L to the L to the B

It's not a couplet, but it's close. The last sentence I wrote on my Admin final, my last final, summing up a question where I was asked to offer advice on the likelihood of a successful immigration appeal for a Mr. and Mrs. Singh, was not without its own internal rhyme:

"Things aren't looking great for the Singhs."

I'm pretty happy with the 21 pages of answers I wrote before that (yes, the longest exam I've ever written) but I especially like that last line. The cheekiness wasn't intentional, but I think it nicely represents my attitude towards law school: there's a lot of stuff to learn, but there's always room for a sense of humour.

Alright, maybe you wouldn't deliver a client bad news this way, but if writing three years worth of posts on this site has taught me anything, law school has some pretty funny moments.

Anyway, I'm officially done. Now all that's left is to recoup this staggering, staggering debt.

Notes for Easy Reference, Space Travel

For anyone ever wondering what law students take into an exam, here's the answer to the question you actually never asked. These documents were my own personal Rosetta Stone for Secured Transactions Law, which I took in December of second year. I'm a big fan of flowcharts, so I spent a few days whittling 50+ pages of class notes into 4 labyrinthine diagrams, sort of in the same way med students make their flowcharts: Leg Bone > connected to the > Hip Bone > connected to the > Red Thing.




Anyone remember that scene in Contact where they get all the alien schematics and Jodie Foster discovers that they piece together in 3D? Yeah, these flowcharts don't do that, but don't think the possibility never crossed my mind.

A Few Good Exams

Three exams done, one to go. I know what you're wondering: if my courses were a movie (specifically, the best lawyer movie of all time) then how would my experiences with each final exam correspond to scenes from said movie? I'll tell you.

Entertainment Law:



This one's tough to gauge. It's a paper course, and I've handed in my essay, which I feel strongly about - but there's no real advance measure of how well I've done. So a scene about driving through Guantanamo Bay as the particular focus of trained enemy snipers seemed appropriately descriptive.

Civil Procedure:



In a word, confidence. If you recall, in this scene, Cruise bluffs his opposing counsel into submission by boasting an extensive knowledge of pre-trial procedures and evidentiary motions that can delay a trial seemingly indefinitely: damn if that isn't exactly what I did on this test.

International Trade Law:



I want the truth, if the truth is an A on an exam I'm pretty sure I killed. Self-assuredness is no guarantee, however. Being wrong for Tom Cruise meant treason and death - for law students, being wrong has no effect on the credits you earn. Literally, you cannot flunk out of law school. Seriously.

Administrative Law:



Since I haven't written this one yet, and it scares the hell out of me, this is my best guess.

F in Cardiology, A in Malpractice

Exams start tomorrow, so a good luck to all those in law school - again, I'm forced to wonder if there is a med school blog, and if anyone wishes good luck to the test patients instead.

For my own part, I have Civil Procedure, International Trade and Admin Law exams coming up (the latter mercilessly scheduled on the very last day of exams). It's certainly stressful, but in a way it's also not to be exaggerated, because the next time I consult my British Columbia Rules of Court on the deadlines for filing a Statement of Claim, it'll be the real deal.

Mind you, if I ever personally invoke Article XX(b) of GATT, check CNN, I may have just started an international incident.

Adesso voglio imparare la legge Italiana

When I was at Queen's University, in my first year I got 97% in Italian and I knew things could only go down from there. (And oh, how they did.) Fall term marks for third year came out yesterday, and I'm glad to report that I've actually created the opposite trend throughout law school. Of course, this term wasn't free from the typical aberration.

If you had talked to me directly after my first, second and third year exams, I would have said my best tests were Contracts, Advanced Criminal Procedure, Corporations and most recently, Conflicts. If you were to ask me directly after receiving my marks for each of these terms, these classes nicely correspond to my worst marks.

I suppose I can appreciate this kind of irony, I just really, really hope it doesn't flow over into my legal career. I can just picture it now:

[Me to client]: I feel really good about our chances with this one, nay, I'm sure of it.

[Client to Crown]: Let's make a deal.

24 down, 6 to go

This time of year I always like to chart my progress through exams with an apt filmic comparison. Typically I have four or five to write, and about midway it's common to feel bleak about the prospects. But I find if you make tenuous connections between your life and Hollywood screenplays, you can at least hope that yours will turn out as happily as theirs.

