June 2, 2009
- ⇒ Five legal concepts I'm pretty sure I first learned from watching The People's Court
This is an essay I wrote for the Perspectives collection UK Law sends out to incoming 1Ls. I tried to cover up the scarier parts.
My wife and I have two children. When I started school, my daughter was almost three, and my son was five months old. He would wake up every night around 1 AM, and it would take at least an hour to get him back to sleep. She started late on her terrible twos, and they were just coming into full swing when the fall semester started.
I was terrified that having kids would doom me in law school. I couldn’t count on a good night’s sleep on any given night, and my evenings and weekends were already full of doing things with them. And I certainly had a few “what was I thinking” moments over the course of my first year. Dealing with raising children and learning the law at the same time is difficult. But overall, I did better in school for having kids.
When you have kids, you have two things that other students don’t have. First, you have a reason to be efficient. Because you know your time to study is limited, you make the most of the time you have. You may only have two hours a night to read casebooks, but you’ll learn to get it done in that time because you have to. More importantly, you’ll always have a reminder as to why you’re in law school. When you come home from a day in class, you’ll come home to kids who need you to provide for them, and for whose benefit you’re spending so many hours studying. These two aspects of having kids while in law school will help you keep your focus. Since everyone in your class is already pretty smart (no, really, you’ll be surprised), the ability to keep your focus where it needs to be is one key to success.
Having said all that, here are three bits of solid practical advice, which I’ve gleaned from experience.
First, UK Financial Aid will give you more loans if you ask for them. The amount you spend every month to maintain a family is much more than a single, childless student spends, but you have to file a budget appeal to make up the difference. It’s not a painless process, but it’s worth the time to take care of it up front, instead of trying to figure out how you’re going to pay the day care in December. There is also a specific form you need to fill out if you pay for child care, since UK will give you additional loans to cover child care costs, above and beyond your amended budget.
Second, Kentucky has free health care for children for low-income families, which, if you quit a job to come to school, you probably qualify for. For example, if you have a family of four and your income is less than $42,400, you qualify. Health insurance for our kids was a huge part of our monthly budget, and this goes a long way to lessen the burden.
Finally, you absolutely have to save time for your kids. It would be really easy to let law school take over your life, especially if you have a significant other who is willing to watch the kids and give you all the time you “need.” When you go home from a day of school, put the law books away for a few hours, and eat dinner with your kids. Play with them. Give them baths. Read them stories, sing them songs, and kiss them goodnight. Then the law books can, and must, come back out. But keep them on a schedule, and give your kids the time they need. That way, they’ll be ready to give you the time you need when exams roll around, and you’ll not feel guilty for taking the time to rest and prepare as well as possible.
May 24, 2009
“The word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.”
— Justice Black, New York Times Co. v. U.S., 403 U.S. at 719
January 20, 2009
“Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new; Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture.”
— Judge Kozinski, 9th Circuit from White v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc., a case in which Vanna White sued Samsung for creating advertising that depicted a robot version of her. Awesome.
January 9, 2009
I've finally spent the time required to iron out the bugs here that were preventing me from posting. I'd really like to say that this means I'll be posting here again. We shall see.
November 23, 2008
Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card
I'm honestly not sure this book needed to exist. While it does tie up all the dangling plotlines from the Shadow series, the book as a whole doesn't really have any driving conflict. It's more just "here's what happened to Ender in the immediate aftermath of the Bugger War." There are two seeming conflicts in the book, but they both seem manufactured, just to give Ender something to do.
Thrilled as I am to have another Ender book, I think it would have been better if the Bean stories had just been wrapped up in a novelette, or even better, at the end of the last Shadow book.
Perhaps the main conflict I'm missing is an internal one within Ender, where he has to confront the killer inside, but that conflict was wrapped up pretty nicely, I thought, in the actual Ender's Game sequels.
View all my reviews.
October 30, 2008
This is a disturbing development. I'm not sure how I feel about this.
August 31, 2008
Friday morning, I woke up feeling awful. The virus had worked its way through my family, so I knew it was coming. Imagine a bad flu without the stomach symptoms: a tremendous headache and body aches, and some weird disorientation.
Were I still working at the library, I'd have called in sick without a second thought. But this is law school - there are no sick days in law school (or so I'm told). Anyway, I drove to school (about an hour and a half later than usual), stumbled to the library, and very slowly made my way though my notes for Civil Procedure at 11:00. I made it though class without incident, but I was burning up by the end of it. Class ended at 11:50
Here's where the alternate universe stuff comes into play. Watch the timing.
I really, really considered skipping my second class (Torts) and going home. I spent that last ten minutes of CivPro making the decision to stay. But it was close.
After CivPro, a group of us went to the Intermezzo for lunch. While I was waiting for my sandwich, about 25 minutes past the hour, the song "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" started running through my head. I was humming it when they delivered the sandwich I only ate a few bites of.
After lunch, I worked through Torts from 1-2:15, and instead of hitting the library to study afterwards, I went straight to the car, and headed straight home. My iPod was set to shuffle everything.
The walk from the library to the car takes about 10 minutes. About 25 minutes into the drive, what should come on but the Monkees' "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You". THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES AFTER I MADE THE DECISION TO LEAVE SCHOOL. Had I left early, as I considered, the song would have come on almost exactly when it spontaneously popped into my head in the Intermezzo! It's proof! There was a parallel universe created when I decided to stay at school instead of leaving, and the song crossed over to provide me evidence. Perhaps, even, to tell me that I made the right choice, or that the choice I made was significant enough in some way to cause a universal rift.
I plan on publishing a paper on this, if someone wants to volunteer the physics. But the facts speak for themselves; res ipsa loquitur as we discussed in Torts class that day.
I would still have known that if I had skipped class, so the quality (however you might judge it) of this little post is probably not the parallel universe split issue.
August 27, 2008
Yup, I'm a gonna keep doin' these until I don't think they're funny. That may be a while; they're a good outlet from hard studying.
August 24, 2008
"Hell," I said to myself, "this class is going to be a lot harder than I thought. It would have been nice for him to point this out sooner."
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