Bad Glacier

One of the things I love about Unfogged is how the comments often end up being completely unrelated to the initial post. Like this one, for instance. The commenters start off ripping on a post about one person’s college reunion, Fontana Labs throws a dirty joke into the mix, and then suddenly the whole thing turns into a freestyle law firm rap battle (see everything after this comment):

I come upside yo’ head with a thump
And send you limpin’ back to Aikin Gump.

I make mike magic like that boy Aladdin
And I work you like an associate at Skadden

and

I put you punk-ass bitches in crisis–
I’m unprecedented; fuck stare decisis

Awesome.

Scientology. Ha!

The Legal Theory Lexicon is a site I’ve been browsing through for a while now. Every week, Lawrence Solum takes a term from legal theory (the site is associated with the Legal Theory Blog) and summarizes it at an easy-to-understand level. Interesting stuff, and I would recommend it to any other 0Ls out there if they’ve ever wondered about the rule of law, originalism, textualism, or any of the other 40-some entries.

From Saucy Intruders, I find out that it only takes $3 million to get Harvard Law School to name a classroom after your law firm. According to this list, that same $3 million could also get you a professorship, and it would take $5 million to get the Student Residence Center, whatever that is, so it sounds like Kirkland & Ellis got a pretty sweet deal here.

On the other hand, it only cost $2 million a year to name the Fleetcenter (link).

Really, though, I think Kirkland & Ellis could have done better. Name a classroom after your law firm and we’ll just associate your name with boredom, solitaire, and the Socratic Method. Instead, buy a bar, buy a pool table for the dorms, buy a vending machine and make it free. Associate your name with alcohol, caffeine, or something fun, and we’ll remember that.

Or, if you insist on sticking with something academic, buy a law review. The Kirkland & Ellis Journal of Complex Transactional, Litigation, Intellectual Property, and Restructuring Matters. Well, you can come up with a better name, I’m sure, but you get into law journals, work your way into a judicial opinion or two, and bam! You’re golden.

While everyone else is talking about the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo, I’m just gonna slip in with something else. In Halbert v. Michigan, another decision released yesterday, the Court decided, 6-3, that a person who pleaded guilty to a crime and is seeking leave to appeal must be appointed a lawyer if he cannot afford one. Halbert v. Michigan is a second-tier case. There weren’t many people holding their breath for this one. But dammit, I did a lot of reading on this issue last year, and I’m not about to let that go to waste!

In 1994, Michigan amended its Constitution to allow appeals, in cases where an accused criminal plead guilty in the first trial, only by leave of the court. These defendants would have to apply for leave to appeal to Michigan’s Court of Appeals. That doesn’t sound bad, right? But Michigan also has a law limiting the circumstances in which indigent (poor) plea-convicted defendants can be appointed counsel for their application for leave to appeal, and this is where the problems come in…

But don’t defendants have a right to appointed counsel for their first appeal? Well, yeah, sort of. Douglas v. California says that prisoners have a right to appointed counsel when they have a right to a first appeal. (Interestingly, it seems that Douglas v. California was also overshadowed when it came out, as it was decided the same day as Gideon v. Wainwright, the case that everyone (well, the subset of everyone who cares about this kind of thing) associates with appointed counsel.) The other major precedent here is Ross v. Moffitt, which established that counsel did not need to be appointed for second-tier, discretionary appeals, such as appeals to the highest state court or the Supreme Court itself.

The issue concerning the Court here is determining which precedent is most applicable to this situation. Halbert, a defendant denied the right of counsel, claims that Douglas requires that counsel be appointed to assist with the application for leave to appeal, while Michigan argues that this is a discretionary appeal, similar to the appeal to a state supreme court, where Ross held that appointed counsel is not required.

Why do I know any of this? I looked at Kowalski v. Tesmer, a case raising the same issue, for a political science class last year. At the time, the Court failed to reach the merits of the case because the attorneys bringing the case did not have standing to challenge the statute on behalf of the indigent defendants being denied counsel. Admittedly, though, the petitioners had a tough case to make. They had to show that there was a substantial hindrance to a prisoner’s ability to assert his own rights, when the respondents could simply point to Halbert, already scheduled for conference, and say, “Well, he did it.” So that case wasn’t really that tough. But back to yesterday’s decision in Halbert…

The majority opinion, written by Justice Ginsberg, held that this case was more similar to Douglas’s first-tier appeals of right and that failure to provide an attorney to those who cannot afford one violates the Constitution. The Court gave two major reasons for their decision: first, the Michigan court’s decision on the prisoner’s petition for leave to appeal is decided on the merits of the case. Michigan’s Court of Appeals functions as error-correction by evaluating each appeal on the substance of its claim, where the State Supreme Court in Ross took cases not to correct the mistakes of lower courts, but to decide issues of public interest or settle important legal points. Second, in most cases, this is the only review the prisoner would get, and without an appellate attorney, he is at an unconstitutional disadvantage. In Ross, the appellants already had the benefit of an attorney for their first-tier appeal, and so they could use the materials from this appeal to make their case to the high court. Here, defendants–often learning impaired or illiterate–do not have the use of a brief prepared for a court of appeals. They have to navigate the complicated appellate system working only from the trial transcript and materials prepared for their first trial.

