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I can’t wait to get a copy of Lee Iacocca’s new book, Where Have All The Leaders Gone?

It looks AMAZING. Borders Books has an excerpt here.

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

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patchmonkey on April 21st, 2007 | File Under General, Law and Lawyers, News Opinion | No Comments -

From New York Magazine:

“In just one more sign of the stripperization of the Everywoman, Benefit’s Benetint, conceived in the seventies for an exotic dancer to color lips and cheeks, is now also being sold at Sephora and elsewhere as a ‘kiss-proof and water-resistant’ nipple tint. ‘Women want nipples to be pert and fresh-looking, and this shade makes them appear that way,’ Benefit spokeswoman Alison Haljun says. ‘For a long time, the idea of a ripe, rosy nipple has been considered appealing and alluring.’ But aren’t the nipples usually undisplayed? ‘Even if you don’t show it off, you know they’re rosier and more perky,’ she says. Sonia Ossorio, president of NOW in New York, says, ‘I can barely keep up with keeping my nails manicured, much less this nauseating onslaught of new beauty standards. While women are spending their energy, time, and money getting their areolas just the right shade of pink, the Supreme Court is getting more conservative and closer to taking away our long-fought right to reproductive choice’.”

I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. I am all about protecting reproductive choice…but seriously, NOW-lady, that was the wrong place to make your point. Although I suppose people are now making a point about it, and it’s definitely a way to convince Justice Thomas to agree with your point.

Ah…well, it’s coming down to that time - I only have a few more weeks left here in Japan before I have to return to the USA and the tragic life of the law student. Specifically, the 3L law student, who has naught to face but bar exams and many years of work, which may or may not suck one’s soul out of one’s body. But I don’t know yet.

July has been rather chill. I’ve mainly been working, and it’s rained or been cloudy for nearly half the month, which is rather depressing. However, the sun did ALMOST come out today, which was almost pleasant. I’ve been spending much of my evenings, though, doing work (or buying games and playing them on my Nintendo DS Lite), applying for clerkships, teaching, and stuff.

It’s been fairly busy since the end of June with looking at things, though. I went over to the Indoor Part of the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which was very cool - the museum chronicles the history of Tokyo and has really neat things. Photos are here.

The next week (wow) and a little later, I went back to Harajuku (always a treat) and did some more shopping and saw cute dogs wearing sunglasses. I also ate taco pizza at Shakey’s (all-you-can-eat, just 990 yen!).

There’s also a trip out of Tokyo, about one hour, to see the Star Festival (Tanabata Matsuri); the Temple University Japan summer festival, and with my buddy SK, a pretty cool trip to the Outdoor part of the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which has amazing examples of architecture from around the Tokyo area.

And because I have a great love for things that light up, food, and festivals, here’s the Yasakuni Shrine Lantern Festival. There are at least 20,000 of these lit up all over the shrine.

So, I taught my second class last night. We started going over the basics of Constitutional Law and the the structure of the US government. I liked some of the questions that were put forth:

• What is a “conflict of laws?”
• How come Bush does all these things that aren’t in the Constitution?
• Why are there no social protections in the U.S. Constitution?
• How does a bill become a law?

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Japan, whose constitution was written by the U.S. after WWII, has all these wonderful social welfare and social service protection in the constitution. The U.S. doesn’t have any, and it always keeps messing stuff up. We have an imperial president who pisses on the Constitution, and oftentimes, no one knows what law to use!

At least one thing is clear:

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WSJ.com - Fact or Fiction? Exploring the Myths About Lawyers

By ROBIN KELSEY
Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

As an alumnus of Yale Law School who spent less time practicing law than studying it, I take great pleasure in offering unrequested advice to people contemplating a career in law. Here are five myths about legal education and practice.

Myth #1: A legal education is a great means to embark on any of a variety of non-legal careers.

Absolutely true. If studying law doesn’t get you to embark on a non-legal career, then nothing will.

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Ah, gather round all you funktastic people. This is how the legal job search really works, now that I’ve gone through it and come up BROKE.

