It's Not Everything I Thought It'd Be

Its been five days since our last final and guess what? We're bored. I forgot how horrible afternoon television really is and when you're living off student loans, you don't exactly have the funds to go out and explore. So we mostly just read (until 3:00 when the People's Court comes on).

To make matters worse, we're lucky if we're able to sleep much past 7:00. This is the view from our bedroom window:

It gets dark here around 4:30, so there's not a lot of daylight to work with. Work starts as soon as the sun comes up around 7:00 or 7:30. Monday morning they were hammering. Today they were cutting metal pipes. To make matters worse, some of the heavy equipment shakes our apartment. When construction started about a month ago, they had a steamroller that shuck our whole apartment almost constantly. Today, they had some heavy equipment that would give us a short, mild shake every once in a while. It's a little like trying to read in a moving car.

For our law school friends, yes, we are thinking of bringing a nuisance cause of action against the construction.

Oh well, tomorrow's another day with nothing to do but curse the construction.

Two At A Time

When people find out that both of us are in law school, they're always shocked. In truth, I think it makes a lot more sense to do this at the same time because we each know exactly what the other is going through. On the other hand, there is one downside to going through law school together. As every law student knows, you amass a plethora of dirty laundry and dishes during the last month or so of the semester. We have two people contributing to the mess and guess what? Neither one of us has time to cleanup. Thus, we get six loads of laundry (consolidated into four loads to save on quarters) and a kitchen counter that we haven't seen for six weeks. Just one of the many reasons we're glad finals are over.

Work Hard, Play Hard

We've been celebrating heavily the last two days! We had an awesome party at Lark Tavern after our last final and I think 95% of our class showed up. It was a blast, I've included some pictures for you. Names have been changed.
Madness decends on Lark Tavern after our last final. Look at all the future lawyers!
I'm not saying that I was sober all night. There was Free Beer after all.


This is my lawfirm. (Our lawfirm was formed as part of our lawyering class) The gril on the far right is an honory member of the law firm!

The girl on the right is from NYC and these pictures were taken with her camera. The girl on the left is from San Antonio. We've bonded over discussions of SaltLick and Mexican Martinis. She's down there right now eating good Mexican Food. I am jealous!

His and our friend from Miami. It was fun to dog him about football this semester
I'm holding on to this picture for a while. The two girls are in my property class (the blonde sat next to me in the class and we saved each other from the fear that is my, um, energetic property professor). The guy in the middle is in my section.

As you can tell we had a great time. We celebrated last night too. We started out with a little Hanukkah party complete with a exciting flip cup tournament and then we went to a Rugby party. Good times, good times.

Thats all for now. His and I will be doing absolutely nothing today and I'm pretty sure it will be everything we thought it could be.

From 60 To Zero

Have you ever had one of those days when you look outside and just know you shouldn't get out of bed? That was Thursday morning. Just one Civ Pro final standing between us and a month of nothing and we couldn't see lights across the street through the fog. As we made our way from the parking lot, a murder of crows perched on top of a barren tree emerged. If we didn't have a final to take, I would've turned around and headed back to bed.

My professor gave our class an extra thirty minutes to complete the final giving us four and a half hours in all. Hers had just three and a half hours to complete her final (she's gotten the short end of the stick all year long, so why change that now). I needed every minute of the four and half hours to finish the test. I was a little dizzy after sitting for 270 straight minutes. Everyone in Hers class struggled to finish in time. Not one person left early.

When hers and I finished and we stumbled out the doors of the law school into the warm sunshine, we began to realize that we had absolutely nothing to do. There were no more finals to study for. No more papers to write. No more assignments to read. We have a month to do nothing but sit and relax. It's kind of a weird feeling, but it'll probably be the last time I have a free month until I retire, so I'm plan to make the most of it. I'm going to do nothing and I suspect it'll be everything I thought it would be.

Torts... brutally short.

