My grades are in.

I passed. :)

No more caveats. I’m going to graduate from law school on Sunday. Woohoo!

As part of 3L Week, we’re going bowling tonight from 9 to 11 at Chippewa Bowl, an unofficial last meeting of the Law School Bowling league. This means I have one last chance to get my elusive turkey in law school.

I never got around to posting, as promised, the video of my dramatic non-turkey on the last official night of Law School Bowling… so here it is, finally. First, you see me getting my second consecutive strike. The entire team cheers wildly because I’d made it known to everyone that getting my first-ever turkey was my main goal for the night, and this was the first time I’d gotten two in a row all evening. But then, in the next portion of the clip, you see me completely choke and aim the ball in totally the wrong direction, not even coming close to a third consecutive strike. At least I close the frame, though, getting a spare (in the third and final portion of the clip.)

Notice my extremely poor bowling form, and my extremely un-masculine celebratory style. :)

…the Backer!

That’s me with two fellow Irish Trojans, Katherine and Steve. If you’re wondering what Katherine is doing with her hand, she’s trying to push Mike Tran’s middle finger out of the way of the camera. Mike, of course, was offended by our victory signs. (The concept of “victory” tends to confuse Bruins, you see.) Heh.

Katherine is a rising 2L; Steve, like me, is done with law school. All of us, though, were feeling in a very celebratory mood last night. :) As were these fellow soon-to-be-alums at the 10 9 Days Party:

As I recall, they asked me to take this picture by yelling, “Brendan, put us on the blog!” Well, I’m nothing if not accommodating. :) By the way, the party had a ’70s theme, which explains Patrick’s outfit. And yes, the chest hair is fake.

The weirdest thing that happened last night is that I met a friend from Newington High School at the Backer! Shortly after arriving, I ran into Ben, who graduated from NHS in 2000 and now works for the Big East Conference. He was in town for some Big East event (I forget the details), and I guess he decided to go out with some friends afterwards. We were both utterly stunned to randomly run into each other at a bar in South Bend. :)

Anyway, good times… and more lie ahead. 3L Week starts tomorrow!

P.S. Brooke is also celebrating the end of law school. And 1LG is celebrating becoming 2LG.

P.P.S. This is funny.

source file

P.S. As you might guess, I made this post, and the one below, some time ago. I had them set to post automatically at noon, but I finished a little early, so I moved up the timestamp (and reset the countdown clock above).

P.P.S. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

P.P.P.S. Evidence grades are out. They’re on InsideND. I got a B! w00t! I’m very happy about that, considering.

Pardon my French, but:

Holy shit! I’m DONE with law school!! DONE!!!

Cue Alice Cooper…

Or, if you prefer, cue Alice Cooper and the Muppets:

Never have that song’s words rung more true… well, except the part about the school blowing up. :) But yeah: “SCHOOL’S OUT! FOR! EVER!”

(I know what some of you are thinking: “But the bar exam… but bar review courses… but but but…” Blah blah blah, whatever. There’s a whole hell of a lot of partying to be done between now and when I start thinking about that crap. Right now, all I care about is… FREEDOM!!!!!!)

Good luck on your Friday and Saturday exams, everybody. It’s almost over!

I’m signing off the blog for the night. I might publish a cell-phone post in the morning, but otherwise, the next time you hear from me, I’ll be done with law school. :)

As it turns out, Becky can’t make it to Cedar Point on Monday, so we’ve got an extra ticket for the 3L Week trip there. If anyone is interested in it, shoot me an e-mail at bloy [at] nd.edu.

[Originally posted at 1:30 PM; bumped to top. -ed.]

Just finished my Morality & the Law exam. Will head to the law school shortly to turn it in. (It’s not actually due till 5:00 PM tomorrow, but I’ll be damned if I was going to not be done at noon tomorrow, when ConLaw II is over. So I finished it more than 28 hours before it was due, which I think is some sort of personal record for me.)

So, we’re at 3 exams (+2 papers) down, 1 to go… or, 13 credits down, 3 to go… or 87 down, 3 to go, if you count all six semesters… but no matter how you look at it, I’m just 22 1/2 hours away from being done with law school. WHEE!!!

Now, I’d better start studying for ConLaw, to make sure I actually have some clue what the hell I’m doing when I take my last exam from 9-12 tomorrow. :)

(Incidentally, the title of this post is a reference to a conversation between me and Dmytro on the first day of law school, right after our first class, Professor Tidmarsh’s CivPro, was dismissed. I look at him and said, “Well, one down.” He replied, “Three years to go.”)

My statement that I hate the Federal Rules of Evidence may be hearsay, but the way I’m feeling about this exam right now, I think it might qualify as a dying declaration. :) Anyway, here’s a countdown to zero hour (a.k.a. 9:00 AM in Room 120):

Okay, procrastination break over, back to my flash cards. And then possibly a good night’s sleep brief nap.

UPDATE, 11:30 AM: Well… that wasn’t fun.

