Brief-Writing Quiz

Please identify the problems that the following remedies can help solve:

1. Research authority from the federal circuit that encompasses your state.

2. Take out a string cite and just use “e.g.”

3. Change the sentence from active to passive voice.

4. Use parenthetical authority to help articulate your point.

5. Squint and hope nobody notices.

ANSWERS:
1. When you need additional authority for a particular point of law.
2. When you are over your word limit.
3. When your client is guilty as sin and there’s no two ways about it.
4. When something that was written in an opinion sounds good but was in no way a holding and you are just making this shit up.
5. When the last sentence of your brief has no basis in the law whatsoever but just sounds so totally badass.

I enjoy the…content.

Tonight as I was working on my brief, amidst cries of “AC! You are studying 2 fast,” and, “Look away, dear child, that girl is learning 2 furiously,” I decided to use one of my eyes to catch up on my blog-reading habit. Turns out, Chicago Typewriter is back. For those of you who like to read things on the Internet that are sometimes sort of funny, and that are written by an ex-law student, I would like to direct your attention henceforth.

Project Fury

I have a hard time motivating. In fact, I’ve arguably slacked off the entire year while my fearless associates have gained a considerable lead in the realm of academic performance. This troubles me, so I have spent the last six hours or so researching how to make up for lost ground. I have consulted two great films, The Fast and the Furious, and 2 Fast, 2 Furious. Both sources seem to advocate the use of a special button that, when pressed, makes the car go very fast for a short time. However, the great and explosive speed is accompanied by a proportional loss of control. This, I believe, is the Fury.

So in my workshop I have fashioned a new plan of attack based on this model. I shall unveil, in my last weeks as a 1L, my secret weapon: Project Fury.

Project Fury is a “Zero Tolerance,” “Take No Prisoners,” “No Fear,” “Shake It Like a Polaroid Picture,” strategy for success in law school. It involves, as its name suggests, a furiously manic form of studying. In this form I will work twice as hard as my fellow students. Where other students raise one hand in class to answer a question, I will raise two. Where others bring one laptop to class to take notes, I will bring two, and perhaps also a notebook. Where others use both eyes to focus on one book, I will use each eye for its own book. I will learn bright and I will learn hot, fast and furious as fire.

I will dress appropriately for Project Fury. Twenty minutes ago, I designed and put into production a “Project Fury” headband that I will use as a signifier for when people try to talk to me: “Hey, Amateur, how’s it going? You wanna go to Chipotle?”

“…..” I will not even have to look up from my books and laptops; I will point to the headband and they will understand. I will sense that their knees have gone weak upon witnessing the Fury, but I will not be distracted. I will dress in but one outfit, an outfit I will wear to sleep, to class, and to shower. It will be mottled by sweat and by blood. The mottling of the Fury.

So cast aside your eyes, ye of the weak spirit, for when I pass, I will pass with the glory of a Phoenix, burning hot into the future, racing for my rebirth as a 2L.

What Grades May Come

To brief or not to brief. That is the question.
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous brief-induced cookie eating,
Or to take arms against a sea of cases that favor the prosecution,
And by opposing end them? To blog: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand first-circuit opinions
that have nothing to do whatsoever with my fact pattern, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To blog, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to fail: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of rest what grades may come
When we have shuffled off this legal argument,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long briefs;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of word limits,
The defendant’s inarguable wrong, the proud prosecution’s contumely,
The pangs of despised bluebooking, the law’s delay,
The insolence of classmates and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a Benedryl and cup of Sleepytime tea? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a reasonless precedent,
But that the dread of something worse than brief,
The undiscover’d grading from whose bourn
No career returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those assignments we have
Than fly to jobs, the salaries we know not of?
Thus conscience does make lawyers of us all;
And thus the native hue of procrastination
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of grades,
And enterprises of great peace and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of inaction.

They’re holding hands!

Today I woke up at 3 in the afternoon, fully dressed from the day before. It has been 3 days since I changed into a separate outfit to go to sleep. I am behind. Behind in my reading, behind in class attendance, and behind in my LRW exam-writing process. Because I am so behind, I skipped an important journal write-on meeting today–I thought I could use the extra time to begin my brief.

However, about an hour ago, as I was reading a case for my brief, I became possessed by an intense and frankly uncompromising urge to surf the internet looking for images of otters. Before I knew it, I had cast aside the case, opened my laptop, opened a browser, and typed “otters” into my Google bar. Quickly it became apparent to me that it was this video, hosted some thousands of miles away, that was beckoning to me. I strongly advise watching the whole thing.

Two Questions

On the school front, I have my LRW exam this week, so I’ll keep this post brief. (Get it? Yar, yar.)

1. Who left that thispeanutlookslikeaduck comment? Are you a person? Are you a spam? I can’t tell, but I love ducks. Love them.

2. Why does xkcd.com now link to questionable content? Not that I have anything against questionable content (though I generally prefer the amateur kind, yar yar), but I prefer xkcd. What happened? Anyone? Anyone?

S.T.U.D.Y

I had my first grades dream last night. Finally. I was afraid the fear would never hit, and I would be forced to motivate myself towards good grades without running, white with horror, away from a bleak future at [insert bottom of the barrel career here].

I will retell the dream now, but for those with a weak stomach, you might want to skip down a few paragraphs.

In my dream…
I got a “D” in a 6 credit class.

It just about topped that dream where I was in a Romanian orphanage, and I had to escape through a series of pipes and chutes with only Clint Eastwood to guide me. It was really scary.

This new fear, I believe, is a result of the story of a friend of mine. This friend, we’ll call her Mellisa Marks, got a nice internship working for the government this summer. They asked her to send her updated transcript as a formality, but when they received the transcript and discovered that she had below a 3.0, her internship offer was revoked. Her grades were: B, B, B, B-. And now she has but two choices–start networking at [bottom of barrel career path], or … no, that’s about it.

So, I have vowed that this semester I will do what many of my colleagues have done to attain success: bite the bullet and S.T.U.D.Y. Though last semester, I did Spin Tepid Unreasonable Distrust of the Yeti, I did not quite S.T.U.D.Y as I should. That is:
Sit, Try, and Understand= Direct Yield.

Unfortunately, this conflicts with my earlier S.T.U.D.Y. plan of Silently Trying to Upend my Dwindling Youth. But “direct yield”! It just sounds so glamorous!

My Triumphant Return

Law school is making me boring. The reason I know this is because when I came here, I thought all of my peers were excessively boring, but now I think they are just normal.

Law school is also making me a bad writer. People who can write only one type of paragraph are bad writers. See AC v. Law School, 126 A.2d 48, 75 (2007). In AC v. Law School, it was held that because a paragraph structure remained the same throughout an entire brief and the justices became bored and needed to take a nap, the writing of the brief was bad. In the present case, I have started to write very formulaically, paying less attention to cadence and more attention to word count, and have acquiesced to the wisdom of TREAC. Therefore, I have become a bad writer.

In response to these concerns, I would like to hereby announce my triumphant return to blogging. In this triumphant return I hope to update every hour, with all the latest on what I am thinking and feeling. Stay tuned!

I do not like it on a train; I do not like it on a plane…

So far, I don’t like law school very much. In order to pay more attention to things that make me happy, I will refrain from blogging about law school until further notice. Perhaps one day I will return; perhaps one day they will invent a more effective antidepressant…

Rule 26

Is too damn long.