Justice Thomas’s dissent, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia, argues that Michigan has set up a system of discretionary appeals, and so Ross should apply. He also argues that even if Halbert had a right to an appellate attorney, he waived that right when he entered his plea. Justice Ginsberg addresses this point at the end of her opinion, saying that Michigan law did not recognize that right, so Halbert could not waive it, and even if he could, he did not do so knowingly and intelligently.

And that’s pretty much it for Halbert v. Michigan. Wasn’t that fun? (Don’t answer that.)

Okay, so I’m back. The needles weren’t that bad, and I will soon have an immunization to meningitis, hepatitis B, and tetanus. Also, I can go to law school now. Awesome.

Now I’m off to go step on a rusty nail . . . just ’cause I can.

I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles. I hate needles.

That is all.

Okay, we all know I’m not going to finish the 50 Book Challenge. If I actually had the whole year, it wouldn’t be a problem, but I’m starting law school in two months. I won’t get much pleasure reading done after August, and trying to squeeze 25 books into two months wouldn’t be much fun. Also, I don’t much like writing about the books I read. I feel like I need to say something intelligent or interesting (you can look back over the archives if you want to see how often that happens) and then I start putting off writing the post, and then I get a backlog of 7-8 books built up.

So here’s the plan. I’ll keep pretending to be doing the 50 Book Challenge, but I’ll stop caring about what I say about the books. You will continue to give me recommendations and will refrain from mocking me when I fail to finish the challenge.

Thank you for your cooperation.

With that said…

Book 19: Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is one hell of a cynical, pessimistic, insightful, funny old fart, and he’s one of my favorite authors. Cat’s Cradle satirizes religion, science, government, and just about everything else. It’s a fun read, even though it’s not Vonnegut’s best.

Is it just me, or was American Dad better than Family Guy tonight? I know I started off disliking American Dad, but it’s turning around. It looks like Seth is starting to figure out what’s working and what’s not. The alien seems less annoying now, if nothing else. [1]

Or maybe Family Guy was just disappointing. The new episodes have all been at least decent, and there are a couple hilarious moments in each of them, but the spaces in between feel somewhat forced. I can’t really figure out what it is. The overly long pauses aren’t as well-timed now, or the flashbacks aren’t as funny. It seems like the transition into them isn’t as smooth as it was before. It seems like Peter always says, “…like that time I…” and explains the whole situation beforehand, whereas before they’d let the joke surprise you. Sort of. I don’t know.

The show is still good, and it gets me to laugh out loud several times each episode, but it’s not up to the standards of the third season. Maybe Seth is focusing too much on American Dad. Maybe they have new writers or something. Maybe you think my expectations are too high, or that I’m just imagining things, or that I should just stop obsessing over an animated TV show.

Well, maybe you should shut the hell up.

[1] I reserve the right to delete this post and/or pretend I never wrote it if the show starts sucking again.

I had a physical today–my first one in years. I had to see a new doctor. Apparently 22 is too old for a pediatrician. Who’da thunk it?

After the initial questioning, the doctor came in and complimented me on my “normal blood pressure and heart rate, straight back, clear nasal passages, stunning virility, and cute butt.” Hey, he’s the doctor. Who am I to argue? Then he brought the nurse in to check my blood sugar. It took them a few minutes hours, with the help of another three burly nurses, to restrain me, but eventually the tranquilizers took effect. They poked me with a huge needle (I swear it was a foot long), but I was strong. I only cried a little bit, and I played it off like my ‘Nam wound was acting up. They totally bought it.

So anyways, I’m healthy. And I get shots next Thursday. Hold me.

Good series of posts from Professor Bainbridge, Raffi Melkonian, and Will Baude about cheating in online poker using poker-playing computer programs, or bots. The article that started it all is here.