I think I was the first person in the class to finish — which may not actually be a good sign. :|

Still, it’s done, and that’s what matters. As long as I passed…

2 exams (and 2 papers) down, 2 to go.

Credit-wise*: 10 down, 6 to go. Or, counting the previous five semesters as well, 84 down, 6 to go.

Hours till freedom: 72 1/2.

Point at which I totally stop caring about my remaining exams: any minute now, but I’m trying to hold it off as long as I can. :)

*Again, assuming I passed everything! Knock on wood! :)

The AP has the guest list for tonight’s White House state dinner in honor of Queen Elizabeth II. In case anyone was wondering, Professor Kelley is not on it. :)

UPDATE: On a more serious Kelley-related note:

Back on March 5, several top Justice Department officials were summoned for an emergency meeting at the White House. On the agenda: Going over “what we are going to say” about why eight U.S. attorneys had been summarily fired.

The reason for the urgency: principal associate deputy attorney general William Moschella was testifying before the House Judiciary Committee the next day.

Deputy White House counsel William Kelley sent an e-mail over to Justice early in the afternoon, saying that he had “been tasked” with pulling the meeting together, and that “we have to get this group together with some folks here asap.”

The meeting was held at the White House later that day. And who did Kelley mean by “some folks here”? Well, among others, Karl Rove — the White House’s chief political operative, and the man who may very well have set the unprecedented dismissals in motion in the first place.

But after the coaching session, Moschella went out and told Congress that there was no significant White House involvement in the firings, as far as he knew.

Michael Isikoff writes in Newsweek: “Now some investigators are saying that Rove’s attendance at the meeting shows that the president’s chief political advisor may have been involved in an attempt to mislead Congress…”

Dear Federal Rules of Evidence,

I hate you. Please go away.

Sincerely,
Brendan Loy

Or, if you count the papers, 3 down, 3 to go. By credits, it’s 6 down, 10 to go. (Er, assuming I passed!) Counting my entire law-school career, that’d be 80 down, 10 to go.

On the agenda tonight: the Kentucky Derby and, maybe, Spider-Man 3. Studying/panicking over Evidence will commence tomorrow.

In just over 139 hours (i.e., at noon on Friday), I’ll be done with law school. For. Ev. Er.

(Which means that one week — or 168 hours — from now, I’ll probably be just waking up, perhaps slightly hungover, after a very, very joyful night of partying.)

And down the stretch they come…

I’ve made clear before that I absolutely despise the law-school message board Xoxohth (a.k.a. AutoAdmit). As I wrote then, “the cretins who inhabit that message board are a bunch of dishonest, pretentious, snobby, racist a**holes who delight in anonymous character assassination and tearing down their fellow human beings.” I stand by those words. But even so, to be perfectly honest, I take no joy in this:

[Law firm] Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge rescinded its job offer to Anthony Ciolli, the 3L at Penn Law who resigned as “Chief Education Director” of AutoAdmit last month. He resigned in the wake of a WaPo exposé on how the site in part served as a platform for attacks and defamatory remarks about female law students, among others. …

Charles DeWitt (pictured, left), managing partner at Edwards Angell’s Boston office, where Ciolli was slated to be a litigation associate, told the Law Blog: “He worked for us last summer. He’s not going to work for us in the fall.”

Ciolli took time from working on final exams to talk to the Law Blog. “Three years of legal education has been wasted because of an unmoderated message board,” he said, adding, “The timing is absolutely horrible.” The 23-year-old…added that “I don’t know what I’m going to do next.”

To be honest, I feel bad for the kid. As much as I hate the product he helped create, I wouldn’t wish his fate on any fellow law student. That doesn’t necessarily mean I think he doesn’t deserve what happened to him; there is some factual dispute over how much control he had over the content of the message board, but certainly, through his role in creating a disgusting site widely known for character assassination, he set himself up for this fall. As a commenter on Above the Law put it:

Dude had it coming. He decided to get involved with a free speech experiment in which he helped run an unmoderated message board. People posted insidious lies in the forum he hosted, and those lies have caused harm to the career prospects of innocent people. Now his career has been affected, too, because of what he allowed to happen to the careers of others. In what world is this not justice?

True… and yet, and yet. However much of a scumbag he might be, I can’t bring myself to be happy about what’s happened to him. It sucks, it just really sucks, to be 23 years old and have your career s***canned because you made a mistake, even a big one. I honestly feel for him. And this is precisely why I find the behavior of the a**holes on AutoAdmit (and, cough cough, ND Nation at times, among other places on the wild, wild ‘Net) so baffling: they don’t think twice about tearing down their fellow human beings over nothing, and they frequently take immense joy in their peers’ failures and foibles… while I, on the other hand, don’t even feel the slightest twinge of schadenfreude over something like this (even where the punishment arguably fits the crime quite nicely). And I don’t consider myself an unusually noble or magnanimous person. I’d like to think I’m pretty normal in terms of my tendency not to celebrate other people’s misfortunes. But maybe I’m wrong about that? I dunno. Perhaps I’m naive, but I think most people are good at heart, and at worst are thoughtless rather than spiteful. Once faced with the humanity of another person, I think most people feel empathy. The problem with the Internet, sometimes, is that you don’t have to face the other person’s humanity, you can just treat them like a series of pixels or a string of binary code. That leads to dehumanization and a lack of empathy. And I think we need to strive to fight that.

