Shockball

Sometime around 2AM the night before my last exam I decided that it would be a good idea to buy myself a small present.  It came in the mail the other day.  It's called Shockball.  It is a small ball that emits random electrical shocks every ten to thirty seconds.  That's what it does.  The fun lies in the constant fear of not knowing when the next mini-electrocution is going to occur.  I think I like it because Shockball is sort of like law school, in a way.  Also, on big letters on the front it says "This is not a toy."  

I took Shockball to Sarah's party Friday night.  Tyler Brown and Josh L came with me, which was awesome because it meant I had people from high school, college AND law school all at the same party. Anyway, back to Shockball.  The most common way to play Shockball is via a rousing game of Hot-Potato.  But the fun of Shockball is in inventing new games to play with it.  "Here, hold this," is a classic game, for example (No, I didn't do that, I'm not THAT mean).  The best games were the ones that piggy-backed on other games.  In Shock-Taboo, you play Taboo just like you normally would, except in addition to making people guess random words you're also holding the Shockball.  It ups the stakes a bit.  

Saturday morning (by which I mean afternoon) I went back to the National Gallery for more caroling with Ben and Jeff.  You can't do enough singing of Christmas songs.  I did notice, though, that very few Christmas songs are written in keys which are... singable.  A Capella people tend to do fine singing things like "Jingle Bells" and "Silent Night," but throw in an instrumental accompanist playing the song in its original key and people just lose it.  After that Jeff and I accompanied Ben to the train station where he departed for Rhode Island.  Then I researched internships.  It was super fun and/or terrifying.  Like Shockball.

This is the view from the Capitol around Christmas- it is beautiful and multi-colored and deserves much better treatment than my terrible built-in phone camera can offer.  I took this picture when I was meeting Rachel for dinner this past week.  I'm not sure I actually mentioned it in the blog.  I should have... I, of course, love seeing my little sister.  AND we went to a great barbecue place.

Saturday evening I went over to Josh's new place for an official housewarming.  We played Beertrek (rules found in a previous post) and ate pizza, which is pretty much the best Saturday evening ever.  But then it got better, because we invented a new game to play with Shockball (yes, I brought it.  Yes, I also have the perspective to see that it seems like I'm being a bit obsessive with Shockball.  I am going to be embarrassed of this post one day, but I'm okay with that).  The game is called Shock the Dealer, and is a variation on what is usually a drinking game played with cards.  All you have to do is guess what card is on top of the deck.  You get two tries.  After the first try, the person holding the deck (and who is looking at the card) tells you whether the actual card is higher or lower than your guess.  If you guess correctly, you get to hold the cards and they have to guess.  If you guess incorrectly, you have to guess again.  Oh, and you're holding Shockball.  Best game ever.  And Trevor and Stephanie W were there, which would have made the entire evening awesome even without Shockball.  

This note was on Josh's refrigerator.  It says "Welcome Home Josh" and is signed "Josh."  As it turns out, Josh was the name of Josh's apartment rental agent.  The note is much funnier and also much sadder if you don't know that fact the first time you read it.  We purposefully placed all the liquor in the apartment on top of the fridge for this picture to play up the "much sadder" angle.

I'm very glad to be able to officially welcome Josh to DC.  The House never had a better historian and we're going to have many excellent times together in the next three years.  Maybe longer.  I do like DC quite a bit, and as I hear it the city has a shortage of lawyers (it sounds like a joke, but people keep telling me this fact like they're serious and once enough serious people tell me something I start to believe them.  Character flaw, I know).  

Final Countdown

I'm officially a half-L.  Or a... 1.5L?  I'm not sure how to put it.  I finished exams for the first semester of 1L year.  If I passed, I'm 1/6th the way to a JD.  I hope I passed.  I'm pretty sure I passed  everything but torts.  There are no words for what may have happened with torts.  Actually, there are words, but I can't blog them.

