Party Joke of the Day

After his death, Osama bin Laden went to paradise. He was greeted by George Washington, who slapped him across the face and yelled, "How dare you attack the nation I helped conceive!"

Patrick Henry punched Bin Laden in the nose and shouted, "You wanted to end America's liberty, but you failed."

James Madison appeared, kicked him in the groin, and said, "This is why I allowed the government to provide for the common defense."

Bin Laden was subjected to similar beatings from John Randolph, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson and 66 other early Americans. As he writhed in pain on the ground, an angel appeared. Bin Laden said, "This is not what I was promised."

The angel replied, "I told you there would be 72 Virginians waiting for you. What did you think I said?"

O-H-I-O

Mom: "I don't know if I've ever told you this, it's kind of stupid, but when I was a kid we always used to love the word Ohio. Ohhhhhh-hi-yo! Isn't it cool? A 'hi' in the middle with two 'O's around it? Ohio! Spelled the same way front and back, as we used to say when we were kids."

(beat)

Matt: "Um, no it isn't..."
Mom: (Blank stare)
Matt: "Backward it's oy-ho."

(Much laughter ensues as my mother realizes she can't think coherently before her morning coffee.)

Matt: "I'm putting this on my Web page."
Mom: "Get out of my room! Go away!"
Matt: "No state is spelled the same way forward and backward."
Mom: "I'm sure there's one!"
Matt: "I don't think so."
Mom: "Maybe we were thinking of 'Dad' or 'Wow.'"

Dirty Legal Minds

Today I pelted someone with a stray innuendo. It was sophomoric and tasteless, yet funny and good. You will see it at the end of this post. But first, I shall whet your appetite with some well-known

THINGS THAT SOUND DIRTY IN LAW BUT AREN'T

10) "Have you looked through her briefs?"
9) "He is one hard judge!"
8) "Counselor, let's do it in chambers."
7) "His attorney withdrew at the last minute."
6) "Is it a penal offense?"
5) "Better leave the handcuffs on."
4) "For $200.00 an hour, she better be good!"
3) "Can you get him to drop his suit?"
2) "The judge gave her the stiffest one he could."
1) "Think you can get me off?"

Source: http://www.unwind.com/jokes-funnies/lawyerjokes/dirtyinlaw.shtml

Now, mine. But first, some background! (This is the part where I sneak in actual legal theories, which makes my blog not just entertaining, but edutaining!)

The Learned Hand Formula
Learned Hand is the actual name of a famous federal judge. The formula in question tries to determine when negligence has occurred: If B < PL, you are negligent, where B is the burden of taking a precaution, P is the probability of harm arising if no precautions are taken, and L is the loss, or injury that would arise. For example, if I own train tracks, I could use the formula to determine what kind of safety system I need to install to prevent injury to pedestrians crossing the tracks. Would it be negligent to not put up a warning sign at intersections? Well, the burden - or cost - of putting up such a sign would probably be relatively small. The possible loss is very high (loss of life). The probability of such loss? Who knows.

Anyway, you get the drift. There are lots of other ways to determine negligence. This is one of them.

And now, what I learned today. Telling someone that you're "going home to apply the Learned Hand formula" can have two meanings. It all depends on context. And alcohol.

Lawyers drink a lot.

Promise and Reliance

I have promised to keep a web log. In response, you -- my faithful reader -- probably bookmarked my site to check it from time to time. This is a form of reliance, and as such I have a duty* to keep the blog chock full of fresh content!

So despite my busy schedule, and the fact that homework seems to be coming at a faster pace than ever before, I feel responsible for providing some sort of legal entertainment. So, to that end, here is some righteous scorn from an early-19th century judge. :-)

"The son...was twenty-five years old, and had long left his father's family. On his return from a foreign country, he fell sick among strangers, and the plaintiff acted the part of the good Samaritan, giving him shelter and comfort until he died. The defendant, his father, on being informed of this event, influenced by a transient feeling of gratitude, promised in writing to pay the plaintiff for the expenses he had incurred. But he has determined to break this promise, and is willing to have his case appear on record as a strong example of a particular injustice sometimes necessarily resulting from the operation of general rules." Mills v. Wyman, 20 Mass. (3 Pick.) 207. (Emphasis added.)

Damn. It's one thing being scolded in private. But in public? For all the world to see? For the rest of eternity? That's rough.

*By "duty," I do not necessarily mean a "legal" duty, but a moral duty. I'm pretty sure there was no consideration, so there is no contract between us; and you can't claim promissory estoppel because I didn't promise anything to anyone in particular, just to the general public. I don't think that's enforceable, because it lacks specificity. Maybe. I'm just a 1L, for God's sake!

