Updated Happy List

• Finally seeing the sun again after it hid for the first week of school.
  
• Long dinners and ridiculously funny conversations with friends at Kramer Books Cafe.
• Filling out a tax withholding form and actually knowing what things mean (thank you tax law).
• Getting paid to do a really fun job.
• Talking with my mom on the phone after a long week.
• Top Model marathons when I'm at the gym.
  
• Cooking for friends and boyfriend.
• Seeing the cute little Japanese kid who lives on the first floor and has a huge head.
  
• Having the 1L's in my section recognize me and say hi.
  
• Only one week until football season starts.
  
• Getting a top locker, finally.
  
• Rooftop BBQ's (which I am going to right now).
  

Erasing Age Lines

This morning I got an email from the legislative assistant who hired me for my internship on the Hill. We worked in the same office, he gave me assignments, and I later used him as a reference. He emailed me to tell me that he goes to my law school and saw my picture in a handout about Dean's Fellows. It is mind boggling that someone who I once considered a superior is now a year behind me in law school and is someone who can come to my office hours for guidance.

Throughout my academic career, there has been the age hierarchy. Aside from the few kids who had early/late birthdays or skipped/held back a year, I was always the same age as the people in my class. And while there were more kids who were the "exception," the age hierarchy largely remained intact during college as well.

Now we get into law school and the hierarchy is shattered. Last year, I might have been the youngest and a 1L at the bottom of the law school totem poll, but all of a sudden there are people 10 years older than me in my classes. I had no sense of how old people are, because as I learned very well last year, age and maturity do not go hand-in-hand at all. People who I thought were 23 ended up being 30, and vice versa.

I guess one of those 'real world lessons' that you learn in law school is that age does not matter anymore. People who were born in different decades are now competing for the same grades and the same jobs. Sure you gain a lot of knowledge and wisdom from experience, but you can be younger than someone else and have more experience than them in a particular area.

The First of the Second

I have officially finished my first week of my second year of law school and I am absolutely exhausted but very content with life.

Even though things already seem much busier, I think the reason why everything seems much more manageable this year is because we have more control. Classes seem better when we get to pick the subject and the professors. Activities are more meaningful when we choose them for a specific purpose. Our weekends seem more flexible because they are not dictated by a legal rhetoric schedule. And overall, I think we all have a greater sense of control in our lives because we know what we are doing this time around.

With more control comes mores responsibility and higher expectations. But I think law school students are the type who thrive on all of the above.

What I Learned Today

Remember how your parents always used to ask you what you learned at school that day?

Well, today I learned that if your company rewards you with an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas, you have to calculate the price-market price of your lodging, airfare, meals, and top-less dancer shows as part of your gross income because they are compensating you. (McCann v. US, 1983).

Moreover, I learned that even if two people go into an airplane bathroom and shut the door, they do not have a reasonably objective expectation of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment if the people outside of the bathroom can hear the people having sex.

Speaking of the expectation of privacy, as I type this very blog, they're debating the expectation of privacy on Law & Order. District Attorney Arthur Branch (played by soon-to-be Presidential Nominee Fred Thompson) is talking about how he would overturn Roe v. Wade because there is no protection of privacy in the Constitution. I bet those Law & Order writers never expected that Fred Thompson would be uttering those same words in the campaign trail.

Sometimes the cases we read in class are more entertaining than television. And sometimes television is more entertaining because of what is going on in real life.

Kumbaya School

As I watch many of my friends start their first year of law school and observe the first years at my own school, I remember how much anxiety there was at the beginning of the school year. A lot of it was unnecessary anxiousness stemming from the horror stories of law school, particularly 1L year. And of course there is the pressure to succeed and the uneasiness about a whole new way of learning. No more skimming reading before class or whipping out papers in a few hours.

However, I realized that some of us were probably subconsciously uneasy coming into law school because we also hardly knew anyone. Everyone was the new kid. Even though my current roommate was at the same law school, and I am someone who does like meeting and talking to new people, I was a little nervous walking into my first class not knowing anyone. Am I going to find people to study with? What up if I end up sitting next to the really annoying person in class?

Fast forward a year, and it was nice saving seats for people because I knew I had friends in my class. And it was nice walking into the cafeteria for lunch and dinner (yes, that is how late we stay at school) to be greeted by your friends and catch up on what they did over the summer. My roommate and I agreed that seeing everyone in the cafeteria just brightened our day. It was like a reunion.

Knowing how much having friends at law school helps get through those long days and even longer readings, I am really glad that I go to the "kumbaya school." We are known as the school that is nice to each other with happy people.

Yet sadly, there are many other law schools, including schools I thought I really thought I wanted to go to, where people are not nice to each other. Places where people don't share notes if people are sick, and places where people don't study together. And those are probably the schools where the horror stories are more true, and where all three years probably do feel like the beginning of 1L year. That would be so sad.

District of California

What are the odds that, while riding the shuttle back from my first day of class, I would end up sitting by two Californians? Specifically one Californian who was in all of my roommate's classes last year, even more strangely, another Californian who went to school and 'partied' with my brother?

I guess when you put people from a big state in a little district, we are bound to run into each other.

In other news, my first day of classes went well. I will try to do a recap once I have finished the whole week since there was nothing particularly important to note.

Back to School

Although I was dreading going back to school while I was back home in California, I have regained some of nerdy self that is excited about going back to school.

I think some of my excitement stems from the fact that I am taking classes that I picked and doing activities that I enjoy. This semester I am enrolled in First Amendment, Higher Education Law, Criminal Procedure, and Federal Personal Income Tax.

I know what you're thinking, how can you be excited about tax? Well a lot of non-believers have been allegedly converted to tax law lover, and after reading the first chapter of my tax book this weekend I can see why. Tax is all about categorizing and organizing things with a side of public policy and politics; perfect for the neurotic law student like me.

The icing on the cake is that I get to see Alex for dinner after my first day of classes since he is moving into GW tomorrow. Off to go organize my school supplies.

(Speaking of school supplies, as much as I love them, they should not be made into faces. I only put this picture up because it scares me.)