otium cum dignitate

An Oasis

The two week hell of law school exams is underway.  Luckily, this saturday will provide a much-needed distraction from the casebooks.  The NFL draft is the one special day during the off-season that reminds football fanatics how sweet life will becomes during the fall when the season begins.

"The season ends in late January and starts in July, and between, there is a time lapse I call the "desert,' " said Henry Browning, 38, a pharmaceutical research scientist who uses the draft as a pretext to leave his wife behind in Kalamazoo, Mich., and travel — to San Francisco this year — with four old graduate school buddies and hold a two-day draft party. "I consider the draft the oasis."

I like that.  Well said.  Three more exams till freedom...

Three Weeks

One week down, two to go until I'm done with this horrible 1L exam process forever.  Sadly, I won't be able to pay much attention to Otium  or anything else during the next few weeks of law school hell. Two weeks...so close, and yet so far away.

The good news is that I'll be wrapping up my first year in law school with a raucous party directly after our last exam on Thursday May 4.  Preliminary plans are for a keg and much grilling.  Should be awesome.  Please, feel free to come.  You deserve the reward for your avid loyalty to this blog.

Law school exams are unlike any other type of exam you'll take in school.  The worst thing about them is that they're both cumulative and 100% of your grade in each class.  Tough combination.  I'm looking forward to re-entering the real world this summer.  The time off from law school is much needed.

To those of you who are fellow 1L's, I feel your pain.  Don't miss the keg on May 4.  You'll need it.

Boo-birds

Today, I went to the Nationals home opener at RFK stadium and witnessed the overwhelming booing that rained down on Dick Cheney as he threw out the first pitch.  It was almost hard to bear.

I'm not a hardcore Republican, but I felt that the fans were really out of line.  I mean, why do DC people feel as if everything involves a political statement?  We are there watching baseball, and it is kind of neat to see one of our top elected officials paying homage to the game as well.  The least you can do is sit there and keep your mouth shut if you don't approve.  The boos were really too much.

On a side note, the Nationals sucked it up today on the field, and I do not have any problem with fans booing them (or at least their GM Bowden) for the pathetic showing on the field.

"New York third baseman David Wright said he was thrilled to meet Cheney and shrugged off the booing.

'When you’ve got 50 percent of America that’s Republican, 50 percent that’s Democrat, you’re probably going to get mixed reviews,' Wright said."

Haha.  Well said, David Wright.  But I still like to keep my politics and baseball separated.

Aborting Roe

Time to ratchet up the dialogue of otium.  What better way to do it than to bring up the one topic that will surely make my search engine hits explode over the next few days?  Let's get the Google algorithm humming.  Abortion.  Roe v. Wade.  Pro-Life.  Pro-Choice.  Fetus.

Now, for some context.  Yesterday, I read the NYT's magazine feature on how a strict abortion prohibition has affected El Salvador.  It was gripping and grotesque.  If nothing else, read it to understand the sheer desperation that some women will descend into to abort a baby.  We're talking about clothes hangers, commercial plumbing pipe, perforated uteruses, fertilizer, and blood.  Lots of blood. 

The El Salvadoran prohibition can lead to inhumane and tortuous conclusions in other ways as well.  When ectopic pregnancies occur (fertilized egg gets stuck in the Fallopian Tube), the law will not allow an abortion.  Instead, doctors literally have to wait until the women's organs start exploding before they can operate.

I probably have your attention now. 

Today, I went to a program at the law school at which four law professors discussed what Roe v. Wade should have said.  Most legal scholars agree that Roe is a pathetically weak opinion, in terms of legal justifications.  It was poorly written and had absolutely no basis in precedent, the Constitution, or society's feelings on the issue at the time. 

Of the four professors, the lone conservative made a somewhat cogent argument about how Roe has had the unintended affect of putting more of a burden on women while simultaneously excusing men from any responsibility whatsoever.  I can sort of buy this.  With abortion prevalent, men have less of a reason to think twice about their actions.  Likewise, once pregnancy has occurred, the pro-choice movement has accomplished its goal of choice, but the choice is put solely and exclusively on the women.  Perhaps, if abortion were more restricted, society would have to address the issue of how to force men (and employers) to help women out with new babies.  Perhaps.

Another professor, Jeffrey Rosen (my future Con Law II professor next fall), argued a more interesting point.  Rather than going into politics and ideology (he is pro-choice), Rosen focuses solely on the legal merit of Roe.  He bashed it through and through.  Rosen argued that Americans have felt basically the same about abortion over the past 30 years.  Polls consistently show that 75% of Americans believe in pro-choice in the first trimester, but only 25% believe in unrestricted abortion rights after that point in a pregnancy.  Unfortunately, Roe has so energized this debate that it has become a partisan core issue for both political parties.  The extreme views are all we ever hear about anymore.  Politicians in recent years have become beholden to their base on the abortion topic.

