a few bad ideas in a row

The more I think about the Civ Pro exam, the more I get scared that I actually did blow it. I've been valiantly trying not to think about it at all, but nasty little flashes of "Hey, you forgot to ______!" have been interrupting my concentration all morning. I need to just dive into my Edie outline, finish it today, and then start to crank on Property. Civ Pro is over. "It's in God's hands now," I said to I. as we packed up our laptops yesterday. "I don't know if I'd go that far," she replied. "Okay," I revised, "it's in Professor Civ Pro's hands now." Anyway, it's out of mine.

I've just done something that might turn out to be rather stupid: I booked a flight to Florida leaving on May 16, a.k.a. the first day of my school's interjournal writing competition. I'll stay by my mother and the horsies for a week, then fly up to Washington D.C. for a bat mitzvah [1], then finally return home to California on May 27, a.k.a. the last day of my school's interjournal writing competition. I signed up to enter the competition, but really have no major stake in getting on a journal:

- my usual luck in legal writing isn't such that I'm likely to make it onto the official law review;
- the five other journals apparently don't get the respect that law review does among employers;
- if merely having a journal on the resume at all is a tickoff item for employers, I've got that already in my unofficial journal -- which comes with its own story;
- Moot Court competition is reputed to take up all the time you have and much that you don't;
- I would much rather spend 150 hours working the kinks out of a sweet oral argument than cite-checking;
- I'm not sure I have 150 hours to spare for a journal anyway, even though maybe half of those hours are allegedly spent partying.

On the other hand, the journals -- with the exception of the main law review, where everyone takes themselves über-seriously -- all seem to be laid-back social organizations, and the note you write for your journal in the spring of your second year satisfies your graduation writing requirement. It would be neat to work on the communications law journal, to befriend like-minded folks I haven't yet met, to write my note on Internet law rather than flailing about the shallow course catalog in search of a writing-requirement seminar I could force myself to care about. There was one woman this year that I know of who did both Moot Court and a journal; she won her Moot Court competition, too, so she must have done something right. Maybe it's workable.

At any rate, I'll probably be bringing my laptop and ALWD handbook along to Florida, which would be supremely ironic on a trip which was supposed to represent the official sloughing-off of my 1L skin. Then again, it would just be typical of law school to permit no such thing.

[1] Waddling Thunder: will you be in town? Drop me an email.

thus spake /jca @ May 1, 2003 09:37 AM