And So It Begins

I have my first exam tomorrow morning.  My first real law school exam.  It shouldn't be too terrible- just twenty multiple choice questions answered over the course of an hour.  That's three minutes per question, and the exam is open book and open internet.  If I can't find the answer to any question that legitimately has an answer within three minutes, then I don't think I deserve to find the answer.

This week I threw myself back into the law school work.  While visiting last weekend Brian and Josh and Kayface expressed concern that I wasn't actually doing any law work because I never mentioned it in my blog.  That's mostly because, though it is interesting for me, I'm not sure how many people for whom it would be similarly engaging.  That said, we did go through an interesting chapter about causation this week in Torts which I'll share part of just to prove that I do law things in law school (I would talk about CivPro because we discussed the all important Erie Doctrine, but then I realized the Erie Doctrine sounds really really boring if explained in any detail).

Here's the causation issue: we, as a society, would like to deter people from acting in a negligent (outside the realm of normal care that a normal person would exhibit) way.  One way in which we do this is to allow people to recover when they are injured due to the negligent acts of others.  If I am hunting in the woods and I accidentally shoot you, thinking that you are a deer, then you should be allowed to sue me.  I didn't mean to shoot you, sure, but clearly I shot you and it will cost money to fix you and I should be responsible for bearing that expense.  Right?  This example would be direct causation.  Obvious and easy.

The fun part comes in when I set off some sort of Rube Goldberg chain of events which results in your injury.  Assuming that I was still being negligent, we then have to sort out whether I was the legal proximate cause of your injury.  Given all the possible configurations of chain-of-event injuries, this results in hundreds and thousands of cases which straddle the line between a claim that succeeds and a claim that fails.  And many judges have come up with their own systems of determination of proximate cause throughout the years.  Yay ambiguity.  Also yay- I'm discussing law on my blog!  Okay, now I'm bored (I enjoy it, I just have to do it for many hours every day anyway).

Socially, the week was really excellent.  Despite being out of production, I still managed to see plenty of Davia, Emily Goo, and Ben.  We even had a steak dinner and watched White Christmas on Wednesday because we're all in the holiday spirit.  Steak dinner is different from Steaklunch.  Just wanted to be clear.

Monday (I know, I'm out of chronology) I went to see a Chinese panel discussion about the future of China's power as viewed through the lens of ancient Chinese philosophers.  I had almost forgotten how much I loved hearing Chinese academics talk, because something hilarious always gets messed up in translation.  I just about lost it when one of the speakers said: "China find that as it get mo' money, it have mo' problem."  (if you don't get it, you missed the music of the 90's.  Sorry.)  I also really enjoyed the following logic (paraphrased):

Questioner: We know that Chinese power is growing, but what about India?  Does China view their economic growth as a threat?

Answer: No, India is not a threat to China.  You see, let's say India's economy is about one-tenth of the US economy.  Now, if India continues its growth of 10% per year, which we think is very ambitious, then all the US has to do is continue to grow at 1% per year in order to always stay 10 times bigger than India economically.

Now I know that this very smart man probably understands how compound interest works and I know that somewhere in his head he was thinking of an example that actually made sense.  But it made me sort of sad as I looked around the room of distinguished academics and realized that no one seemed to notice that, using his numbers, India's economy would be almost twice as large as ours within thirty years.  Clearly- mo' money, mo' problems.

Today I got to see Josh and went out to get some Thai food for lunch.  Weekly tradition?  I think so.  While over near his offices, I also ran in to the House office building to see Emily Goo because she was letting me borrow some sheet music.  Never thought that my first time in the House office building would be justified by musical theater, but I guess that's not too surprising...

Fun day planned for tomorrow after the exam, and it should be because starting tomorrow I have ten days to write a memo that will be worth 75% of my grade in Legal Research and Writing for this semester.  Best to start those ten days on a high note.