Two years ago I used Lord of the Rings, in April '05 the Die Hard Trilogy, then plotted last December's finals using the many moods of Jack Bauer, and last April I resorted to the Man with No Name Trilogy.

I had a mind to use the best miniseries ever, Band of Brothers, as a guide this time around, because I recalled the funny scene where Ron Livingston (best actor ever?) is awoken with what his corporal thinks is lemonade, but turns out to be something else. I thought the moment might dovetail nicely with the unpleasant experience that was the Securities exam. However, I'm reminded that perhaps these exams really aren't as bad as war, so maybe a better comparison is in order.

So really I'm left with that old chestnut, Harry Potter. They're four films into the series, I'm four exams into it. If the underwhelming source material is any indication, the upcoming Order of the Phoenix stands to be the worst film of the series, and my Conflicts exam might just be the same.

No cramming with cadavers

Exam season starts tomorrow, so it's time to wish good luck to all those law students suffering through the holiday season. Just remember, if we had chosen to become doctors, this whole process would be a lot messier.

I'm pretty lucky this year in that three of my classes are paper or factum-based, and (insert chagrin here) I've completed those. I just printed off my Land Use/Earthquake paper yesterday with the title "Drawing the Fault Line," continuing my grand tradition of 10 years of pun-based essay titles.

You may say it betrays the sincere tone of William Blake's famous poem on child-labour misery, "The Chimney Sweeper," to call an essay "A Bitter Sweep Story." I think denizens of the industrial revolution could have stood to lighten up.

More of a Haunted Run, really

When I lived in Kingston, Ontario, I regretfully did not go on any of its "haunted walk" tours. I'm pretty certain that town has its fair share of gory lore, and I'm told that the ghost of John A. MacDonald still treads its street, pleading that the whole Constitution thing was really a joke.



So I made up for that missed opportunity tonight when I went on Vancouver's Haunted Tour of Gastown. With about twenty other people we got a tour of the section of town reputedly cursed by its ancient First Nations inhabitants when the land was unceremoniously taken away. This, I can confirm, meets the legal test for the imposition of a curse. (See Mummy v. Gravedigger et al.)



I found the tour interesting in part because I had never walked Gastown before, and that now I had a completely new reason to fear it. We learned about ghosts of every variety, from the headless to the feline. I particularly liked the trip down Blood Alley, despite an odour that would suggest it be renamed otherwise.



This is part of the reason I like Vancouver so much. There are countless areas of the city with a feel all their own. At any time you feel like you could be walking through New York, Toronto, Hong Kong, or, as it were, Whitechapel-area London/Silent Hill.

A straight consonant student

And now back to regularly scheduled programming.

Back in January, I likened the return of my grades to various moments in 24. The show was a handy reference point, because its tense and often painful situations mimicked quite nicely how several of my exams turned out. Now that spring marks have been released, it's only apt to describe my reaction to them using good ol' Kiefer again.

A disappointing Evidence mark aside, the rest of my exams went as well as I could have hoped. When you get to law school, you're basically told that E isn't the only vowel you won't get as a grade. So it was shocking to see that I rounded up several A's in one term. To to draw a comparison, if exams were a Christmas tree, and doing well was represented by a drunken Kiefer Sutherland tackling said Christmas tree, well, then I feel like this. (Video is TAFW, meaning "totally awesome for work.")

Is there a Pepsi tent at the Geneva Convention?

The trifecta of law exams are over, three straight days of madness concluded, ready to begin the holidays. Rather than dwell on how they went, I thought I could accurately represent my feelings about each of them through the various levels of preparedess and control exuded by Jack Bauer. Thus, for Corporations, Secured Transactions, and Advanced Criminal Procedure respectively:


Calm, cool, prepared in the face of peril.


Less assured. Chances of success depend on split-second thinking.


KABLAMMO!

(I'm aware of the irony of showing how well I believe I did on a criminal procedure exam with a picture of something entirely internationally unlawful. But it's topical, right?)

Merry Christmas folks. Just think, this is the halfway point to the start of second third of our lives!

Yippee kiyay etc.

Two exams down, three to go. To mark such progress last December, I employed a filmic metaphor that some of you, or maybe it was me, described as nerdy. This time round I figured I'd put forth a more muscular metaphor befitting the present circumstances.