They’re all right, more or less. Using bots to win money from legit players is despicable behavior. Using “cheat sheets” or odds tables is somewhat similar, but these are not generally banned by the game rooms (I don’t think, at least). This type of thing was presumably the basis for the first generation of poker-playing algorithms, and, of course, given enough time, you can simulate a bot’s algorithm on paper and play that way. And there’s also the game-within-a-game aspect of it, where the bot-makers and game rooms are playing cat and mouse. This same thing happens in all online games (did anyone else play Diablo/Diablo II? Remember how ridiculous things got between the cheaters and the game developers there?).

The problem here is a failure to distinguish between two groups–I think of them as the bot-makers and the bot-users, but this isn’t a good distinction. The difference I’m trying to get at here is in the person’s intent.

My “bot-makers” are the engineers, the programmers, the ones who want to see if they can make a program that can beat people at poker and can look enough like a human player to evade detection by the poker rooms. They want to see what they can do inside this system. There’s an intellectual curiosity I ascribe to this sort of person. They are–more or less–the people Will Baude seems to be talking about when he describes the sport of rule-breaking.

My concept of “bot-users” is more along the lines of Professor Bainbridge’s targets. These are the people that buy or download the bot programs. They don’t make the bots. They don’t really care about how the bots work. Their aim is to make money off as many suckers as possible.

Of course, there’s all kinds of overlap here. From the article, it sounds like the bot-makers are in it–at least partially–for the money too, so the distinction isn’t really that useful. There’s a lot of the idealistic hacker ethic in here, and in Will’s post, though he doesn’t refer to it as such.

Ignoring the rules of the poker rooms for a minute, I feel that to the extent someone is a bot-user, their actions are morally worse than the actions of the bot-maker. For the one group, the goal is to cheat people out of money, whereas for the other group, it is an intellectual challenge. The harm to other players is an unfortunate side effect. The problem is that you can’t just write a poker-playing program and leave it at that. You have to test it under real conditions. You have to test it heavily against real human opponents playing for money. Poker rooms have to keep their reputation as a fair place to play, so they have to ban bots to keep their human players from leaving.

So of course, both the bot-makers and the bot-users are cheating the legitimate players. They’re breaking the rules of the poker room and possibly the law as well. still, it feels like there’s a moral difference between the two. It’s probably nothing the law would acknowledge, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. That would just mean the law isn’t perfect.

Update: Raffi got to it before I did, and says what I wanted to in 1/2 the words. Oh well.

Sometimes my imagination gets away from me…

Years ago, before we stopped planting things in the garden, my family used to have a compost pile, but no longer. Now we just throw our organic garbage into the field behind the house. I walk out there today with an old cantaloupe and a few chewed-up ears of corn, and I look out at the field and realize, “Hey, this is a corn field. And I’m throwing corn cobs into it. That’s kinda weird, in a Vlad the Impaler sort of way.”

Obviously, there must have been a Vegetable Resistance. The humans defeated the uprising, and I am now charged with the gruesome duty of delivering the skinned, boiled, chewed-up remains of the Resistance leaders into the heart of the field to show the rest of the population just how unfuckwithable we really are. We must destroy their will to fight, crush their morale, so that Cornstalk Warriors will never again stumble out of the field, hungry for fertilizer… and human blood.

And then I realize I’ve been standing at the edge of a field with a bucket of starting-to-get-moldy vegetable matter for several minutes. I toss it into the field and walk back inside.

“The corn is starting to get tall, isn’t it?” my mom asks.

“Yeah, if it rains soon like it’s supposed to, it’ll get knee-high by July for sure,” I say.

They are too small to challenge us yet. But when they are, we’ll be waiting… weed whackers and Roundup at the ready.

They sure make it easy to get loans when you’re going to law school, don’t they? Fill out a short form with your social security number and driver’s license number, enter the amount of loans you want to take out, and bam! You’ve just doubled your debt load.

Just thinking about all this debt makes me nervous. I guess I’d better start work on a budget.

Hands down, the best headline regarding the Michael Jackson verdict:

“Michael Jackson Gets Off on Molestation”

That’s gross.

Against my better judgment, I went golfing yesterday. The friend of a friend was having a low-key bachelor party, and my friend was in charge of getting a group together. They needed people, so I agreed to join in their bastardized skins/scramble game. This was a bad idea, and I knew it. You see, I’ve only golfed (not counting putt-putt) one other time in my life, and that was six years ago. Add to this the fact that I have no inherent athletic ability–any skill I have in sports comes from nothing more than insane amounts of repetition. Then, just for fun, throw in my ultra-competitive nature and my tendency to scream and throw things when I get angry, and you start to see why this was such a bad idea.

The round went much as expected. I managed to put four balls in a row into a pond that was 45 degrees to my right. Probably about a third of my tee shots ended up on the fairway of another hole, and about another third ended up rolling thirty feet in front of me before stopping. The remainder did something else–something that almost never involved going straight and a reasonable distance. I missed three- and four-foot putts like it was my job. The only reason I am able to return my brother’s golf clubs intact is that there was someone worse than me in my group. Lucky draw, that one.

