After a relatively long stretch of chilly and dreary days, it was nice to be able to sit outside the law school to do some reading. The sun was out, the flowers were in bloom, and I had just come back from an LSRJ event dedicated primarily to sex trivia (with a healthy dose of wine and cheese).
And a few days ago, I discovered an odd sculpture right by Union Station. I vaguely recall that there used to be a giant shoe there, which I mistook for a Shoe Woo ad. Now it’s a tribute to technology.
This whole 2L interviewing process is so prestige-driven.
I confess that I’ve taken to trolling the TLS forums (much to Billy’s chagrin), and it’s a bit disheartening to see how many people need to know how others are faring with V5, V10, Vwhatever firms (that is, the top 5/10/whatever firms on the Vault list). Those going into public interest law aren’t interviewing yet, so naturally these posts are already skewed, but it seems that it’s Vwhatever or bust, as if working for a Vault firm is the only way to have a fulfilling legal career.
Yes, I admit that I was prestige-driven for a considerable portion of my life. Although school came naturally to me, I got good grades in no small part because I wanted to get into the best college I could get into. When it came time to decide, I chose the school with more prestige over the school where I’d be happier. (Of course, I transferred to an entirely different school altogether, but that was a momentary lapse of judgment that I still regret to a certain degree.) I wanted to get into the best possible grad/law school, and yes, now I want to get hired by the best possible law firm.
With one caveat.
The best possible law firm for me.
And that has absolutely nothing to do with the firm’s Vault ranking. In fact, I did not even consult Vault when choosing the firms with which I wanted to interview. The first time the subject even came up was when one of my good friends asked me what the highest ranking firm was on my bid list. Once I got my first call back interview, that friend was the one to pull up the firm’s Vault page. All the ranking info that I have about it, I got from him.
I suppose that chasing after a position with the most prestigious firm makes sense if private law practice is not your final destination but rather a springboard to other things (politics?). But if you intent to stick with the private sector for most of your life, doesn’t it make more sense to pick a place that best matches you as a person instead of one that the general population (is Vault even representative of the general population?) views as prestigious? Of course, I’m functioning under the assumption that some people actually want to spend their entire life in the private sector and that a good match involves more factors than just rank…
We recently had a mandatory meeting to discuss our university-funded summer job experiences, and I’m still infuriated several days later.
The meeting I attended was geared specifically toward judicial interns, so, after story time, the conversation predictably turned to judicial clerkships. The moral of the story was that a clerkship is one of the best experiences a recent law school graduate could have, that more people should explore those options, and that a certain professor is working very hard to basically flood the D.C. market with judicial clerks and interns from Georgetown (using those time-tested methods of contacting alumni and asking them to put Georgetown résumés on top of the application stacks).
That doesn’t sound so bad, right? In fact, I’m sure that many of my classmates probably appreciate this professor’s commitment. So what’s my beef with it? Basically, as someone who is desperately trying to break into a legal market to which I have no geographic ties, I’m not terribly fond of the idea of markets being flooded by local law schools. Local law school grads (especially those from the top local school) already have numerous advantages over out-of-towners — for example, the student can attend an interview at any time instead of having to fly in for a day.
Granted, clerkships are somewhat unique as far as a job, and I personally am not interested in a clerkship, but the basic principle is still there. What if a qualified applicant from, oh, anywhere is simply dying to get an internship or a clerkship in D.C. (perhaps because he or she wants to develop ties to the D.C. market), yet the judge rejects him or her simply because of a convenient little arrangement with Georgetown? How is that at all fair? What if I hadn’t gotten an amazing job offer over last winter break in Madison, decided to look for an internship in Boston (which was going to be the target of my job search after winter break)…and was rejected because the Massachusetts judges had a similar arrangement with Harvard, BU, and BC? Why, I’d be livid.
There’s also the problem of having alumni pull strings for current students. Whereas I understand why it might be advantageous to hire someone with local ties (for example, at a firm, a local might use his or her connections to bring in clients), I am utterly perplexed by the notion of alumni networking. The idea seems to be that you should throw someone a bone just because you attended the same school. Huh? What obligation does an alum have to someone he or she does not know? Is he or she to assume that the student is a worthy candidate and deserves special treatment simply by virtue of attending Georgetown? Well, Georgetown is a great law school; shouldn’t the name speak for itself? For all the alum knows, the student in question could be mediocre, yet he or she might get preference over a better candidate from a different school who has no similar alumni networking opportunity with the employer in question.