I had a teacher in high school who once said “each word is a pearl.” Today during my torts final that phrase became “each word is like a flawless four carat Painite”, priceless. In response to my tort prof’s hatred for excess verbiage she imposed some seriously draconian space restrictions. We had two short answers each of which had to be under 500 characters, not words, but characters. To put that into perspective my post up until this point has 454 characters. As you can tell I’m perfectly capable of rambling on for 500 characters without saying anything.

I had to fully analyze a vicarious liability problem in less then what I’ve written here. That’s not an easy task for me. Especially when you consider the “gift for gab” I’ve inherited from the matriarchs of my family. But I did it. And because I got through my multiple choice and short answer rather quickly I was able to devote a full hour to doing nothing but editing my long essay down to 5700 characters. There wasn’t a drop of passive voice (or an adjective for that matter) left in that darn essay. But I do have to say that Torts is the most entertaining exam to take. Where else to you get to combine someone falling in a moat, being struck with golf clubs, having medical equipment left in you and committing suicide by drinking too much water?

3 finals down, 1 to go and a keg of beer waiting at the end of that rainbow.

Misery Sells

We couldn't help notice a spike in traffic corresponding to the start of finals. As Hers says, this is reason reality television is so popular. We just wanted to say we're glad our misery is keeping everyone entertained and that you only have another week to enjoy that and than it's winter break :)

Hope everyone else is enjoying their holidays :)

Property, at least its all relative!

We took our property final today. In case you’re wondering how it went we went to the bar right after the final. And after the pitcher of beer it’s not exactly like we’re feeling better about the exam, it’s just that we don’t care as much any more.

My professor model his exam after the BAR exam. We had one section that was multiple choice, one essay section and one “performance” section. The multiple choice was 33 questions and we had 1.8 minutes to do each question. The multiple choice questions themselves weren’t hard, but the answers presented were enough to drive me to drinking. The questions went something like this:

O conveyed Blackacre to B so long as used for a some really inane and if not to Susie so long as Susie never smokes crack if she does to Ted. Allen adversely posses the upper left quadrant of Blackacre while B then sells the lower right section to LaShawnda. Allen then sells the upper third of his section to Billy. What is the status of Susie’s claim:

[6 answers that could all be right or could all be wrong]

Choose One:

A: 1,3,4,5 but not 2 and sometimes 6

B: 6 in New Jersey; 4 & 5 in a community property state but not 2 in England in 1600

C: 1 & 4 if under the policy argument of Sawada, 2 in state that employs the destruction of contingent remainders rule but not 6 if the state is community property

D: All of the above

E: None of the above

After 33 of these mind numbing questions it was on to my “performance” exam. We were given a case that we had never read before and we had to analyze and discuss it. It wasn’t too horrible, and the Essay was to discuss everything we thought was wrong with American property law. (It was hard not to mention any of the prof’s questions in this category).His’ final was tough too. The multiple choice weren’t as bad but his essays were tough.

The moral of all of this story to all of you who own real property and substantial chattels: Please, Please, Please make sure that you have a will! And make sure that your will is correct, lest you run the risk of being studied in a future law student’s book on property. That is all!

C is for Confidence

Well, we’re officially in the middle of all the insanity. We’re learning that there are certain people this time of year that you can’t talk to for more than five minutes without starting to go a little crazy yourself. Luckily for us, a friend invited us to study in a classroom she had reserved along with a few others (thanks L). That turned out to be the best thing we could’ve done. We were able to hide away from the craziness, kick ideas around, and ask questions about the statute of frauds without getting into a heated three hour debate.

We finished up studying last and got to bed by 10:00. I woke up this morning feeling confident of two things: I had a good grasp on Contracts, and that knowledge would earn me a C. My professor pretty much told us in the review session that everyone was going to get a C. The problem is that he doesn’t really like to give Ds or Fs. Well, because of the curve, every grade above a C has to be balanced by a grade lower than a C. Last year, I believe there were three As in a class of around 60-70 students. Well, at least I shouldn’t have to worry about failing.

