Anybody else going through the bar preparation process want to share how messy and note-laden their room has become?

I like the cut of this girl’s jib:

I took the five-week, three-hour-a-day [Bar] prep course, paid for the computer software, booked a hotel room near the testing site and even stayed one night there. But, at 2 a.m. before the first day of the test, I decided that I wasn’t prepared enough to take it. So I didn’t. I was angry at myself, but I felt more relieved than anything else.

Then I did the exact same thing all over again — in February [2008]. It’s now summer and, once again, I’m registered to take the exam.

I’m thinking of bailing out of one or two bar exams. Anyone want to join me?

The town I grew up in was swindled (via the vagaries of bankruptcy law) out of one $322,000 firetruck. And they’re not happy:

from Irvington Village News <———@———-.com>
reply-to ———@———-.com
date Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 1:13 PM
subject Trustee Pat Ryan resigns from Village Board

At a meeting of Irvington Board of Trustees held July 21, 2008, Trustee Pat Ryan resigned from the Board. Mayor Erin Malloy thanked Trustee Ryan for her service to the Village and for being a “terrific colleague and terrific running mate.” Trustee Ryan was first elected as Trustee in 2006 and in her second term after winning re-election in March 2008.

In announcing her resignation, Ms. Ryan cited that “there is a decision before the Board that is very complicated and very difficult — It is a decision that I believe I cannot support.” Ms. Ryan was concerned that the Board’s decision to seek recovery of the lost fire truck funds from a fidelity bond held by the Village on behalf of former Clerk/Treasurer Edward Ritter could have personal financial impacts on Mr. Ritter.

Mayor Malloy, it’s worth noting, was the coin-toss loser of the exciting mayoral election of 2005 that ended in an exact tie. She actually had one more vote, but after a lengthy court battle a sealed ballot cast by one of her supporters was thrown out.   She won in 2007.

My home town’s politics are fantastic!

Via Empirical Legal Studies, Above the Law, and NAALP.

After a surprisingly long period of research, I’ve found what appears to be the only option for purchasing an authentic barrister’s wig: the very Harry Potter-esque Ede and Ravenscroft of Chancery Lane. The lowest tier wig (above) costs £495.00 and is all sorts of awesome.

I’m going to buy one and wear it around my house while I watch TV and eat Cheetos.

The frizz-top wig is better, but it costs £1775.00 and my budget for humorous wig purchases doesn’t stretch QUITE that far.

If I had the time, the money, and/or the technical know-how, I would create a dictionary that lists the current definition of a word, as well all the previous definitions of that word, organized by year, from most recent to most ancient. Wouldn’t it be great too be able to look up a word, and then see how that word’s definition has mutated over time? Haven’t you ever wondered what the word “haberdashery” meant in 1850, but had no easy method of researching it? This would make Justice Scalia’s day!

Realistically, the best way too go about doing this would be to partner with a pre-existing, well established and long-published dictionary. The OED, for example, has been publishing since the 19th Century and would make a perfect source work. You’d type in a word, get their current definition, as well as every definition they’ve published in the last 150 years.

You could even do a fair amount of this work without permission. Works published prior to 1923 in the US are in the public domain and can be freely republished. Someone should start with the OED’s first edition, and digitize every version through 1923. While the OED only goes back to the mid 19th Century, other dictionaries go back even farther, and they could be added to run back as far as English words have been defined (since 1604).

Am I the only person who thinks this would be interesting and useful? Is there already a way to do this that I’m unaware of?

A fantastic story: A fashion designer who dislikes Obama because he think’s Obama is a Muslim sells a t-shirt that reads “Obama is my slave” to a grad student who thinks it’s a good idea to wear this t-shirt out and about in New York City.  The grad student is, unsurprisingly, assaulted by a group of angry New York denizens, then sues the fashion designer.

I can’t figure out who I like least in this story, the xenophobic fashion designer, the foolishly short-sighted and litigious grad student, or the violent street people?

I wish I were British:

Save the Wig! “Various types have been threatening to abolish barristers’ wigs for decades. But to my dismay, I learned last night that the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales has resolved to abolish wigs in all civil courts in England and Wales. Voice your opposition.”

Perhaps those in opposition to wig abolishment want to ensure they continue to be recognized as barristers rather than solicitors, for reasons set forth by the next group.