Over the course of our job search, we are told to reach out to alumni at our desired places of employment. But I don’t see why “Hi, I’m Evie, and I’m getting my J.D. at Georgetown, like you did n years ago” should be any more effective than “Hi, I’m Evie, I see that you are a leading attorney in historic preservation, and I’m super interested” or “Hi, you got your undergraduate degrees in Art History and French? Me too!” or “Your biography says that in your spare time you like to play laser tag with your kids? I used to work at a laser tag place!?” Not that I would necessarily use those hooks — and certainly not that exact wording — but what is it about having attended the same school that forges a stronger bond than having a shared major, a shared hobby, etc.? What makes your school so special to you that it renders all the people who subsequently attend it special to you as well? Ask me in a few years, I suppose.
Note: I’m not necessarily opposed to networking in general. If someone were looking for a great new employee, asked a friend for leads, and the friend happened to have had an exceptional intern at some point, I don’t see why the friend shouldn’t recommend the intern for the open position. The difference is that the friend is familiar with the intern’s work and knows that he or she is a good employee. This is not so in the case of alumni networking.
But I digress. I realize that the arrangement set forth by the aforementioned professor (along with other kinds of networking) may certainly help those who aren’t necessarily the best and the brightest get good positions. Nor do I purport to be the best and the brightest myself, so I realize that similar arrangements could help me as well. Still, something about the whole idea doesn’t sit right with me.
Of course, I might be singing a different tune if I find myself unemployed…but I’ll cross that bridge once I get to it.
My my, it sure has been a while. The past two weeks were a whirlwind, and so I didn’t get a chance to document them as I was living them. So, what’s new? First of all, I’m now back in D.C. After a hectic move-out, a round of final goodbyes, and a two-day road trip, I’m finally living in an apartment where I’ll be staying for two whole years. I’ve got to say, it’s a lot easier to pack when one is not doing it during finals week and when bikes aren’t being transported inside the car. Not only did I manage to successfully pack everything that I brought back to Madison with me, but I also squeezed in a few extra boxes of books (which necessitated buying more bookshelves once I got to D.C., but that’s another story).
So if my bikes weren’t inside the car, where were they? I decided that it was time to invest in a bike rack for my car, and boy, did that give me a lot of heartache. Fortunately for me, the BUB was being shipped to D.C., so I only had to worry about the vintage mixte and the road bike. Still, that was plenty to worry about, since they are not cheap by my standards, so the loss would be significant. First issue: how do you keep them safe while traveling at 80mph on the highway? I was hesitant to put that much trust in an affordable bike rack, which was probably designed for shorter trips. The way I had the bikes tied up, I don’t think they could have been removed without taking the entire trunk off; still, I spent the first two hours glancing in the rear view mirror every five seconds, just to reassure myself that my babies were still safe. To my surprise, the handling of the car was not affected at all; I just had to give myself a tad of extra room when switching lanes.
All hung up.
Chicago brought a new set of problems. I had an interview, which required leaving my car in a garage somewhere…but this is downtown Chicago, people! Driving (and walking) around, I saw abandoned bike frames stripped of all parts on every block. As for garages, they aren’t constantly filled with people, most don’t take responsibility for theft…and if you’re gone for more than 5 minutes, a clever and well-prepared thief will certainly be able to do some damage. I got lucky and my bikes escaped unscathed, but I spent every second in Chicago worrying about it. The parking garage, however, gets major bonus points for this:
 I was on the parking level for hogs. |
 Similarly entertaining parking levels. |
As if Chicago wasn’t bad enough, my paranoia got worse. I didn’t have many trust issues when I stopped in some small town in Ohio for the night: small town folk tend to be decent, from what I hear. D.C., however, was another story. My roommate wasn’t getting home with my keys until the following morning, so I had to find someplace to spend the night. Now, there are a few people with whom I could have crashed, but I needed to be close to my bike-laden car, and all of those people live downtown, where parking is not a viable option. My solution? Spend the night in the Georgetown Safeway. I felt like Natalie Portman in Where the Heart Is (minus the pregnancy, of course). All went well, though, and my bikes are now safely in an underground garage in my apartment building. What an ordeal!
In other news: last week was OCI (On Campus Interviews) or, as one of my interviewers put it, law firm speed dating. Hundreds of suit-clad law students running from hotel room to hotel room to talk to recruiters — does that sound fun? That’s right. The worst part begins now, when people are waiting by their phones for callback interviews, desperately wanting to discuss their successes and failures with their classmates, but not doing so out of either respect or feelings of inadequacy. It’s stressful…but I’ll do anything to be in Boston next summer and after graduation.
