Papers and rain

This city is great for fun, uniqueness, and high murder rates. It's also great for slip-n-slide. It never stops raining. Either God likes to pee a lot on this town (maybe to keep the thugs inside for a few hours?) or the wild-fire fighting aircraft are often misdirected from California. I haven't figured out which it is, but it's certainly annoying as hell. Enough of that, this blog is supposed to be about the law school experience, not my lame day-to-day observations.

So, I have this big paper due tomorrow that's worth about 1/3 of my semester grade in Legal Research & Writing. This class is just a major pain in the ass. There is no final exam in this class. Instead, there's a crap load of research and writing exercises that have to be completed. This assignment is basically an inter-office memorandum about whether or not our fictitious client will be successful in a defamation claim against one of her peers. With that being said, I must state that the background of our client's story is quite amusing.

Basically we have this law student that is ranked in the top of her class and has had several prestigious clerking positions in the past. However, she is unable to land a job coming out of law school, because one of her classmates has acquired some intimate photos of her and has posted them on a public website along with some rather negative remarks. She claims that potential employers have googled her name and found these photos and comments. In my view, the simplest thing to do would be to advise our client that she ought to quit acting like a slut, but unfortunately I don't think I'd receive a good grade if I did this. The paper isn't all that difficult to write, it's just a pain making sure all of the citations are correct. We have this 100 and some odd paged book that gives rules about how to cite cases and statutes. Apparently, the profession is pretty strict when it comes to correctly citing authority. Simple things such as the correct spacing between abbreviations could knock us down a half-letter grade if we're not careful. I completed my paper Saturday, but every time I review it I find some other stupid citation error that needs fixing. I think I've caught everything now, but I still need to reread it 27 more times to be sure.