“Barristers are better than solicitors in every conceivable way” group. “On the one hand you have barristers- dashing, glamorous, obscenely intelligent and effortlessly classy. Daily they stride forth, fearless and proud, to fight tirelessly for justice, freedom and the underdog, while nobly robed in wig and gown, which may be archaic, yet remain oddly alluring. The pitiful masses can only gaze in admiration as counsel hoist aloft their verbal lances, and engage in their rhetorical joust, intent only on victory (and on getting the £50 fee for some shitty bail application).

And on the other side you have solicitors- squinty eyed, sallow skinned desk monkeys. Clothed in their cheap, sensible suits, boasting less charisma than a volume of the white book, and more often than not impotent. Essentially glorified secretaries, these bastards still for reasons unbeknown to any reasonable man receive sickeningly generous training contracts, before starting work on a salary which would give the average pupil a wet dream. But this is clearly only a comfort blanket, a pathetic attempt to numb the awe and envy we know they all feel for their glorious legal brethren at the Bar.”

Thanks Lorelei.

CrazyMonk points to a great article about “how black Baltimore drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds.”

In the previous year, nearly twenty defendants in other Baltimore cases had begun adopting what lawyers in the federal courthouse came to call “the flesh-and-blood defense.” The defense, such as it is, boils down to this: As officers of the court, all defense lawyers are really on the government’s side, having sworn an oath to uphold a vast, century-old conspiracy to conceal the fact that most aspects of the federal government are illegitimate, including the courts, which have no constitutional authority to bring people to trial. The defendants also believed that a legal distinction could be drawn between their name as written on their indictment and their true identity as a “flesh and blood man.”

It’s long, but good.

Last year it was Copyright Infringement High, now it’s Copyright Infringement Elementary:

How do you think E. B. White feels about this?

Even law firms fall for an audacious version of the Nigerian 419 scam.

Nothings beats some good Third Amendment jurisprudence. Nobody much talks about the Third Amendment’s guarantee that “[n]o Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” It’s really the forgotten Amendment in the Bill of Rights; people still fight over the other amendments (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) but nobody ever fights over the third.

Well, wait, two people did.  The first is about the flying of military aircraft over a landowner’s property:

Custer County Action Ass’n v. Garvey, 256 F.3d 1024 (10th Cir. 2001)

Judicial interpretation of the Third Amendment is nearly nonexistent. The crux of any such claim, however, is whether the nature of the asserted property interest falls “within the ambit of the Third Amendment’s proscription against quartering troops ‘in any house, without the consent of the Owner.’” Citing Engblom v. Carey, Petitioners argue that “because a private party has rights to the airspace above his or her property … the United States military may not appropriate such property interests during peacetime without the property owners’ consent.” This argument borders on frivolous.

D’oh! Frivolous! I guess that was to be expected, but surprisingly they’re not all frivolous. Check out the one other case on the topic dealing with a prison guard strike:

Engblom v. Carey, 677 F.2d 957 (2nd Cir. 1982)

In this action, brought [] by two correction officers at the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility (”Mid-Orange”) in Warwick, New York, against the Governor and various officials of the State of New York, plaintiffs-appellants contend that their due process and Third Amendment rights were violated during a statewide strike of correction officers in April and May of 1979 when they were evicted from their facility-residences without notice or hearing and their residences were used to house members of the National Guard without their consent. For the first time a federal court is asked to invalidate as violative of the Third Amendment the peacetime quartering of troops “in any house, without the consent of the Owner.” District Judge Robert W. Sweet granted defendants’ motion for summary judgment dismissing the complaint on the ground that appellants did not have a sufficient possessory interest in their facility-residences to entitle them to protection under the Third Amendment and the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. We affirm the dismissal of the due process claim on the ground that adequate post-deprivation procedures were afforded to protect appellants’ rights. We reverse the dismissal of the Third Amendment claim on the ground that issues as to material facts rendered summary judgment inappropriate.

Aside from the lower court’s opinion in this case, there are no reported opinions involving the literal application of the Third Amendment. Several far-fetched, metaphorical applications have been urged and summarily rejected.

…

Some time before April 25 a decision was made by Mid-Orange to clear the rooms that had been leased to the striking officers so that the rooms could be used to house National Guardsmen, who until then had been housed in the school and administration buildings. On April 25 officer-tenants were permitted to enter and remove and store their belongings in a locked storage area in the building, and appellants did so. Their rooms had been ransacked and personal property was found to be missing or destroyed. Beginning at the same time Guardsmen were housed in these rooms and remained until the end of the strike on May 5. It is undisputed that Palmer’s room was so used. While Snow’s affidavit states that Engblom’s room was never occupied by Guardsmen, this was disputed by Engblom’s affidavit.