Reason #517 Why Microsoft Sucks

This relates to law school only tangentially. Please indulge me.

So MS Word was sluggish. I could feel it. Typing notes in class, it took a second or two for autocorrect to fix misspellings, or for asterisks to turn into bullets. I was miffed. I scoured the Web for speed-up tips, and one of them seemed to help (turn off real-time word count), but I wanted a more permanent solution. I wanted a fix that would hold up in the long run. I wanted... a version update.

I go to the Microsoft Web site and learn my version of word -- "X" -- is woefully out of date. I should really be using 10.1.5, which apparently is the height of coolness. I tried to download it, only to be informed that I really should download 10.1.4 first. Fine, I say. I go to download that. Sorry, they say, you've got to download 10.1.2 first. Regulations, and all that. Damn you, I say, and I click the link.

The downloads progress smoothly. I open the updates. One by one, I install the patches. And one by one, what do I find?

"The application Word has unexpectedly quit."

Excuse me?? I try it a couple more times. Same result. I restart the computer, confident that would solve all my computer problems.

Nope.

I am now attempting to download version X, a 102 MB file, from the Case Western web site. The version I started out with. The version I should have stuck with.

So, what have we learned from all this? At the risk of sounding trite, the moral of the story is: If it ain't broke... it isn't Microsoft.

American indifference?

I went to an interesting talk yesterday. The speaker was Samantha Power, a Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which examines America's reaction to acts of genocide around the world. At the risk of completely misinterpreting the point of her book, Power's thesis was this: "The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred."

And yet, despite her calls for America to do something about foreign genocide, Power found herself against the ongoing war/occupation in Iraq. Yes, it got rid of Saddam... but in the process, she said, the U.S. may have caused more problems.

Power believes that in the process of fighting this war, the United States brought four self-fulfilling prophecies to bear:

1. The Iraq - Al Qaeda connection: Before the war, the connection was specious. Now, it's stronger than ever before. The war has bonded American haters around the world. See quote #1 for why this is a bad thing.

2. Targets: We wanted to lessen the potential for terrorism. Yet now in Iraq, there are a slew of soft targets for terrorists.

3. Legitimacy and Liberation: As much as it confounds us, many Iraqis saw Saddam as a legitimate ruler. They were fighting for their liberation, yes, but at least the country had a legitimate ruler. Now, however, Iraqis see an occupying force that won't leave. They are still fighting for their liberation -- but now it's against what they perceive as an illegitimate ruler.

4. Ineptitude of the U.N.: The United States loves to bash the U.N. It doesn't work, we say. It's inept. Now that the Iraqi occupation is becoming more difficult, we are poised to hand off control of the situation to the U.N. In doing so, however, we will give them a black eye because the situation is a mess. As Power says, it's a loser of a situation, not something anyone would want to inherit. And yet, the U.N. will probably take a larger role in its rebuilding, and after 5 or 10 years when it's still going on, Americans will start to blame the U.N.'s ineptitude for a bad situation that hasn't much improved.

A few choice quotes from her lecture:

• "U.S. security is undermined when everyone hates us."
  
• "It's very useful to know things about the place that you're about to invade."
  
• "The Bush administration is right: The Security Council is broken."
  
• And, paraphrasing Robert Frost: "A liberal is someone who's so openminded, he can't take his own side in an argument."
  

I'm not sure I agree with all her points, but she really made me think. I am grateful for that opportunity. Back in undergrad at U of M, this is the kind of thing I was hoping for. Intelligent speakers that would enlighten. No protestors anywhere to be found. A well thought out, reasoned discussion. At Michigan, that was not to be. Here at Case... it is!

Rolled-up newspapers

In America, the legislature plays a unique role: It writes the laws. This is especially true in criminal law, where city, state and federal legislatures pen statutes delineating what is criminal and what is not.

Parts of Europe use common law principles to establish new crimes. For instance, if there are laws on the books establishing the criminality of selling paraphernalia for doing drugs, and an Evildoer decides to sell children paraphernalia for sniffing glue, then courts may find the Evildoer guilty of committing a crime that had not yet existed!

In the Kingdom, that's cool. Here in the Colonies, that's a violation of Due Process.

But this is all neither here nor there. I just wanted to offer a brief description so that the layman could appreciate this lovely snippet out of our criminal law text. In it, a commentator is describing the wonder that is the U.K.'s common law criminal system:

"When your dog does anything you want to break him of you wait til he does it, and then beat him for it. This is the way you make laws for your dog; and this is the way judges made law for you and me." (The Works of Jeremy Bentham)

Ah, whimsy. :-)

Notable Quotables

"Get filthy drunk before you slide on the slip-and-slide."
-Professor Waters, Torts

"There are lots of differences between friendship and arrest."
-Carney, Legal Writing

"$8 an hour clerks do not make law. Therefore you may not cite the headnote."
-Id.