To that end, if these exams were the Die Hard Trilogy, we would be around the point in Die Hard 2 where Bruce Willis, seeking access to a communications tower, is lured into an ambush by vicious terrorists (including a before-his-fame Robert Patrick, disguised as a painter). Much like the forces that John McClane faced in that instance, the Criminal Law exam was equally trying. But, if I may draw a further parallel to that scene, I feel that, weighted down by the "debris" of pressure, I grabbed the "gun" of knowledge and - as the exam bore down on me on the "moving sidewalk" of time - shot the test in the "kneecaps" of failure... Screw you that was an awesome scene.

As I've said before, Criminal Law is the subject I find most interesting, and I was looking forward to this exam somewhat. For you longtime readers, or fellow UBCers, you may recall that I was the only one (that I know) in an entire Criminal class who convicted a woman of abducting a youth, albeit momentarily, on the December exam. Hey, when someone asks me for an impromptu photo shoot in the woods, I get suspicious.

Well this time around, not only did we get to outline the strength of a case against two accused brothers, but we got to play judge and sentence one of them to punishment. This particular man assaulted another with brass knuckles while in a dissociative state, and then proceeded to hijack a car. From what I gather, most people assigned him a minimal sentence, two years or less, to be served conditionally in a treatment facility. Not me. Oh no, not me. Once again securing my notoriety as a "hangin' judge," I sentenced the accused to a term of seven years and imposed a $2000 fine on his ass. Suck on that, Donald "automaton" Johnstone.

Whatever the outcome of that may be, and it may not be pretty, I am simply glad this exam is over. Now I can put away my Criminal Code and never look at it again during my entire career as a lawyer. Really, when will any of those sections become relevant again?

Of course, this elation is only momentary, as I must study forthwith, particularly Property Law. If I may return to my metaphor for a moment, (of course I can, what are you going to do, comment?) I would point out that the Property test would be in the Trilogy about when John McClane gets the pummeling of a lifetime from the colossal German terrorist, Targo, on the tanker. As those of you who are studying for this upcoming test, try to tell me that's not at least half true.

Your silence is acceptance

A quick post to wish all those in small group Bane a good luck on tomorrow's contracts exam, and the rest of exams over the next two weeks.

Please note: this well-wishing is subject to an exclusion of liability clause, which, should an air of wellness or similarly decent results fail to materialize, precludes any action against the wisher-of-well. Moreover, there is an implied force majeure clause which, in the event of a rattling air-conditioner or similarly frustrating event, denies the payment of any sort of quantum meruit for any sub-standard performance delivered up to the event.

Nerdery aside, knock 'em dead Bane.

Henry V. Ryan (2004) Supreme Court of Canada

Blogging for a breather. I'm just past the halfway point of first year law exams, which, to draw a comparison, would be right around where Sam and Frodo get captured by Faramir in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. (That analogy is clearly not helpful because it first suggests I'm in a cornered position in these exams, and second, that I'm a big nerd.)

Frankly I don't understand the point of making some of these exams closed book, in an hour long time period no less. I know I'd respect a client who walked into a law firm with a complex set of issues and said, "I need your help, but I'm timing you and I don't want you peeking in any of those books behind you."

"Certainly," the dashing, young lawyer replied, "let me just call in the judge and have your action dismissed right now. That'll just make the whole thing easier for the both of us."

A court reporter, appearing from nowhere, then transcribes the word, "zing!"

Of course, I shouldn't complain, the tougher exams are yet to come, and I'm home for the holidays in less than a week! It's easy to forget it's that time of year in this city, what with the sun and warmth and greenness and all. (Please divert your hatred to the comment area below.)

Alright, that's enough of a break, once more unto the breach, dear friends! Clearly, Shakespeare can't save me now.

Fiat banum, ruat coelum

Not much for this post, as tomorrow begins the battle royale that is first year exams. Legal Institutions is up first, (political science masquerading as a law subject), followed by Property (are you aware how easy it is to defraud the land title system?), next comes Torts (see below), then Contracts (eh, I got nothin' against contracts) and lastly Criminal (wow, they even thought of murder in space!). One week it's all over.

Just want to wish good luck to all in Bane, the rootin' tootin-est first year law small group around! Seriously, lame adjectives aside, best of luck folks.