In this particular case, given all the circumstances, I don’t blame others if they do feel a bit of joy over Mr. Ciolli’s pain. I can understand the viewpoint of the commenter who wrote, “I hope this is only the first for the assholes at AutoAdmit.com. They are truly the worst this world has to offer, and I hope all of them are ruined.” I agree that they are, if their online behavior is any indication of their true character, “truly the worst this world has to offer,” but as for hoping that they’re “ruined”? No, I don’t hope that. I hope they see the error of their ways and reform themselves. I hope they make amends with the people they’ve hurt. But I don’t hope they’re “ruined,” and I’m not glad Ciolli is jobless. It was probably the right decision, and he probably deserves it, but I’m not glad about it. All I can think about his situation is, “man, that sucks for him.” Again, I don’t mean to make myself sound noble or anything, that’s just honestly how I feel. And that’s why it truly confuses me that some other people, especially when surrounded by the cloak of Internet anonymity, can become so strikingly mean and nasty and hurtful, for no reason. Do they not understand these are real people they’re hurting, just as I understand that Anthony Ciolli, whatever his flaws, is a real person? I don’t get it. I really don’t.

It’s gone. It’s done.

I just turned in my Electoral College Paper, much-hyped and oft-quoted here on the blog, to Professor Mayer. It came to 78 pages, 21,563 words — 26,533 including footnotes. (All this for 2 credits!) The title:

COUNT EVERY VOTE—ALL 538 OF THEM
A Pragmatic Defense of the Electoral College

Several people have asked already if they’ll be able to read my paper once it’s finished. Well, first of all, although it’s “done” for law-school purposes, it still needs a bit more work before I would consider publishing it. (It’s amazing how naggingly incomplete a 78-page paper can feel when you’re this immersed in the material.) And I do intend to try and get it published — er, that is to say, published somewhere more prestigious than BrendanLoy.com, heh. But I’m not sure what publication(s) I’ll be targeting, and thus I’m (obviously) not sure what their policies are on uploading papers to SSRN during the submission/pre-publication phase. (Once it’s on SSRN, I’d be able to link to it from the blog.) From what I hear, a lot of places are fine with “pre-publishing” on SSRN, but some might not be, and I don’t want to risk having my paper rejected on that basis. So, in other words, I’m not sure. But one way or another, you’ll get to read it eventually (either on SSRN soon, or in a prestigious publication of some kind a little later, or on SSRN much later, once I’ve gotten rejected by enough prestigious publications that I give up and just upload the damn thing :). Stay tuned, as they say.

And now, having spent practically the entire semester earning 2 credits (well, 3, including my other directed-reading paper), I get to learn everything from all the rest of my courses — 13 credits’ worth — in the next 10 days. Woohoo! :)

But first, I’m going home and setting up my newly arrived, still-boxed TiVo (my graduation present to myself). Constitutional Criminal Procedure (the subject of my first in-class exam, on Saturday) can wait; there’s a Sabres game to watch. And rewind. And watch. And pause. And watch. LET’S GO, TI-VO BUFF-A-LO!

P.S. About the paper… once I make the changes I have in mind, but before submitting it for publication, I might need a few “beta-testers,” so to speak, to read the paper over and make suggestions/comments/criticisms/corrections. So if you’d be interested in doing that, e-mail me at bloy[at]nd.edu. (I’ll probably only pick a handful of people, though, so no promises.)

…from the recent (relative) dropoff in my blogging frequency (and, perhaps more noticably, the odd hours* at which I’ve been blogging), we’re getting into the heart of “crunch time” here. Today is the last day of classes (though I’ve been done since Thursday), tomorrow and Thursday are “stop days,” and exams start Friday (my first is Saturday, not counting the take-home final that’s sitting in my bag right now; I also have in-class finals next Tuesday and Friday). For those keeping score at home, I’m in the bargaining phase right now; I expect the depression phase to set in tomorrow or Thursday, followed by the acceptance phase sometime on Friday. :) But at the moment, I’m not even really thinking about exams, as one of my directed-reading papers was due yesterday, and the other (the Electoral College one) is due today at 5:00 PM — that’s less than 12 hours away, and I still have lots of changes to make, and citations to fix… eek! Anyway, the point is, I’m a wee bit busy, and blogging will be light-to-nonexistent today until the Sabres game this evening. In the mean time, talk amongst yourselves. I’ll give you a topic: the interstate-compact-based “National Popular Vote” plan is neither “national” nor a “popular vote.” Discuss. :)

*I was awake for approximately 33 consecutive hours Sunday and yesterday, then went to sleep around 4:00 PM yesterday, woke up at 1:30 this morning, and am now at the law library — I got here at around 4:55 AM — surrounded by my research materials (and a big mug of coffee).