---

I feel like I'm back in middle school and learning how to write a proper bibliography. All right, class, underline the title and then put a period. Do not underline the period! Et cetera, et cetera. I guess we have to go over this stuff at some point, but to spend a whole class on it?

Oh wait, prof just said that "The period in id. is underlined or italicized." So I guess we do underline the period.

Damn the complexities of law!

It's only a game...

"Who wants to tell us about Morales? Jeff Weiskopf. Where's Jeff. Jeff, tell us about Morales."

There was exactly half a second between the prof's question, and his calling on Jeff. And yet, in that instant of time, all of us who didn't remember the facts of Morales had hope. Hope that someone else would volunteer, and we would be spared.

Yet, even if the prof entertains the idea of letting people volunteer, he doesn't mean it. It is Russian Roulette, and we are forced to play. There are 80 chambers, and 79 are empty. But God help you if you get that one bullet.

*looking around* ... Wasn't me!

Res ipsa loquitur basically means that if something in your possession hurts another person, and you don't have a good reason for it, you're negligent.

Wilson v. Spencer summed it up nicely: "Thousands of automobiles are using our streets, but no one expects the air to be filled with flying hubcaps."

And I, for some strange and twisted reason, cracked up at the imagery. Does anyone else find it hilarious?

Rethinking Foreign Policy

I am in the midst of a fundamental shift in my world view. Maybe. Possibly.

You see, I don't want to admit it because that would mean I'm not the rabid conservative I've always pretended to be.

But we all knew that already, didn't we? My "conservatism" springs more from common sense than from any particular ideology... and yet I have embraced the conservative cause, which so often corresponds with the Republican cause.

I'm not sure I want to do that anymore. I am beginning to have serious misgivings about our foreign policy, about the war in Iraq, about our place in the world. I watched Bill Clinton's speech on CSpan yesterday, from the Dean fundraiser out in the fields of Iowa, and I found myself agreeing with him more than I disagreed. I still disagreed -- just not as much as I used to. When I saw that most of the things he said made a lot of sense, I cringed despite myself. But I knew a shift was taking place.

I am still a conservative, and still a Republican. But only moderately... and if I ever ran for office, I could probably run as a conservative Democrat. I don't know. This is all very confusing.

I recorded my raw thoughts into a voice recorder the other day, and I urge you to listen to the file. It's about seven minutes, and I sure would like some guidance.

...or perish?

Our contracts professor admitted he was wrong the other day, while privately explaining a concept to a student. He asked the student to explain the concept to the class.

Student: "The way you explained it to me?"
Professor:"No, the way that it is, as opposed to the way I explained it."

Finally, a dose of laughter to counteract the monotony that can be our 9:30 a.m. Contracts class. Our professor is proving to have a sense of humor -- a dry one, yes, but at least it exists!

Absolute

Found this great passage in my Contracts book. It's from the French economist Frederic Bastiat, and it describes the awe he feels when contemplating the free market that binds us all:

On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself -- Here are a million of human beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind ceased to flow towards this great metropolis. Imagination is baffled when it tries to appreciate the vast multiplicity of commodities which must enter to-morrow through the barriers in order to preserve the inhabitants from falling a prey to the convulsions of famine, rebellion and pillage. And yet all sleep at this moment, and their peaceful slumbers are not disturbed for a single instant by the prospect of such a frightful catastrophe. On the other hand, eighty departments have been labouring to-day, without concern, without any mutual understanding, for the provisioning of Paris. How does each succeeding day bring what is wanted, nothing more, nothing less, to so gigantic a market? What, then, is the ingenious and secret power which governs the astonishing regularity of movements so complicated, a regularity in which everybody has implicit faith, although happiness and life itself are at stake? That power is an absolute principle, the principle of freedom in transactions.

F. Bastiat, Economic Sophisms 104-105 (1922)

This man put into words what I've been marveling at for years now.

The Point

Why keep a Web site? Why, when everyone else in the world is posting their daily ramblings online, should I make the effort to do the same? After all, what makes my ramblings any more worthwhile than others'?

Not much. Which is why my ramblings will be a secondary part of this experiment. :-) This blog is not about me; it's about what I go through on a daily basis. It's about antiquated Latin phrases and English words that don't mean what they should mean. It's about... LAW SCHOOL.

From the millions of pages I read each day, a few choice thoughts or phrases pop out at me. They are words that made me stop and think, or chuckle, or often even cry. These are the words that grab my attention during the day, and keep me up at night. They are published in my case books, and said by professors and students in class. They are law school. And that is what I hope to share with you.