Blog Ipsa Loquitur

The problem with accusing others of overachieving is that you run the risk of sounding like (1) a condescending bastard and/or (2) an underachieving lay-about. I mean, I’m in law school, and I’m working my ass off, so I’m fairly certain I’m not a great example of the second. But I’m probably the former.

I don’t mind saying it: I think student government is silly. It’s an educational exercise in the same capacity as a Model United Nations, except without the accompanying geography lessons. I’m heading into my last year of law school, and I’m still expected to pretend that student elections have more to do with leadership ability and less to do with how many references to “Borat” one can cram onto a campaign poster. It smacks of little more than a popularity contest, with the grand prize being another line on your résumé.

Dear Reader, if you’re presently crying foul because all elections are, at base, popularity contests: you’re correct. But let’s distinguish between the popularity of a candidate’s ideas and the popularity of the movie that the candidate associates himself with. While a standard sheet of A4 paper probably lacks sufficient room to convey your vision about meeting the political challenges facing your law school class, there is probably just enough room to cram “I come from Kazakhstan!” in 72 point Comic Sans.

Additionally, there is more solace to be had in the fact that there really aren’t any political challenges to be met by a student government. To be certain, administering a school is a difficult task, and takes years of experience in managing a team of hundreds of faculty, coordinating various departments, and other feats of academic adroitness that I can’t even imagine. Luckily, the school has people who have been specifically trained and hired for just such an occasion: school administrators.

The student government is not wholly without task, however. Even the most hardened micromanagers among school administrators can see the value of giving the students some autonomy. Let the students handle the decision about what kind of pizza the cafeteria should serve on Fridays, who should be in charge of painting the banners for the pep rally, and what the playlist should be for the homecoming dance. (Subject to the administrators’ approval, of course; kids these days listen to the most vulgar things.) It’ll make them feel like they’re all grown up.

And now that we’re in law school, I’m sure the student government has been charged with resolving dilemmas of even greater importance. There are fundraisers to be held, and charities to support, and even a law school prom to organize.

sidebar: Yes, law schools have proms. Really. I’m not making that up.

I mean, I suppose it all shows an interest in those fabled extracurricular activities that we’re all told employers care so much about. And student government likely falls within the definition of the word “extracurricular,” as it’s not part of your classroom instruction. For even more employer appeal bonus points, a role in student government could demonstrate an interest in taking charge and managing a team. That would come in handy if your future law firm is considering having a bake sale. (Insert your favorite Jay Leno open-mic night joke about how “it’s a recession, folks!” here)

My rambling mockery of student government was brought on, Dear Reader, by the fact that not one but two students running for student government positions brought cupcakes to give out on election day. Cupcakes. Yes. Like in that movie where Matthew Broderick is a pedophile teacher.

For the record, I’m not hating on the players. I’m hating on the game. (See Marrow v. Warner Music Group) If you’re mortgaging your future to be able to afford law school, the only rational decision is to squeeze every drop of life experience out of it before you’re flung out into the real world to hang your shingle.

But boy, the game is silly.

Hypothetical situation about the opposite of a Big Brother Police State: you’re on a public street in a car registered in your name, in plain view of Tom, Dick, Harry, and pretty much every concept of God known to the Western World. In this situation, is a police officer allowed to look at you, or not allowed to look at you? The answer ought to be obvious.

So if you’re on a public street in a car registered in your name, in plain view of a GPS satellite, and probably carrying a phone and/or navigation system in your pants and on your dashboard, what makes you think that the police can’t use the same technology to watch you? Do you magically gain some sort of rights when computers are involved? A recent AP article about a court ruling in Michigan seems amazed at the lack of privacy we have while in public.

If we want to make a law requiring the police use only eyeballs to follow you, that’s fine. I think it’s much more cost-effective to have the police use technology to keep up with society, but there’s plenty of room for debate. However, let’s not act surprised that driving around on a public road is less than completely private.

Repent, all ye slackers! The almighty curve shall smite the wicked! The end is nigh, and that means law students everywhere are doing their best “groundhog that’s seen his shadow” impression.

