Oral Arguments

So Washington is crazy with the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court. Today is Day 2 of oral arguments. Wish I could have gone, but I was not prepared to line up beginning last Friday morning. On the upside, professional line-standers (yes, that's a real thing) are making a killing. (Oh, it would be so ironic if someone got sick from standing in line in the rain and had to charge it to their health insurance company at the hospital.) I'm taking a nerd poll on how this case comes out. I say they uphold the law 6-3 with Scalia, Thomas, and Alito dissenting and a narrower holding than liberals would like. But what I was really hoping would happen was Thomas breaking his vow of silence from the bench and making that the story. I wonder how many of my professors were at the arguments today? A bunch, is my non-technical guess.

Instead of being at oral arguments at the Court, yesterday I attended Ron's oral argument at Jessup internationals. He was actually awesome. And not just because I'm his friend and was rooting for him. He had no notes and busted out the equivalent of an oral string cite, with about eight cases he just pulled out from memory. He might as well have walked over and slapped his opponent in the face while singing "Ball so hard..." His partner also did really well, and in fairness so did his opponents. But I have a feeling his team won that round.
Then today I had an oral argument of my own, volunteering to defend (gasp) Congress for my Separation of Powers class. Gun so hard... But my professor was happy that I had volunteered, and it was sort of neat acquainting myself with the issues involved. It was essentially a mock negotiation between Congress and the Executive branch over subpoenaed documents. The negotiation is based on the real-life fact pattern of Congressional oversight of the Clinton Justice Department's handling of campaign finance violations in the 1996 election. As my professor introduced the facts, "Some of you may remember this, and some of you may have been playing with Transformers."
I think it went pretty well. It was kind of fun arguing for Congress. Part of my argument essentially was "You really should just hand over the documents we want. I'll remind you we have the power to appropriate funds. I'm not saying we will deny your appropriations. But I'm also not not saying that." Being a member of Congress is sort of like being a mafia boss from what I gather. The major difference being you have no extra obligations on the day of your daughter's wedding. Oh, and Congressmen get a great pension. But really, it illustrated just how broad Congress's powers are and how many tools they have - both political and legal - to get what they want. Of course, the proper test in a situation of a congressional subpoena vs. a claim of executive privilege is a balancing of each branch's interests; often the result comes from your inherent trust or mistrust of one branch. So people who grew up with Watergate might prefer Congress; people who grew up with McCarthyism might prefer the Executive. And people who grew up with President Bush and the current Congress might prefer anarchy.

Gunning Where It Matters

Last night was a fiasco. Not anything I did, per se, more what I did not do. Namely sleep. I probably got a solid 4 hours. I went to bed around 11, hoping to be in dreamland by 12. It turns out that was optimistic. I could not fall asleep no matter what I did. I read, watched tv, had a glass of wine, counted in my head, listened to music, etc. Nothing helped. I just lay there unpleasantly conscious. Covers on; covers off; covers half on; covers seven-eights off. Around 2:30 am I took a shower. My roommate must think I am a freak, but I think it helped so that sometime around 3:30 I drifted off. I woke up (with a wet pillow from my hair) on time this morning to take...my Criminal Procedure final. What a joy!

The final itself went alright. I felt pretty good about it, but so did everyone else. Our grades are distributed on a curve, so the better everyone else does, the harder it is for me to do well (see Will's common gripes about law school: grading curve). I tend to do better on more difficult finals, so I am a bit nervous about this one.
The other reason I am uneasy about this final is that two of the multiple choices questions should be disqualified. One of them had no correct choice as an answer (I am 99% certain, particularly after conferring with some classmates). The second question was not written in complete sentences. I believe the question was, "Which of the following is a true statement?:" The four answers were supposed to be about the Knock and Announce Rule, but only two of the answers actually referenced the rule. The other two answers simply contained incomplete sentences lacking a subject. In retrospect, the subject seems to be "the Knock and Announce Rule." But these incomplete sentences led to some semantic difficulties so that I did not even know what one of them was trying to say. Again, after conferring with classmates, I am not crazy, this actually happened. I want this question excluded (especially because I am not confident I picked the correct answer now that I fully understand what proposition each answer was trying to state).
I remembered the number of the first question (with no right answer), and after the exam I went to my professor's office to ask her to look for it in reviewing the tests. I stupidly forgot to mention the second question and had to later email her my request. Yeah, I felt like a gunner for doing that. But, hey, I am nervous about the test and this could really have an impact. This is real people. This is not a drill. So sometimes one must appear as a gunner. Luckily, I only did so to my professor rather than the rest of the class. And I guess to this blog. But no one on the internet is full of judgment, from my understanding.

Did that actually just happen? moment

For some reason discussing abortion in any context brings out the absolute worst in people. Today in Con Law it brought out the worst in gunners. We were discussing Roe v. Wade. (At the beginning of class I turned around and desperately asked the girl behind me what the case was about. Thankfully, she understood my sarcasm.) After discussing the legal reasoning behind the case and talking about how it fits into substantive due process jurisprudence, my professor opened up the floor a bit and started asking questions. Cue the crazies. First, one kid pontificated on the personal politics of the nine Supreme Court justices. We all know and no one wants to hear it. Shut up. Then, in response to a hypothetical designed to tease out our thoughts about the inherent conflict between the right to life and the right to autonomy, a classmate of mine offered a counter-hypothetical: "What if they ground up the babies into a powder and fed it to the mothers which would enhance their lives for 18 years." That's when I sat up straight in my chair and looked around with my mouth hanging open to see who else realized that this was the craziest thing ever. It was a "Did that just actually happen???" moment. Even if I explained the full context here it wouldn't make a difference. That's just a ridiculous thing to say. It almost makes me miss Racist-Civ-Pro kid.

This evening I had an Alternative Dispute Resolution Board meeting. It was a waste of an hour of my life. This comes a whole day after being asked about ADR Board at an interview and candidly expressing my feeling that it was a wholly arbitrary (and capricious) and largely useless membership. I was selected from a client counseling competition - how do you assign objective measure to how good a client counselor someone is? I guess there is a way...but the people who were judging certainly were no more trained than I. In retrospect I am not sure this was the best thing to say during an interview...maybe it's this kind of thing which prevents me from getting a job. Hope not! I still remain desperate and perhaps rethinking law school.

I keep getting distracted by nearby conversations during Boggle and losing to Reza. That's right, I blame the nearby conversations.