a job soon – a continuation of the two-year cycle. And I’m sure it will continue well into my life.

The clip below is from an essay titled “The Power of the Marginal” by Paul Graham. It’s interesting with regard to how to select a major. I think the general principles of the excerpt can be extracted and applied beyond the university setting.

One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there’s almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It’s this end that gives rise to phrases like “those who can’t do, teach.”

Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you’re probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who’s good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn’t. You often hear people say that you shouldn’t major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: don’t learn things from teachers who are bad at them.