I'll introduce the final three classes today: Lawyering I, Constitutional Law I, and Civil Procedure I. If you've studied Latin, you may have guessed that these classes all form the first part of a sequence; I'll finish the sequence by taking the second part of each in the spring, along with new exciting classes such as "Property" to fill the void left after finishing Torts and Contracts.
LAWYERING is the class that's the most unlike other law school classes, but it's the class that's the most like the actual practice of being a lawyer. In Lawyering, we don't have to read very much -- and I've been skipping most of what we've been assigned -- but we do have actual assignments beyond reading. We have to go to the library, learn some library-science-ish approaches to identifying keywords for looking up cases in case indexes, learn what all the different symbols mean in a citation (such as: 31 C.F.R. § 515.329 (2005), with lots of additional superscripts and symbols that I don't yet know how to reproduce on my own keyboard), which states' cases are listed in which case reporters' volumes, and lots of little but necessary technical information. We've been given a hypothetical case for which we need to look up and summarize a number of different cases which might be useful, and then look up the times that those cases have been cross-referenced, and then look up and read and (I know this is coming) summarize those too.
There's more tangible work to be done in this class, but it's more laid-back. No one comes to class in fear that the professor will ask you which states are in the Southwest Reporter. It's a good change of pace.
CIVIL PROCEDURE is the class that focuses on minute technicalities of the law. The first topic of the semester is "personal jurisdiction," which is about which state hears a case when the parties involved are from different states, or when one is a corporation that may have a headquarters in one state but transacts business in others. Our first case of the semester, Pennoyer v. Neff, involves an Oregon lawyer who did some legal work for a California settler who wanted to apply for a federal discount on available land in Oregon. California guy goes back to California without paying his legal fees, and Oregon lawyer sues him to recover the balance of the bill. The problem is that Oregon lawyer doesn't know California settler's address, so he just takes out an ad in the local Portland Oregonian to serve notice. As you can guess, California dude doesn't see the notice (he's also illiterate, but I'm trying to simplify the case by leaving out some additional important details). So CA dude doesn't show up to court, and OR lawyer wins judgment by default. The default judgment allows the state of Oregon to confiscate CA dude's land and give it to OR lawyer. When CA dude eventually reappears in OR, he's pissed about this and sues to get his land back. And the question is: did the Oregon court have the right to jurisdiction over a California resident? And even if so, what constitutes appropriate notice?
These kind of complicated scenarios get asked over and over again: what about a St. Louis shoe company that has independent salesmen selling its products in Seattle -- does the company have to pay Washington state employment taxes? When a New York couple buys an Audi at their local dealership that bursts into flames in Oklahoma in the middle of their move to Arizona, where can they sue? (The question of where it's most advantageous to sue is usually easy, which is why so much is at stake with jurisdictional questions.)
Civ Pro Prof. is a new professor -- he still lives two hours away, and his syllabus changes every day, so I don't really know what we're studying after personal jurisdiction. He's nice, slightly nervous, unintimidating; stocky build, light brown skin, nice navy-blue suits. Kind of looks and talks like Jared the Subway guy. He's told us less of his biography than most professors, so I'm not sure exactly what kind of expertise prepares one to teach Civ Pro. I think that it means that you've specialized in federal cases (of what, I'm not sure) and so you're familiar with those rules more than individual state cases or statutes. More to come about this class.
CONSTITUTIONAL LAW has a lot of familiar elements from U.S. history: the Federalist Papers (and their vertically-challenged authors, Jemmy Madison and Alexander Hamilton), the Articles of Confederation, ratifying conventions, and the articles and amendments of the big C itself. We're reading fewer cases in this class and talking more about the contexts in which those cases were decided, and the precedents that they set. For example, most Americans -- at least the ones who read even the most ordinary newspaper or watch Katie Couric's evening news -- probably know that the U.S. Supreme Court can smite down unconstitutional laws. But it's not as if all of our contemporary constitutional law is explicitly written into the Constitution. It gives some guidelines, and the Supremes themselves interpreted those words, and a couple hundred years later, we have a set of tested, semi-reliable practices.
Con Law I is about the structure of the government and how power is distributed within it; Con Law II is supposed to be more about individual freedom. The professor is a dryly funny guy who's written briefs in the Guantanamo detainees cases (info that he didn't tell us, but I googled him), so it's easy to make the comparisons between the separation of powers in the era of G.W. and Jemmy and the current G.W. and Cheney. It's the most historical of any of my classes -- and more connected to what I've been doing for the past five years -- but remains a fun class.
That's the expository material; now hopefully these characters and plotlines will develop throughout the semester...