See you on the other side, world.

If I were bolder, my reply to the question “why do you want to work in public interest?” would be simply:

Because literally tilting at windmills pays even worse.

Let me explain. One of the (many) things I’ve been writing instead of posts here is a statement of interest on why I want to go into public service. I’m working for another government agency this summer, and before the government starts handing out funding to their interns, they want to know that I’m serious about serving the public interest.

Honestly, though, being forced to talk about myself in glowing terms and describe myself as selfless, kindhearted, and friend to all the animals of the jungle is difficult. I’m not of the shameless self-promotion vein. Heck, I’m not even of the humble self-promotion vein.

I understand where the people in charge of giving free money to poor law students are coming from, because they don’t want to accidentally hand out money to people whose career plans involve building death rays, or world domination. It’s public money, and it ought to go to foster the education of those dedicated to serving the public interest. I get that. Really, I get that.

But when I have children, I plan on making them write essays when they do something wrong, not when they want to do something right. Kids come home after curfew? Write me an essay on why you couldn’t make it home on time. Didn’t take out the garbage? Write me an essay on the biological processes that make the garbage so stinky when it sits around for a week. Borrowed my car, but got into a car accident? Write me an essay on Newtonian physics, and explain why you couldn’t stop in time.

I am the one topic I’ve never been really comfortable writing about. Looking at the above list, my children may avoid the same fate.

On the federal level, you have a number of big sources of authority. The most dramatic is probably the Executive Order: the President has sat down at his sweet desk, pulled out The First Pen (ink force one?), and made some sort of Decree. He doesn’t get to make up new laws, but he does wield a lot of power. Hell, with an Executive Order, President Truman almost nationalized the steel industry.

There’s also Congress, which is probably the most conventional source of authority: if you want a new law, you write your Senator or Representative a nice big check letter, explaining your concern. You’ve also got federal courts, which interpret law and impose balancing tests and invent factors of elements of crimes that Congress failed to draft, owing to the latter’s overall lack of psychic abilities.

But there are also agencies: created by Congressional Act, these entities incorporate a little of all three branches. While they don’t get to enact legislation, they do get to promulgate regulations. Those two ideas may sound alike, but I assure you that there are no synonyms in law.

Take the agency most of us focus on this time of year: the IRS. Congress passes the actual Internal Revenue Code, but the IRS promulgates regulations to supplement the requirements of the code itself. There’s also something called Revenue Rulings: think of them as IRS newsletters, but instead of birthdays and promotion notifications, they contain guidance about how the IRS plans to enforce its rules and regulations. You can even pay the IRS to examine your situation and tell you what to do. In addition to all these sources of authority, you’ve also got a limited variety of courts that rule on the rules and regulations.

With all this to keep track of, the IRS is aware that certain situations can still be a little tricky to sort out. As such, the IRS has still more miscellaneous publications that address common questions; The Prestigious Internet has located a lovely specimen.

The IRS has addressed the apparently(?) common question of whether you can write off a child as a deduction if they’ve been kidnapped. In the matter-of-fact way that only the federal government can muster, the IRS notes that this tax treatment only applies until there has been a determination that your child is dead, and won’t apply if another family member has kidnapped your child.

I kind of wonder about that last requirement: I’m certain it’s there to close a loophole, but I can’t for the life of me imagine a scenario in which you need your ne’er-do-well brother to kidnap your children. You know, for tax purposes.

The trial process is fairly straightforward in America; we have an adversarial trial system which is founded on the presumption that the ultimate truth is reached through a vigorous debate. The thinking goes that instead of entrusting the finding of facts to a single neutral investigator, we can just embrace the human tendency to make snap judgments or bring biases with them into their courtroom. It’s easier to trust someone to be biased than neutral, I suppose.

So we set up two parties on opposing sides, to seek the truth through competition. Like most competitions in our society, however, we don’t allow the competitors to employ every vicious trick they can think of.  Partly because there are some really effective tricks that lawyers can think of.