Note: A lot of this is about the “big firm” search that the career offices focus on. They get ranked by salaries and stuff, so if they place a lot of embryotic law students into positions where they make $140,000 per annum, then it looks really good. See below for “A Big Firm?“.

First off, the most important thing to do is to know people. I knew people, but apparently forgot to take advantage of this, which harmed me in several ways. I’m still trying to recover. What do I mean by know people? Basically, you want to be able to drop names and then ask for favors. Yes, it sounds wrong and horrible and awful, and everyone who should does it. Who are good people to know?

• Your significant other’s parent who is a lawyer;
• Your family friend who is a law partner;
• Your friend who at least is an associate, even though that doesn’t help as much;
• The dean who you made friends with and knows everyone in the city/state/country/universe;
• Lawyers you met while out with student groups or from various other non-scholarly pursuits;
• Etc.

What do these people do? They help you get a job, if they can. Having someone pulling for you is a lot different than going in there shock cold and hoping that you’re impressive like whoa!

Second: Career services is great, BUT…
See, this is a big BUT. Face it, if you aren’t at one of those top top schools, and you’re not in the top so-and-so percent of your class, you’re probably not going to get picked for an interview. At my law school, they post them on the wall - and the same twenty or so people have interviews every single day. You know who I’m talking about: 3.7+GPA and Law Review. Well, here’s the dirty little secret about this: there are more “top students” than there are summer associate positions. For example, let’s say you want to work in Washington D.C., at Arnold & Porter, and you’re coming from, say, Rutgers-Newark Law. You’re in a bit of a bind. Why? Because all those damn kids at Georgetown and Harvard and Chicago and Yale and so on also want to work there. So they want to have a “diverse” incoming class of associates - but they also want “prestige” associates.

If I were to be really cynical, I would say that at most big firms in the top twenty to forty probably do their hiring like so:

We have 40 summer associate positions here at the New York office of Big & Firm LLP. Now, we’re ranked number 12 in the world…so let us set aside 20 of those associate positions for people coming from Yale, Harvard, Columbia, NYU, Penn, Chicago, Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, (you get the point). Now, Senior Partner Johnson’s son is graduating from Temple this year, so I don’t think we want to keep him out. And these other people all have recommendations. So we’re left with five more associate spots - let’s bring in one hundred kids to interview!

Now, that would kind of by cynical. But I’ve got a feeling that’s how it’s done. Why? Because there’s a certain Philadelphia firm that is upset every year that they lose all their selections to other firms. Wanna know why? It’s kind of an open secret: they keep picking the top ten people from all the law schools to interview - who can basically choose where they want to work. And where they want to work is certainly not there. It’s great that they want to get these great people - but it won’t work like that. And they also screw the rest of the people who would give an arm (or a leg) to work there but don’t have a 4.01GPA .

Don’t fret, though! There’s still luck to be had. While all those guys are competing for the same position at the BIG FIRM, there are all these small and medium size firms that are actually much much nicer. Also, don’t forget the government - it may not pay as well, but the benefits and the hours more than make up for it.

I’ll finish this soon. Until then, fight the power, kiddies!

(PS: While I was writing this, I managed to break the other theme, so here’s a new one. huzzah!)

Matt Hoffman, of the [non]billable hour placed an excellent post up about how to fix law schools. By the way, I hadn’t read the 5×5 with Law Student Bloggers until midway through this post. And here I was thinking that I had been somewhat novel with my idea for “rotations.”

Oh well - great minds think alike, I guess…

• I would really like to see a “rotation” program begin for law schools. Look, at most law schools, only a few people will get a summer associateship with a big firm - and at some, no one will. But this is one thing that could fix a lot of things - helping people who “really shouldn’t be lawyers” figure out what they should be and helping people who aren’t sure what kind of law they want to do figure that out. It’s not that hard - they do it in medicine. You don’t want a cardiologist who hates doing cardiology, do you? That sounds like it would be a good way to lose heart - but hundreds of law students go out there, get miserable, and then decide that what they’d really like to be doing is sailing a boat in the U.S. Virgin Islands instead of ever having considered law in the first place.