Later that evening, I got to see the end of Mike Tyson’s career. My friend and I tuned in at the start of the fifth round of the Tyson-McBride fight, just in time to see Tyson get knocked around, head-butt McBride and try to break his arm, get pushed down at the end of the sixth round, and give up after he got back to his corner. The part of the fight I saw looked terrible. Tyson looked out of shape and slow. I don’t see him fighting any more–or, I don’t see people caring any more, at least.

It was an interesting day.

Item number one in Jeremy’s list of advice for 0Ls says, “Come up with a neat little 90-second answer to the question, ‘Why are you in law school?’ ” That sounds like good advice. (Never mind why people ask the question. Just know they’re going to.)

In reality, I decided to go to law school because it looked interesting. I wanted to do something that would have an impact on people’s lives. Computer science wasn’t doing that. I wasn’t good enough to do the cool stuff; I could see myself getting stuck in a rut, writing code that thousands of programmers have written before for a program that no one cares about. And I didn’t want that. Law, at the very least, provides a service that is needed and an opportunity to change things for the better (for your client, if no one else).

But what the hell kind of an answer is that? “It looked interesting and I want to help people.” I’ma get my ass kicked if I actually say that to someone. So I’ve been kicking around a few other answers to the “Why are you in law school?” question:

• “I want to be able to defend myself in traffic court.”
• “My great-grandfather was a lawyer, my grandfather was a lawyer, and my father robs banks.”
• “I hate having free time.”
• “You mean this isn’t the support group meeting?”
• “You know how they say not to fill out multiple-choice tests ‘ABACADABA’? They’re totally full of shit.”
• “I’m bangin’ the admissions office.”
• “Those statutory rape laws are tricky.”
• “To Kill a Mockingbird. I wanna sue the jackass that wrote that damned book.”
• “You know what they say about lawyers: the only thing bigger than their bills is… well, you see where I’m going with this one. Lawyers have large houses.”
• “Do you have any idea how much ass John Paul Stevens gets?”
• “My brother double-dared me.”
• “I want a pair of these golden handcuffs I keep hearing about. Also, maybe a golden whip and some golden nipple clamps.”
• “I’m sure as hell not going to waste those four years of Latin!”
• “I can’t stand the sight of blood, so Clown College wouldn’t take me.”
• “I want to make the world a better place, and I figure the best way to do that is to defend large corporations for 30 years and then donate a few bucks to the ACLU after I retire.”
• “Whales. Effin’ whales.”

I’ve only spent two hours out in the sun for each of the last two days… with SPF 30 on… and I’m starting to turn a little red.

This is pathetic.

Also: Whoa, the albino kid in Powder (pic here) was played by Sean Patrick Flanery. That is awesomely weird.

Did anyone else see last night’s episode of The Daily Show? Did Newt Gingrich actually go from pimping a novel about an alternate ending to the Civil War to basically admitting he’s running for President in ‘08?

I just thought the two acts were mutually exclusive, that’s all.

Extra!: I looked the book up on Amazon, and this section of one of the reviews cracked me up:

The key factor to an alternative history such as this one remains have the characters ring true. Lee continues to take advantage of the tendencies of his opponents and Grant refuses to back off not matter what the body count. George Armstrong Custer is always looking for glory while Pete Longstreet will always want to be safe rather than sorry.

Yup, nothing rings true like one-dimensional, stereotyped characters.

(Of course, this says nothing about the actual books. They could be quite good for all I know. I just wanted to mock this reviewer.)

In case anyone hasn’t heard, Ashcroft v. Raich, the medicinal marijuana case, was decided today. The vote ended up being 6-3 in favor of the government, with Justice Stevens writing the majority opinion, Justice Scalia concurring in the judgment, and Justice O’Connor, Justice Thomas, and Chief Justice Rehnquist dissenting.

I don’t know much about the legal aspects of the case (I guess it came down to what counts as interstate commerce), but it seems like it was a struggle between States’ rights and “moral values.” It’ll be interesting to see how people respond to this, I think.

Maybe I’ll write more if I get around to reading the opinions.

Update: SCOTUSblog has links to all the opinions here.

Good luck to everyone taking the LSAT tomorrow. My advice to you at this point is to relax. You won’t do yourself any good by stressing out and/or studying all day. Give your brain a rest. Get a good night’s sleep and eat a good breakfast. Don’t forget to bring a timepiece to the test.

Last year, I spent the evening before the LSAT floating in a hot tub. I highly recommend it.