Subsequently (part 2)

We were talking about service of process in my Civil Procedure class. It doesn't matter if you don't know what that means. My professor was trying to tease out an answer about why something was not proper service of process. He finally gets the question he was looking for, "What did he say when you gave it to him?" to which my professor, playing the part of the guy in the hypothetical, blurts out three sentences in what sounded like Swedish. The entire class was silent for a moment, then burst into laughter. Why does our professor speak fluent (maybe) Swedish? I have no idea. This moment in Civ Pro was matched only by our discussion of Pennoyer v. Neff when he was asking someone about why the court's reasoning made sense. The student gave some answer and my professor just exploded, "No, it makes ABSOLUTELY no sense." Whoa there Nelly, this is the Supreme Court of the United States of America (SCOTUS) we are talking about here. You can't be yelling and causing a ruckus about it. Well apparently you can, particularly when you happen to be correct and the decision from 1868 is just decided stupidly.

Today I had the dreaded Legal Research class (aka the worst 55 minutes of the week) with my Dean's Fellow who can't speak proper English for one word only. "Sub-see-quently." Well today (in 3rd grade) one of the activities in class was a competitive game about legal citations where we divided into two teams and had to correctly answer the question. Best part, we all got candy!!! (FALSE, the best part would have been putting in my iPod and running out of the room yelling "You eat poop...suckers!" Too bad this didn't happen.) Well I have shared my thoughts on pronunciation of 'subsequently' with my classmates. And when one of them pulled out a citation question for the game, of course it included the word. So my classmate read the question, came to the word, stopped, and very deliberately pronounced it the correct way. Most of the class snickered and looked at me. I threw open my book and started looking for the answer so that I wouldn't look the Dean's Fellow straight in the eye and laugh at her.

In Criminal Law we watched the clip from Pulp Fiction where John Travolta accidentally blows the head off the kid in the back seat of the car. I laughed out loud when it happened. It may have been inappropriate.

On advice from Shaked I went to Starbucks during lunch and got a pumpkin spice latte. And a pumpkin cream cheese muffin. It must be getting towards Fall, when all the good flavored things come out. Pumpkin pie. Pumpkin beer. But I don't think that pumpkin by itself tastes very good. Hrm. I should see someone about that. It was actually nice to be at Starbucks studying (with Ryan) rather than at school. I was going to say there were fewer stressed-out, pretentious assholes, but it was Starbucks so never mind.

Yesterday in Legal Writing (oh joy) we tangentially touched upon the rule of lenity. The rule of lenity is basically a 'tie goes to the runner' rule. It says that if a statute can be interpreted two ways then it should be interpreted in the way less harmful to the defendant, or if there is ambiguity as to guilt, like you are teetering on the verge of conviction, then the defendant gets off. After class I was trying to make conversation with the professor (whom it is no secret that I do not love) and I asked if he knew the origin of lenity. He told me he thought it was British common law. I responded (yes, I know this is kind of a pretentious thing to do, but I was actually interested and I don't think that having a wide knowledge base or an education is a negative thing) that I know it dates back at least to the Ancient Greeks. In Aeschylus's Orestia, specifically the third play, The Eumenides, Athena establishes the principle of lenity when judging Orestes at trial. So the origin of the rule goes back at least as far as Aeschylus, who I'm assuming didn't make it up himself since he was a playwright. Of course I was blown off, "Oh, yeah? Great. See you next week." That's predictable and I can't actually fault him for it. But I don't think there is one person at school who actually would be interested in it. That is troubling to me. I am definitely realizing that at school, at least this school, if it's not on an exam it probably isn't going to get much attention. That's sad. There should be more to school than exams and vocational training. Well, of course there is: papers. Oh, great.