  How would rotations work? Well, it would need the ENTIRE legal community behind it, I think. There’s already some “interaction” between the law schools, judicial system, and law firms - but we’re talking major interaction. Law school would be extended by one year - but during that one year, students could even get paid. (I suppose this could also be done without extending it and using the third year as the rotation year - but there are some really interesting upper level electives that would get killed…Heck, it could even be one semester!)

  Each student would spend a month or so in a practice area: in-house counsel, judicial interning, small firm practice, large firm practice, state/local government, federal government, non-profit, NGO, criminal prosecution, and criminal defense. Now, I haven’t quite worked out any logistics, but this would expose students to so many things that they wouldn’t normally get to do. Andy suddenly is able to figure out that while he didn’t enjoy working for a judge, he really enjoyed working with people at South Jersey Legal Services. Molly can learn that while she hated the atmosphere at Workem & Payem and couldn’t see herself as a big firm lawyer, she greatly preferred working at the Philadelphia Prosecutor’s Office. And Ashanti, who went through all those and decided that while she loved law school, practice wasn’t for her? Well, she’ll know that she should concentrate on consulting - I hear McKinsey & Co. is hiring!

  See the changes that would wrought on the profession? Rather than a bunch of mopey-eyed miserables, people will be doing something they actually want to do.

• Big Firms: I had a professor say something very interesting to me today that put a lot of my recruiting worries to rest: “Why are you so worried about life after third year? Go out, do your associateship, and don’t shut the door on the rest of your life. You don’t have to take the offer. If you like working at the big firm, swell! You’re one in a million, take the money and go for it. If you don’t, say “Thanks, but no thanks,” tell them you appreciate the offer, and go off to England or work for the Justice Department or whatever you want! It’s a summer job, not a marriage.”

  But seriously, I understand the point about big firms - and he agreed. I don’t know if it’s what I want, and I’ve been told how miserable it can be (and believe me, I love being in law school; if I had a choice between working as a lawyer and being a professor somewhere, I would jump to be Professor Monkey rather than Mr. Monkey, Esq.). But I definitely won’t know if I don’t try it - and even though you’re in a magical happy land for the summer, you can still see the way other people work. If I don’t like it…well, I suppose I just will have to find something I like! I hear American Samoa is nice all year round.

• You know, I wonder how to better reach out to solo & small firms. I bet it wouldn’t be too hard - there’s a phone book & e-mail everywhere these days. Why the heck not just do a mail merge and say “Hey guys, we’ve got all these young lawyers looking for work, and they want jobs.”

  Back when I was a marketing major, one of the ways to “takeover” a company was the “internal buy-out” method. I don’t know if this is the real name, because I can’t find my notebook from Professor Nickel’s class. But here’s what I remember:

  Find an old person who wants to retire in a few years. Agree to work for a certain number of years at a certain salary, getting more and more money and control of the company every year - and you keep paying them a salary and then possibly even a pension (I think one has to pay the pension). At the end of the few years, take over the firm.

  What does this do? You keep the old person’s company alive. They get money. They get someone who cares about it. You get the goodwill of the company and the trust of the community. EVERYBODY WINS. This is something that small firms can do pretty easily, and I think it would translate well.

• Okay, this might sound odd, but the most interesting work I did all summer had to do with attorney ethics. I would love to take a class on advanced ethics for attorneys (and actually, call me a turncoat, but if there was an ethics prosecution, and there probably is, but I’m currently too tired to search for one) I would jump to serve on it. It could be all about what naughty lawyers have done, and discuss philosophies in law and how to better encourage an ethical and moral bar. And you know, speaking of attorney ethics, I want more outrage when attorneys do bad things - how come we can talk about “bad CEOs” or “bad government officials” in business school or social studies, but not “bad lawyers” in law school?
• Since I mentioned teaching above, why is there such an insistence on “Harvard/Yale + Law Review + Clerk” to teach? One professor, when I asked about teaching, gave me five options: Go to Harvard/Yale; get an LL.M. from Harvard or Yale; work at a soul-crushing big firm in NYC (and get a LL.M. from Columbia or NYU); clerk at the Supreme Court; or donate a lot of money to the school on the condition of becoming a professor. Here’s my idea: I’m fine with getting an LL.M. (frankly, I’m excited by going to school) especially if I can get one from Oxford or the London School of Economics. I have no problem with practicing for a few years. So I’ll take this: I’ll go to one of the British universities (or even Harvard or Yale, I guess) and I’ll work for a few years. And I’ll throw in a bonus: I want to teach, not just write boring articles and sit on my ass - and you should know that someone who wants to do something is usually going to do a much better job than someone who doesn’t care.
• More Free Food. Look, law school is expensive anyway. I could use a cookie or something other than just pizza. How about sandwiches once in a while? Maybe a nice taco tray, or some of those little tomatoes with whitefish inside? Gosh, those are good.

