Cold Called

Last night I went to my first bar review. It is absolutely not a big study group for the bar exam, as I was (not) led to believe. Rather, every Thursday night the law school assembles at a bar (which rotates), there are drink specials, and we get to watch our classmates get progressively more drunk and prone to dancing. My recommendation is to resist the urge to dance at all costs. One day we will all be lawyers (hopefully). You do not want to walk into court only to realize that one night you made an ass out of yourself dancing to Apache by the Sugar Hill Gang in front of the opposing attorney. Of course if you are either a spectacular dancer or possess an incredible lack of foresight, go ahead and dance. I recommend dressing scantily as well. I did not use bar review as a dance party; I took the opportunity to meet and hang out with people in a non-school setting. It was nice and refreshing, though I had to bar all law school talk from at least two conversations I had last night. It does get hard to talk about other things when all we know we have in common is school. But there are other things to talk about. Like ice cream and Kanye West, as one girl pointed out. (Of course these garnered these responses from the other guy we were talking to: "I don't really like ice cream; I don't really like sweet things," and, "I don't really listen to him." Well, those were rousing conversations, let me tell you.)

The other first that happened to me is that I got cold called in class. I blame Kanye West for this, actually. Being cold called is why you do your homework, so that you don't look like a complete fool. Positive: I had done my homework. Negative: I had done it about four days previously and didn't quite remember every aspect of it. It balanced out and I did alright. I knew what I was talking about, but there was definitely some floundering going on. It certainly got my heart racing and my brain saying "Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap." This professor (Criminal Law) likes to choose people to cold call based on their relation to the case we are reading. So if the case is from New York, he'll call on someone from New York. Sometimes this connection gets less obvious. For example we are talking about actus reus, the necessary concept of a bad act in criminal law. The professor puts up a picture of the poster from "Minority Report" because it is basically a movie about how the justice system would look if actus reus was not a requirement to commit a crime. And Minority report starred Tom Cruise, who also starred in the movie A Few Good Men. And the first scene of that movie shows the U.S. Marine Corps Marching Band. Except that in the movie that is actually the Texas A&M Drill Team. And we have a student who is a graduate of Texas A&M... And that's how he chose who to cold call yesterday. Today we have a case from Illinois. "We have lots of Illinois connections today," says the professor. "Phew," I think, "I don't have any Illinois connections." And of course I get called on. I just look stupidly at the professor for three seconds trying to figure out my Illinois connection. The professor understands my confusion and says to the class "He's like, what's my Illinois connection? Well he put down" (on an index card on the first day of class because we were asked to) "Kanye West as one of his favorite artists. And Kanye West is from Chicago." First, I wrote Kanye because I couldn't think of a third favorite artist, so I just went with it. Second, Really? That's the strongest Illinois connection we've got. I like someone from Illinois? I'm sure we have people who are actually from Chicago, or who went to school in Illinois. But I like a famous artist from Chicago, so bam, I'm on the spot. Like I said, I blame Kanye for this. I'm going to use my law school expertise to figure out a way to sue him for this.