Hello visitors

As seen on Law dot com? Great. Now I feel pressure to actually write good stuff. Move along, nothing to see here.

The update: in retrospect I was far too charitable to Legislation last time. Although Legal Writing (also known as Lawyering at other schools) is extremely boring, tedious, and nightmarish in the additional work it forces us to do, at least it has an obvious necessary purpose that should excuse it from the bottom of the list. No, Legislation is the worst class in law school thus far, and I can think of a few reasons this is true.

First, the textbook was written by Frickey and Eskridge, and these are two men who are not bashful about self promotion. Every other footnote in the book is "See article X by Frickey" or "an excellent synopsis of this issue was done by Eskridge in some law review." Coupled with the fact that Frickey himself was a professor at the U of M for awhile, it all leads me to a sick feeling of nepotistic self promotion that isn't terribly conducive to learning the subject through a balanced approach.

Second, the professor is in his second year teaching and I get the idea this is the lousiest class to teach of them all. I bet the other professors gets made fun of in the professor's lounge every day. "Hey, (professor)! How's that Ph.D. in economics helping you with that Legislation class?" He certainly doesn't give the air of excitement to his treatment of the materials. This isn't to denigrate his intellect; on the contrary, I have the perception that he's absolutely brilliant.

Third, when viewed against the other classes, Legislation seems positively dull.

Lastly, Legislation the class sucks because the element of predictiveness is just not there with legislation. We've spent a bunch of time on what I term "canon fodder," the analysis of statutes through various maxims that should guide interpretation. The only problem is that these canons are inconsistent in coverage and application. Where other areas of the law give me the impression that there is an element of predictibility and limitation of scope, legislative law tends to lead me to the opposite conclusion.

(note for Mom and other non-law school types; "Law" does not mean "a law." Law is typically broken into four sources; Constitution plus treaties, common law, legislation, and administrative regulations)

shhh...

Don't tell my coworkers, but I'm quitting my job as of the 30th of November. It will mean I can study like mad for finals, which begin the second week in December and go for two weeks. In other personal news, the birthday of Hobbsblog is this Saturday. I will be posting links to my favorite columns from the year. As I was poking around my archives, I noticed that I've never bothered to republish my archives, which means each month is in the template style of the page as it existed when I originally wrote it. I think that's cool.

Sunday is the one year anniversary of the death of Jerry Stiffler, my father in law. I was working on the blog when Mag and I got the phone call that changed our lives. I've been thinking of him more and more as we just celebrated our anniversary and now we're approaching that day again. This has been a hell of a year, hasn't it...?