Skip to main content

Starting the 6th

I am starting my sixth term of law school next week. Since I am on the four year plan, I take ~11 hours of class each term, at night, for four years. So far, I have squeezed in regular classes, an externship at the Arkansas Supreme Court, moot court competition, law review, and a research assistantship with Dean DiPippa. I am going to travel to Minnesota at the beginning of March with the moot court travel team, but besides that ... I'm trying to make this term low-stress. Last term almost killed me... and I still don't have my grades yet. Ack.

If I had it to do over again, I would follow the same path. Law school is tough, as much harder than college as everyone always said each next step would be, but I never found that so until now. Junior high was actually easier than elementary, high school was not much harder, college was pretty simple ... and then, BAM! Socratic method with smart people! This has been the first really challenging academic experience of my life, and I must say I love it.

And I hate it, of course. I can't wait to have most evenings with my family, control of my schedule, etc. So I can't say that I have mixed feelings about being 5/8ths of the way through -- I look more and more forward to being done.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to read the Bill of Rights

The legal rights in the Bill of Rights didn't exist until the 20th century Social media has been abuzz with the Bill of Rights, and in particular the 1st Amendment, recently. Many posts, explicitly or implicitly, trace the Bill of Rights to the Founders.  That's wrong and leads to a poor understanding. A proper reading of the Constitution and the law reveals that, while the text was written then, these rights did not apply even on paper to the states until 1868, in fact until the middle of the 20th century, or even into the 21st century for the 2nd Amendment. “It is a Constitution we are expounding.” The Constitution sets out principles and goals, structures and limitations, and we must never forget that . It is law -- the highest law of the land , in fact -- but it is not code , which is detailed and often attempts to be exhaustively complete and explicit. The Constitution was written to provide a framework of balances by a group of  flawed aristocrats trying to rebel from ano
Post a Comment
Read more

Election 2016: Why Hillary’s conflated scandals are unconvincing #ImWithHer

This is part of a series of posts on Election 2016 . To be honest, I’ve stopped listening to most of the scandals about Hillary. That’s not because I think she is perfect or would never do something scandalous, but because the noise of obvious crap, generated over 3 decades, has made me jaded about spending any time investigating stories by people who think Killary is a fascist Communist. To be clear, I think she is an imperfect human. We don’t subject most politicians to the kind of scrutiny that Hillary has faced – how much do we know about George and Laura’s relationship, or his struggles with addiction, for instance?  But she isn’t perfect.  I think she is a bit paranoid and has a tendency to “circle the wagons” at the slightest sign of problems, and I think she is a fierce competitor that swings first and asks questions later. Like all successful politicians, she is willing to spin the truth to meet her needs, and she comes across, in crowd settings, as a bit fake.  Unlik
Post a Comment
Read more

Why COVID-19 is MUCH worse than the seasonal flu

This is the second in a series of posts about the COVID-19 pandemic . This installment is discussing why COVID-19 is much, much worse than the seasonal flu. Here it is, in a nutshell : COVID-19 is more contagious, more deadly, already has more known long-term impacts, has no vaccine or truly effective treatments, and has no apparent seasonality. Contagion SARS-COV-2 is much more contagious. The median R0 (average number of people infected by each person when nobody is immune) is 5.7 , or more optimistically 2.5 . For the pandemic to go away, R0 would need to effectively be less than 1.  The estimate of the 1918 novel flu was between 1.2 and 2.4 .  (An R0 of 5.7 means we need over 80% of the population to be immune to reach effective herd immunity .) Beyond that, the incubation period is long, and the number of transmissions before symptoms begin hovers near half those infected . And the duration of being contagious is longer, up to 10 days after the first symptoms. That means people ar
3 comments
Read more