This morning Ben and I went down to grab donuts (free food all the time- really) and then came back up to prepare for our exam at 8:30.  He had relabeled a half-gallon of Bojangles sweet tea as "Civ-Pro Fuel," which I appreciated.  We started our exams.  I attempted to care for about seven hours.  I did my best at caring about Civil Procedure.  Then I went to a law office party that Cate G invited me to.  She works there in HR.  None of them cared about Civil Procedure, I don't think.  They did, however, care about having top-quality well drinks.  Like... Grey Goose was their crappy vodka and Bombay Sapphire was their crappy gin.  I accepted this in as gracious and appreciative a way as I knew how.

I'm going to apply to internships over the next few days.  Or sleep.  Whichever comes first.

My Second Contracts Exam

I'm pretty sure my torts teacher just trolled the entire class.

Troll: to purposefully do something WAY outside the bounds of reasonableness just to laugh as others freak out about it.

Our three-hour Torts exam is meant, like all of our other exams, to allow us to show what we learned over the course of the semester in order for the teacher to allocate to us 100% of our grade in the class.  I imagine that's how that works, at least.  So imagine our surprise when we opened up our exam to find one (1) two-page question entirely about contracts.  To clarify: a question for a torts exam in which absolutely no one gets hurt or claims to get hurt.  Two people got up to ask whether we were given the correct exam.  Everyone else just looked sort of dazed.  When we received word that it was indeed the right exam, we proceeded to do the greatest making-stuff-up session ever.

Marginally reasonable things I said in my exam: there could have been, according to the question, a very weak argument for a tort involving economic harm (which we studied for about five minutes).  I took that and ran with it.  I also introduced a lot of "well, if someone HAD gotten hurt, then..." hypotheticals, even though the question did not ask for any such things.

Completely unreasonable things I said in my exam:  I claimed that a blueprint was a consumer product which consumers expected to be able to "operate" safely.  I offered up the possibility for a strict liability regime based on the negligent product design of blueprints.  I said (in my most passive-aggressive moment) "I would cite the cases which allow for voiding a contract in this case, but those cases are in my outline for Contracts."  I made arguments for affirmative duty (which you make when dealing with strangers who are not in privity of contract) in a case in which everyone was in contract with one another, simply because I had run out of other things to say.

At one point I had deleted everything else on my exam and started a new answer about negligent infliction of emotional distress on students by giving an unforeseeable and nonsensical exam.  At another point I had written down "if this question seriously wouldn't be better answered through a contracts analysis, then please please fail me out of this class because I obviously missed something hugely important."  I deleted both of those, which is probably for the best.

Afterwards the entire class got together just to assure themselves that everyone else felt the same way.  Even the most hardened gunners in the class were perplexed and admitted to just making up terrible theories in order to fill pages.  So on the one hand, I guess it is good that we are all in the same boat.  On the other hand: what happened???

No real time to think about that now, though- I've got Civil Procedure to study for.

"The Timorous May Stay at Home"

More review for Torts today- and I think I'm starting to see the big picture.  Here it is: as more and more forms of injury become more readily identifiable and quantifiable through advances in medical technology (and as new types of injuries emerge through the globalization of society) courts become increasingly willing to make up new rules in order to allow injured parties to recover in order to be "whole" again.  And corrective justice is served.  There- a whole semester of Torts in one sentence.  

Grossly Oversimplified Timeline of Rulings in Tort Law (Negligence Regimes- as imagined at 3AM):

???BC-1600's- Oh, there was an accident and you're hurt?  Sucks to be you.

1600's-1800's- Well, maybe if your neighbor threw a log at your face he owes you some money.

... And if he tossed the log in front of you right as you were walking by and you trip, he owes you for that, too.

Mid-1800's- Barrels of flour don't normally fly out of windows and smack you in the head if everyone is being awesome at life.  They owe you money for that.

... but if you're beating dogs and accidentally poke out your friend's eye, that's cool.  I mean, it's cool to beat dogs.  We don't want to discourage that activity.

Early 1900's- Don't swing metal things at exposed electrical wires.  Sucks to be you.  Also don't get hit by trains.  That's totally your fault.  Also, don't break the law.  If you get hurt while you're breaking a law, it sucks to be you.  

Mid 1900's- Okay, maybe it's not ALWAYS your fault if you get hit by a train.  And maybe if you're breaking a law that isn't all that important you can still have money.