The first week of class would have been uneventful, if not for The Tax Lawyer. (I swear, tax-obsessed Lawyer Boy must have put a hex on me a couple of years ago: not only am I now in law school, I’m working for a tax journal.) Good thing I like hunting down sources and checking citations; our first assignment would be quite stressful otherwise.
Last but not least, I kicked off my second year in D.C. with two first dates. They proved conclusively that although I can get along and have a very pleasant time with a wide variety of people, finding someone with whom I feel a romantic connection is like finding a needle in a haystack. Moreover, the hay in D.C. may be of very high quality, but I happen to be allergic to it (i.e., the men here are educated and accomplished, but I’m not willing to date lawyers and politicians). Will I fare better in Boston?
In order to become a staff member of a law school journal, one has to go through the write-on process: a competition that takes place right after spring finals are over. It typically entails writing a case comment that relies solely on the materials in the closed packet and taking a Bluebook exam to demonstrate that you know which periods to italicize and when to use a semicolon instead of a comma.
The materials were posted on Saturday. On Monday, we got two emails informing us that two of the Bluebook test questions had mistakes. Today, a mistake was discovered in yet another question. Oy vey.
And these are the people who are going to be grading my entry?
There I was, sitting in International Law, enthralled (for the most part) by Mortimer’s lecture and red tie, when he mentioned the word that never fails to make me shudder: Sulawesi.
After being done with Professor George’s anthropology class, I never thought I would have to hear about Sulawesi again. Not that I have anything against the people of upland Sulawesi, and I have the utmost respect for Dr. George’s research there, but after spending every class period listening about it — mind you, for the most part, it did not pertain to the actual class at all — I needed a break.
Apparently, a break of 2.5 years is not enough. I can only hope that one day, I can hear the word “Sulawesi” and not shudder.
And while I’m on the topic of professors shamelessly letting their research be the focal point of the whole class, let me rant a bit about a class that I took at Duke. It was about animal behavior and psychology, and I was quite excited by the prospect of learning about such a fascinating topic. Note that I said prospect…because not much learning was done. We spent most class periods talking about pigeons, pigeons, more pigeons, sometimes rats, but mostly pigeons. It’s pretty safe to say that our professor researched pigeons. I came out of the class knowing quite a bit about pigeons, that’s true, but not much — nothing, in fact — about other animal behavior, though I vaguely remember being awoken from my pigeon-induced trance by a brief mention of Karl von Frisch and bees.
You know things are bad when hearing about bees is the highlight of your day.
Enough Miranda cases, already! One day before my Criminal Justice exam, and SCOTUS is hearing a case (the third this year!) that might require those Miranda rights to be rewritten.
It’s frightening to find myself agreeing with Scalia in quite a few cases when it comes to crim. Perhaps I’m not as liberal as I thought.
Also, I’m not inclined to call them Miranda rights, since I was not a fan of Miranda’s character in The Tempest. I’m seriously considering referring to them as Prospero rights instead. Although, given the criminal context, Caliban rights would perhaps be the most appropriate title.
Tonight’s reading was a breath of fresh air amid what is usually incredibly dense and boring. Mr. Yeazell, in writing his Civil Procedure textbook, kindly supplied us law students with some anecdotes. Here’s an example, allegedly from an actual trial transcript:
The Court: Next witness.
Ms. Olschner: Your Honor, at this time I would like to swat Mr. Buck in the head with his client’s deposition.
The Court: You mean read it?
Ms. Olschner: No, sir. I mean to swat him [in] the head with it. Pursuant to Rule 32[(a)(3)], I may use the deposition [of a party] “for any purpose” and that is the purpose for which I want to use it.
The Court: Well, it does say that. (Pause.) There being no objection, you may proceed.
Ms. Olschner: Thank you, Judge Hanes. (Whereupon Ms. Olschner swatted Mr. Buck in the head with a deposition.)
Mr. Buck: But Judge…
The Court: Next witness.
Mr. Buck: We object.
The Court: Sustained. Next witness.
Never in my life did I think that the final stages of a paper-editing process would entail trying to capitalize on the space left at the end of each line and carefully rearranging the words in order to make each paragraph one line shorter, all in hopes of squeezing 10.5 pages into the 10 page limit without cheating, i.e. tweaking the margins/line spacing/character spacing. Oh, Courier New, you’re killing me. But not as painfully as in-text and parenthetical citations. *kickbitechomp* I MISS MY FOOTNOTES.
Our Con Law professor today:
“What separates New York from New Jersey, besides the smell?” [Laughter.] “Who here is from New Jersey?” [A couple of people raise their hands.] “Wow, your hair is not aggressively permed. I’m surprised!”
Oy vey.