As such, this vigorous debate in search of the ultimate truth has to have some kind of rules, and a party that’s neutral enough to apply them. In much older lawsuits, these people were sometimes described as referees, but we usually go with the term “judge” now. (Similarly, the powdered wig look has faded into the ages alongside the term that evokes thoughts of the soccer pitch over the courtroom.)

In this theater of the jurisprudential, we almost have the stage completely set. The last role to be cast is the finders of fact: the people that decide who wins the competition. In an actual sporting event, the referees keep score, but our metaphorical trial (alternately a sporting event and a play in my increasingly tortured prose) relies on the community at large to declare the victor.

In the trial of Socrates, the jury probably numbered about five hundred men. I’m kind of fuzzy on the details, but I think we switched to a smaller jury when it became apparent that you’d need a time machine to find five hundred people who hadn’t heard of OJ Simpson’s double murder escapades.  So we pick a handful of your peers, and let them decide which witnesses are lying, which witnesses are competent, and ultimately, which party has carried their respective burdens of proving which facts.

The jury is a passive entity. The jury asks no questions, and neither does the judge. (The judge enforces the rules, but only in the most egregious breaches of the rules may the judge intervene on her own. For the most part, the judge is a spectator with a hammer and sweet chair.) Like the judge, the jury spends the vast majority of their time sitting and watching the events unfold, and trying to piece together a story of what happened out of the cases that the two parties present to them. The jury is permitted to ask the judge to clarify certain complex legal concepts during their deliberations, but they have no interaction with the two parties or their witnesses.

I mentioned before that the law imposes certain rules on the parties, as a matter of fairness.  There are the “Law & Order” rules, that everyone’s seen on TV: Sam Waterston yelling “Objection, your honor!” There are rules about impeaching the character of a witness, rules about hearsay, rules about bringing up criminal history, and a whole bunch of other rules that determine which evidence is excluded on the basis of being too prejudicial to the jury, and not probative enough. The judge has the final say about what evidence the jury may be exposed to.

But in our wacky modern times, this delicate balancing act of referee, competitors, and spectators is being strained.  John Schwartz of the New York Times has an interesting article about the growing trend of jurors investigating and gathering information of their own accord: with cell phones.  Jurors have long been instructed to avoid contaminating their view of the trial or the parties involved with information that has not been sanitized through the judicial filter. From the article:

Jurors are not supposed to seek information outside of the courtroom. They are required to reach a verdict based on only the facts the judge has decided are admissible, and they are not supposed to see evidence that has been excluded as prejudicial. But now, using their cellphones, they can look up the name of a defendant on the Web or examine an intersection using Google Maps, violating the legal system’s complex rules of evidence.

I’m not sure why this is happening: are people just ignoring the judge’s instructions to not seek information independently? I found Evidence pretty interesting: maybe we could force jurors to sit through a lecture about the reasons that we don’t let the lawyers say whatever they like.

sidebar: I’ve written about my experience as a juror in the past, and I did so in the past tense; I did not share anything with the world until the experience was over. I also did not do my own damn case research, because I listened to the person with the hammer and sweet chair.

We exclude evidence from the courtroom because our judicial system recognizes that there’s a lot of unfair stuff you can do. For instance, in an murder trial, you could bring up evidence that people with tattoos have a higher tendency to be convicted of violent crimes, and then ask the defendant how many tattoos he has.  You can even play on subconscious elements of the human psyche: the so-called “gory photograph rule” prohibits showing juries horrific photos of a crime scene if they only serve to inflame the passions of the jury and make them more eager to see the defendant hang.

If the jury seeks out evidence on their own, they run the risk of coming across all sorts of prejudicial facts and conjecture that the judge has seen fit to keep out of the courtroom.  In cases like these, where jurors have ignored the judge’s instructions and exposed themselves to information on their own, the judge is forced to remove that juror from the jury.

If there are a lot of jurors (in one case in the article, there were eight!) who have tainted themselves, the only solution may be a mistrial: the legal equivalent of a do-over.  Judges can hold members of the jury in contempt of court, and I think they truly ought to.  Bringing a newspaper into the jury room is impermissible: why should surfing news.google.com on your phone be any different?