Recording Industry vs The People

The lawyers representing Patricia Santangelo, who is the first RIAA defendant to refuse to settle, have set up a blog detailing the events of the case:

We are lawyers in New York City. We practice law at Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP.

Through the Electronic Frontier Foundation we and our firm have undertaken to represent people in our area who have been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for having computers whose internet accounts were used to open up peer-to-peer file sharing accounts.

We find these cases to be oppressive and unfair, as large law firms financed by the recording industry sue ordinary working people for thousands of dollars.

We have set up this blog in order to collect evidence and input about these oppressive lawsuits.

Okay, so I know I promised more writing about me yesterday. I always have trouble writing in here because this isn’t a LiveJournal (I do have one, and I don’t use it). I know that some people just keep checking this page to see what’s up with me, and I appreciate it.

1) I have no idea how other law students make such lovely blogs and keep them updated with lawyerly things during law school. It amazes me to no end. Maybe it’s because I was a 1L last year and it didn’t seem like I had any time? I mean, I wish I was able to do political commentary, or review the new law clerks for the Supreme Court, or even just discuss the weather over the now-closed DMA parking lot…But I never felt like I had time before.

2) I think that people who say that you never forget the first person you love (or at least, kindasortamaybe love are right. We used to have this discussion, where I would tell her how wonderful she was and she would tell me how easy it would be for me to replace her. Well, I never actually have and she actually was wonderful. It’s really weird. I mean, it’s two years hence and I still think about girls in comparison to her…I suppose everyone does that, you want to compare everyone you ever know to everyone else and then you get all confused. Maybe that’s wrong, but that’s sort of it. Kinda silly, really. Stupid things, feelings. We could just all be Vulcans, that would make it a lot easier, I think.

“I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.” - Neil Gaiman, _The Sandman_

3) Classes are killing me. It really is tough to manage this long interminable day, but I do like the job in the courthouse - it’s just the classes afterwards that bug me. I’m finding it difficult to care about either evidence or professional responsibility, and I am, of course, worried about my grades. Always grades, it comes back to those damnable things. We should totally just be judged on the content of our character rather then on grades, we’d be a much better society.

4) I really need to start writing again. I’ve been (yes, this is dorky) re-reading Harry Potter, and then because I like to see what people do, I keep ending up and reading HP fanfiction. Nothing DIRTY, but I’ve been trying to read the good ones. Most of them are crappy, which is a common theme in fan-writing, apparently. They like to write really crappy stuff.

And no, I’m not going to be writing that. I want to get this damn book out of my head so I can do something else with it. I sort of know the plot, and I sort of know the characters, and I sort of have an idea, but not entirely, which hurts the writing. Although for me writing is not the sort of thing that’s “plotted out,” it’s more along the lines of the sort of thing that just happens. You put pen to paper (or fingers to keys, as it were) and just get one’s type on. T’cha, y’know?

5) My life is seriously kinda boring right now. As I pointed out, I don’t do much other than work, class, and sleep…there’s no time for anything else! But I’m kind of excited for the Fourth of July this year. With Live 8 and Elton John coming to Philadelphia, it’s going to be way exciting. Hopefully I’ll get to see both concerts, it’s going to be pretty cool.

(Partially stolen from Three Years of Hell…

I just noticed this, and it’s a good idea…

Property : DONE
Constitutional Law: Friday, May 6th
Criminal Law: Tuesday, May 10th.