Wow… sounds pretty dead on, doesn’t it? Like, a real Third Amendment claim?  Well, the dissent didn’t think so:

The majority holds that Judge Robert W. Sweet improperly granted defendants’ motion for summary judgment and dismissed the claim of Marianne E. Engblom and Charles E. Palmer, state correction officers, that their Third Amendment rights were violated by the quartering of New York State National Guardsmen in their residences at the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility in Warwick, New York, during a statewide strike of correction officers. Supporting this theoretical and impracticable position, which acknowledges a farfetched Third Amendment “quartering” claim based on a constitutional provision rarely, if ever, utilized, the majority conjures phantom “genuine issues of material fact.” Moreover, my brethren adopt a fanciful interpretation of the meaning of “house” protected under the Third Amendment, and fail to pay sufficient heed to the special circumstances and exigencies of prison administration. I cannot agree. A careful and practical analysis, responsive to the full range of interests at stake, leads me to the conclusion that Engblom and Palmer did not have a property interest which would give them the right under the Third Amendment to exclude from their prison quarters National Guardsmen sent to the prison during the crisis conditions caused by the strike. Accordingly, in light of the patently frivolous nature of appellants’ claim, I dissent from this aspect of the Court’s decision…

The majority’s willingness seriously to entertain a “quartering of troops” claim holds us up to derision

D’oh! Frivolous again!  And this time, it was “patently frivolous.” That was unexpected… and sad.  Oh well.

The mistake attorneys and judges say is the most common among those who choose to represent themselves in traffic court? Admitting guilt.

Far more stats about the bar exam than anyone could ever be interested in reading.

Unlike hearsay exceptions, there appear to be no songs about personal jurisdiction. Someone please fix this.

One or two people have asked me what preparing for the bar is like. The answers I’ve given have been undirected and light on detail. Here, in video form, is actually a pretty decent recap of what some of the BarBri (bar preparation people) lecturers are like:

Whatever your position on the recent Guantanamo ruling, I think we can all agree that Senator Graham’s position is based on faulty logic:

“The American people are going to wake up tomorrow and be shocked to hear that a member of Al Qaeda has the same constitutional rights as an American citizen,” said Graham.

“[Even] the Nazis never had that right.”

Even the Nazis? My god, the well-liked and respected Nazis? I can’t believe we would treat somebody better than we treated the Nazis. I just assumed we would treat every foreigner worse than the Nazis…

By the way, I assume he’s obliquely referring to Ex parte Quirin.

Because Troeltsch got me thinking about Scalia’s writing style, here’s a favorite bit from his dissent in PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin:

It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States…to decide What Is Golf. I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer? The answer, we learn, is yes. The Court ultimately concludes, and it will henceforth be the Law of the Land, that walking is not a “fundamental” aspect of golf.

The Supreme Court this morning decided that detainees, captured abroad and held at Gitmo, have habeus corpus rights and those rights were not adequately served by the tribunal system Congress set up for them (full decision). Scalia is pissed!

America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Sa-laam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed.

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court’s blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today.

I like the idea that we’re currently responding as if the threat were a serious one is itself evidence that the threat is a serious one.

Definition of the common law crime of seduction — “Inducing, by promise of marriage, an unmarried woman to engage in intercourse.”

From Denver:

Peckman is spearheading a Denver ballot initiative to create an 18-member Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission that would form a strategy “dealing with issues related to the presence of extraterrestrial beings on Earth” and how humans and aliens can peacefully coexist.

Set aside all other (totally legitimate) objections to this plan, why does the commission need 18 people? I mean, after Dennis Kucinich, what are the other 17 going to do?

Click to big-ify

What kind of car was actually parked there? Not a Ferrari.

12 real reasons why potential jurors on the R. Kelly trial were excused from duty. The final two are fantastic:

Please call my mom - When one juror failed to show up for service, deputies called his house and his mother answered. She told the court that she didn’t know where her son was and that he hadn’t been “right” since he was shot in the head a while back. The judge and attorneys agreed to let him off the hook.

I blame R. Kelly for Sept. 11 - When the judge asked one prospective juror about his feelings regarding Kelly, he cryptically answered: “R. Kelly may have led the Taliban in attacking us on 9-11, but you can’t prove it.” You’re right, we can’t. In fact, we’re fairly certain that no one has ever tried.

I might take the second guy, he at least seems open minded.