My final was entirely essay and consisted of two questions that were a little over a page each and one question that was about a paragraph long. I felt like I did a pretty good job on the final, which probably just means that I missed a lot of issues raised in those questions. In other words, I left confident of two things: I had a good grasp of contracts and that knowledge is going to earn me a C. Isn’t law school fun?

So, we have one final down, four to go. Next up is Property on Friday but for right now, it’s time to kick back and watch The People’s Court before focusing on Property.

Those who can study, those who can't Blog.

Our first exam is less than 36 hours away. Yikes. You may be asking me why I’m posting instead of studying. Well, I’m just tired of studying. There’s only so many ways one can study an outline. Next I’m going to try reading it on one leg and barking like a dog, no a really big dog. That might help.

Our last day of class was today. I had two classes and his had 1. My two classes were property and contracts. Let me tell you how useful those two hours of my life were.

Our property professor spent 15 minutes out of our only 50 minutes of review telling us how to eat a proper breakfast and get plenty of sleep. Got that, thanks, move on. Well he did. He tried so hard to pump us up but he fell a little short. In general it’s a good thing to tell people that they could do really well on your test and a bad thing to tell them that you’ve had a reputation at all your schools of being a very demanding grader. Don’t further patronize us by telling us that the test could even be “enjoyable”. I’m sure that’s what they told surgical patients right before they took a shot of whiskey and bit down.

And on to Contracts. Today was performance art day. Our professor gave extra credit out to people who reenacted a case. The reenactments were great and you could tell they had put a lot of time into it. These worried me greatly. How do these people have free time to plan out a skit or write a poem. What do they know that I don’t know. Should I be writing my contract outline in poetry. This is just a little of the self-destructive logic that goes through a law students mind right before finals.

Because everything is graded on a curve you get a little paranoid about who might know more than you and how much everybody else is studying and how they’re studying. You can see the tension and the stress on everyone’s face when you pass them in the halls. Students line up in an eager anticipation, that is only duplicated by black Friday, in hopes of landing one of the few study rooms in the library. Otherwise you’re stuck out in the open looking at the despair and stress on everybody else’s face.

This post isn’t to worry any of you that His and I are about to crack. We do our work, get to bed at a reasonable hour and eat a good breakfast. I should be half way to acing my property final. Rather this post is just a thinly veiled attempt to get all of you to wish us good luck in our Comments.

I'll see your voidable title and raise you a knock out rule.

I just don’t know if I can take much more of this. His and I are spending upwards of 16 hours a day studying. We wake up and study. We eat and study. Even when we take shower we’re studying. And the little time we have that we’re not actively studying, we are talking about what we are studying. Our conversation consist of us grilling each other on questions in some sort of sick 1L-upmanship. A typical conversation will go something like this:

Hers: Some inane hypo about adverse possession

His: Some even more obscure reference to the tolling of the statute of limitations.

Hers: Pulling out the trump card relates it all back to UCC 2-403 and a bona fide purchaser for value.

His: licks his wounds and comes back with an even more inane hypo about unjust enrichment.

Hers: throws in a comment or two about there being three kinds of reasonable standards

His: counters with an in-depth analysis of UCC 2-207 subsection 3.

And this is the ritual we go through until we decide to toll the competition and return to our outlines, books, and notes in hopes of coming up with an even more obscure and challenging hypo. This really is as fun as it sounds; don’t all line up at once to hang out with us!

Random Thoughts

I don't know which came first, the law school or the medical school, but putting one right across the street from the other was not a great idea. If the construction doesn't distract you, the ambulance sirens will. And then they wonder why we can't wait to sue them when we graduate (the medical school refers to the law school as the "baby shark tank").

With our first final just five days away, maybe it's not the best time for social hour in the library. And if you insist on making the rounds and visiting with every table, is it asking too much that you whisper?

With winter approaching I have to ask: What the hell New York? Is it really necessary to rig every gas pump in the state so that you have to stand there and squeeze the trigger while pumping gas? I can't stand in the cold wind pumping gas when I know there's a better way. I blame Hillary.