... but you shouldn't leave your barges unattended in the middle of a busy harbor.  Come on, guys.

1970's-1980's- You can't compare a person who has seizures to a defective product.  Nice try, though.  Also, if you're a hospital you shouldn't give people bags with severed legs in them.  You should know better.  You aren't liable for the emotional distress of a kidnapped baby's parents, though.  I mean, it's a big hospital.  Stuff happens.

1990's- Someone hurt you physically or mentally?  What do you want?  You want money?  Take it.  

Wait a second, not so fast- guy who jumped off a boat into one foot deep water.  Or you, people who want to sue school districts for failing to protect children in various and sundry ways.  And ESPECIALLY not you, people who were only economically hurt and have no physical and mental damage.  Sucks to be you guys.

2000's- You can prove that a doctor negligently lowered your chance of survival from a disease from 49% to 0%?  Enjoy 49% of your regular damages.  I mean, you would....  your estate will.

You went snowtubing and signed a waiver of liability and then broke your foot on their negligently maintained mountain?  Sure, sue away.  Waiver?  What waiver?

A catheter exploded inside your heart and caused catastrophic internal injury?  Well that sounds terrible but....Whoops.  Federally preempted.  Sorry.  Oh, you don't know what that means?  Well you can't sue because.... we said so just now.  Also something about Federalism.  

So- that's Tort law.  I do actually know the cases (and there are a lot more), but it's fun to generalize.  In between studying today, I went to the National Gallery (favorite museum?  possibly) because they were doing caroling in the rotunda.  They had a mandolin orchestra and programs with all the words to all the best Christmas songs printed out.  

Davia and Jeff singing Jingle Bells or something.

The rotunda is all decorated for Christmas- there are lots of trees everywhere.  It's difficult to get a picture of a three-dimensional hemispherical area, but it's very pretty, I promise. 

Then I won some more games of Battleship (superior strategy, clearly) and have been studying ever since...ish.  

Exam on Monday.  Yay. 

Haircuts and Study Breaks

My hair has been long-ish for a while.  This is all well and good, but I have been occasionally annoyed by how often it gets in my eyes and, oh yes, how it inspires people to compare me to Harry Potter.  So on Wednesday, as a study break (because all I need are more study breaks), Davia took me up to U Street to the girl who cuts her hair and who just got a job a salon which caters to the lawyers and such on Capitol Hill.  She spent about an hour on my hair in an attempt to make me look professional and decidedly anti-Potter.  I am pleased with the results.  

I have since walked past about six of my classmates, none of who recognized me.  I'm a chameleon.

Wednesday night, Ben L was kind enough to invite me on a Mandate to share with him a groupon for a bourbon tasting.  Bourbon tasting?  Sounded like a good study break to me.  And we know I need more study breaks.  

It was very fancy. (And for Ben, it was Suit Wednesday.  Before you ask: yes, every Wednesday.)

After sampling three different bottles from the same distillery, we got to pick our favorite to be put into a cocktail.  I got a Manhattan made with Evan Williams 1783.  I do not normally like Manhattans, but it was excellent. 

When we got back we decided we needed a study break (we did not) so we watched the original movie version of Arthur... which I was surprised to find is a really good movie.  Yay early 80's.  

Thursday I tried to study a bit and I went to a study session for Civil Procedure which seemed to do nothing but terrify us all.  If I felt good at all about Contracts, all that good feeling has now gone away.

Then I went out to Rosslyn to meet up with Greg C, an old friend from Burlington and quite possibly the only person from my elementary school class I ever talk to.  We went to a barbecue place because we wanted to highlight our distinctive southerner tendencies.   I forget what the place was called, but it was actually very good.  The waitress asked us if we worked for the State Department, because "you look like guys who would work for the State Department." Wasn't sure what to make of that.  Had a great time with Greg, though.  

When I came back Ben and Davia called me down to the lounge for a study break (like I needed it) and I proceeded to play many games of ping pong and one very long game of Monopoly.  In what everyone thought was a hilariously ironic moment, I had to sell off four houses each on Boardwalk and Park Place (where no one had ever landed over the course of fifty+ turns) to pay off a debt to Ben, only to watch people land on Boardwalk the next two turns.  It was a bitter, bitter $100 that I collected from each of them.  Then they refused to take my money after I landed on their monopolies because I looked so dejected.  It was not my finest game.