Rosen argues that the Courts should probably have stayed out of the debate and instead let the democratic process address things.  In general, I agree.  It's usually better when politics focuses on the actual issue itself, and not some Court's decision 30 years ago.

More Comcast Hate

As mentioned in a previous post, Comcast is refusing to show Nationals games in the Washington market because of a childish dispute with a local sports network.  As with other baseball issues, Congress wasted no time getting involved.  The fact that this situation concerns the local team makes it even better. 

Congress is basically forcing Comcast and MASN, the regional sports network that has the rights to the Nationals games, to make a deal.  Supposedly, they have three weeks to get things straightened out.

This is just another symptom of the absurd monopoly that Comcast has over the DC market.  Especially in the district, Cable prices are ridiculously high (my combined cable and internet bill is $110/month, as opposed to my utilities bill which comes out to about $60/month). 

The other night, Comcast blacked out a game that was being covered on ESPN but then didn't show the game on the local MASN network either.  Some people may think that Congress has better things to do than meddle in sports disputes, but this strikes at the heart of Comcast's monopolistic practices.  I applaud the Congressional Committee for taking action.

Wal-Mart in the Urbs?

An article in Business Week explains that Wal-Mart has a new business plan.  The surprise is that it doesn't involve fields of asphalt amid suburban sprawl.  Wal-Mart now hopes to begin opening stores in poor urban neighborhoods in the near future.

Wal-Mart often gets a bad rap, and deservedly so.  The mega-chain does much to feed off and fuel suburban sprawl and unorganized growth throughout America.  Moreover, it indiscriminately destroys small businesses with its massive economy of scale.  And who can forget the barrage of horror stories describing hour-shaving managers and the company's horribly deficient health care plans?

But there is one thing Wal-Mart does well.  It offers low-income consumers a chance to buy more.  It increases their purchasing power, and subsequently boosts the U.S. economy.  Unfortunately, the suburban model requires shoppers to arrive via a car, a mode of transportation that isn't getting any cheaper.  If Wal-Mart really does dedicate itself to serving poor urban neighborhoods (and the company says it's going to open 50 new stores in such areas over the next two years), this would do a lot for helping poor people survive on their paltry incomes.

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out.  The Wal-Mart image is so ingrained in my head, I cannot even imagine how the store would look in an urban context. 

Wigging Out

As 1L approaches its end, I've spent the last few weeks remembering the good things about life again.  Like baseball on a warm summer day, or coffee and a newspaper in the morning.  But just today, I realized yet another thing to be thankful for.  Unlike young lawyers in England, I won't ever be  donning a wig in the courtroom.  Sounds random, but the Washington Post ran an article on this very topic today in the so-called "World News" section.

It seems there is something of a revolution going on right now in British legal circles to do away with the anachronistic hair pieces.  Usually made of horse hair and costing up to $4,000, I can't blame such "modernists" for their aversion to the legal wig.  Traditionalists argue that the wig helps to "equalize" the courtroom by minimizing the conspicuous advantage an experienced lawyer may have over a nubile first-year associate.  Yea right.

Of course, there are practical objections to wigs as well.  In an interesting juxtaposition of 17th and 21st century courtroom custom, British judges  sitting in international courts such as The Hague find it especially troublesome when they need to wear translation headphones over their curls.  On a simpler note, they tend to itch a lot too.

And that's your world news tonight. 

Sports and Predictability

The Los Alamos National Laboratory just released a statistical study on the differences in predictability in five major sports leagues:  The English Football Association, the MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL. 

The results?  The English Soccer League produces the most underdog victories (45% of matches result in upset victories) while the NFL turned out to be the most predictable with only 36.4% of games resulting in underdog victories.  Between these two poles:  MLB (44%), NHL (41%), and the NBA (36.5%).

While this would tend to alarm an ardent football fan who probably lives by the "Any Given Sunday" mantra during the fall, the results shouldn't be that surprising.  In sports with less scoring (soccer and baseball), predictions are harder to make since scoring is sometimes flukey and can result from unusual mistakes or circumstances.  In basketball and football, on the other hand, teams have more opportunities to score points, and so individual games trend closer to the overall mean. 

Moreover, scoring in baseball and soccer is often attributed to a single player, whether that be a pitcher in baseball or a goalie in soccer.  In the NFL, a touchdown or field goal is usually produced when a team simultaneously executes a number of strategies and decisions by every player from the offensive lineman to the quarterback. 

Although it's sometimes more fun to watch less predictable sporting events (e.g. March Madness), I find predictability in the NFL to lend a measure of order and legitimacy to the sport's best teams and coaches.  It reinforces my belief that expert coaching really does make a difference, and that's why I love the sport so much.