Still Alive

Well, one exam down and two to go.  People have been asking me how I did, but the truth is... I have absolutely no way of knowing.  I think I did well for myself, I suppose.  I feel like I spotted the issues and did a reasonable job articulating them.  But did I do those things better than a majority of my classmates?  Since it's a forced curve, that becomes the overriding question.  I come away from the exam knowing one thing, though, and that's that studying more would not have helped me at all.  So I am okay with how it went.

Seen in a totality of circumstances, law school exams are neither harder nor easier than I imagined them to be.  They simply... are....  That's why they let you see all the past exams and why they let you bring in whatever books and materials you like- because nothing is going to change the fundamental questions and no amount of black-letter law is going to definitively answer the most difficult ones.

In spite of all the people going crazy over exams, this past week has been almost like law school summer camp again.  They've set up the lounge with board games and hot chocolate- I played with Lincoln Logs and bested Davia by one shot in a game of Battleship the other night.  They gave us s'mores last night.  There's breakfast food tonight served by the faculty.  There were cupcakes yesterday.  There's coffee in the alumni offices.  I went to a birthday party over the weekend on the 12th floor.  Other than the dealing with the consequences of worrying about whether this one exam on this one day is going to make or break your entire future legal career, I sort of wish more of the year was like exam time.

"Are you guys all siblings?" "...sure, we'll go with that."

Today was a day a long time in the making.  It involved weeks of study beforehand and the concerted efforts of many.  It had nothing to do with law school.  It was, of course, Mike Makeover day (part one).

Since my first days of college there have always been a few intrepid friends who have made bold attempts at making me care how I look.  It has always been a difficult job, since I have never been able to imagine many things I cared less about.  Still, they have tried and many small improvements were made over time.  Some of you reading this blog are among their number.  Thank you, as always.  I know I can be difficult.

So I shouldn't have been surprised when it was suggested (suggested is such a nice way of putting it...) that the time had again come to go to the mall and play dress-up.  Davia, Ben L, Steph, and Micah constituted the design team.  We met at 11 this morning at the Pentagon City mall to strategize.  Really. There was a legitimate planning session involved.  Micah quickly took the reins (he had given me the homework of reading the entire GQ Style Manual- he knows his stuff) and organized the day.  Work from the bottom to the top.  Shoes first.  We went to DSW and found two nice pairs of shoes- one brown and one more casual and blue- at a steep discount.  From there we took an epic tour of the clothing stores of the mall.  The entire group would enter and each member would start tossing me items at random.

For example: Davia going for the jeans.

I would go into the dressing rooms and put on things as I was told to do before coming out to their general derision or adoration, whichever was more appropriate.  This was repeated many many times before every one of the four was happy with every single piece.  And me, of course.  They did at least pretend as though I had a say.  The four of them standing directly outside my dressing room caused some traffic jams and occasional questioning from the employees.  "Are you all siblings?" One of them asked.  "Is this for a TV show or something?"  said another.  The answer was always yes.  Because... why not?

Ben trying to find me a vest.

I walk out, they take a picture, I walk back in.  Over and over.

In the end it was a very successful shopping day.  I do not like shopping, but I had a great time because it's impossible not to have a great time with such a group.  I ended up with a couple of jackets, a couple of sweaters, a couple of shirts, a couple of pants, and a couple of shoes.  Well, a couple of pairs of shoes.  Four shoes.  

Then Davia and Stephanie took it upon themselves to go through the clothes I already owned to try to find things to get rid of.  They made a good case that a few of my things... might be a bit too big for me...

Case in point.  

By Steph's face you can tell they were having a good time with this part.

I feel I have made significant wardrobe progress.  For now, at least.  Mike Makeover day (part two) is on Wednesday and involves a haircut of some sort, I've been told.  I'm actually okay with that, as I was called Harry Potter (again?!) while walking down the street the other day.  I am not Harry Potter.

Many thanks to Ben, Davia, Micah, and Steph.  You are all wonderful people and you deal with me so patiently.