I’m of mixed feelings about the 7th Cir.’s holding in Moore v. Madigan

One the one hand, anti-gun wailing and gnashing of teeth is like music to my ears (the decision is here). Though gun control’s not quite dead, it’s definitely on life support.

On the other hand, this has thrown a wrench into a certain project I’ve left undescribed (see fn 1). Between this case, the 2d Cir.’s holding in Kachalsky, and whatever the 9th Cir. holds in Richards v. Prieto (assuming it’s decided next semester-ish), I’m going to have to rework substantial sections.

On the gripping hand, my project not only turned out to be timely, but by the time it’s done, it may even be on a circuit split!

And with that said, those astute readers of mine will likely have deduced the general subject of my law review article.

Now, back to studying. One more exam to go, and then this semester will be officially over.

You know, aside from the initial suspension of disbelief activation energy…

The Red Dawn remake was actually pretty good (and by “suspension of disbelief activation energy,” I mean getting past the idea that the North Koreans could actually take over the Pacific Northwest*).

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but after getting eliminated in the intramural moot court competition this morning, I finally had an afternoon where I didn’t have the specter of a brief/oral argument/note hanging over my head.**

Despite my initial misgivings, the change of the conquerors from the Chinese to the Norks wasn’t completely terrible. I know that sounds like I’m damning the movie with faint praise, but the movie was actually good.

*It’s kind of a spoiler, but the suspension of disbelief was helped along by a revelation later in the film (*cough* HEMP *cough*). No, not that kind.

**Sure, finals are the week after next, but who cares!

No, I’m not dead.

Yet, at least. In two more weeks, I’ll probably wish I were.

I’ve been busy studying; finals start Monday, and since they’re the whole grade for each course, there’s a bit of pressure.

Posting and tweeting will be light for the next week or two, until things have calmed back down.

One semester of law school down…

Five more to go. I think we get our grades in mid-late January, so until then, I get to wonder. I’l go ahead and post my thoughts on the first semester’s worth of classes now, and we’ll see how well my expectations line up with my actual results.

In the order in which we finished the various classes:

Reasoning, Writing, and Advocacy- I did ~average for the first 2/3 of the semester, but the last assignment (worth 40% of the grade) didn’t go as well. I didn’t put quite as much work into it as I should have, and I’m not happy with where it was when I turned it in. Oh well. We didn’t have a final, at least. And for that, I am truly grateful.

Torts- I was pretty confident going into the final, and think I did okay on the multiple choice and short answer bits (together worth 50%). The essay question (worth the remaining 50%) went well. At least, I thought it went well at the time. But over the rest of finals week, little things I should have included kept occurring to me while I was studying for the other exams. That’s to be expected, I guess; Torts was the first exam, and no one really knew what to expect going in. My outline was ~16 pages, and aside from a couple things that slipped my mind, I think I knew it pretty well.

Property- I’m pretty confident about the rule of perpetuities problem, and the identifying estates and future interests problem, and one of the two essays. The second essay I’m not as sure about; my exam software crashed midway through answering it, so instead of trying to restart it, I just wrote the rest of the exam in a blue book. It did throw off my concentration; hopefully my answers on the rest of the exam are good enough to make up for my inevitably poor performance on that question. My Property outline was only 12 pages, and I didn’t know them as well as I did Torts (especially the marital property section; I was sketchy on it, and then that was the question I had to answer after my computer crashed. It was a bit of a double whammy).

Contracts- This was our only open book/notes exam, and I felt better after it than I did after any of the others. I think I have a pretty good grasp on what we covered this semester, and I hope I was able to convey that in the two essay and 15 multiple choice questions we had (Side note: it has never taken my ~4 minutes per problem to answer multiple choice questions. Until now.). My Contracts outline was the longest at 26 pages (plus the various outlines and guides (for the merchant’s exception, the statute of frauds, and the like; all told, the extras brought the total length up to 80 pages or so). I’m very glad we didn’t have to memorize it. To make the ridiculously long outline easier to navigate, I made a table of contents for it. That’s right. Xzibit heard I liked outlines, so he put an outline on my outline so I could contract while I contract.

Civil Procedure- We had three exams during the semester (two multiple choice and one essay), and though we only got the multiple choice exams back, we at least had an idea of how the professor tested (as far as multiple choice questions go, he is a devious, tricky bastard). The final was a mixture of multiple choice and essay (~25 multiple choice and a two-part essay); I think I did well on the multiple choice (though I did learn my lesson from the previous tests; any time I changed answers before, I always ended up changing more from the right answer to the wrong answer than I did from wrong to right; here, I went with my first thought on most of them). The essay wasn’t that bad, either. We only covered the first 8 chapters or so in the book, and my outline was eight pages long. I don’t know how well I’ll end up doing in the class overall, though; I did average-above average on the tests we got back, but those three are only worth 30% of the total grade. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Legal Research- the last exam we had of the semester was 50 multiple choice questions. Most of them I got without difficulty, which means probably everyone got those. The others, I wasn’t as sure about, since they were basically “finish this sentence from the reading from these possible endings.” Since I didn’t have the reading memorized, and since the multiple choice answers were all “choose the best answer” (and sometimes there was more than one answer that seemed like it would work), I think how I end up doing in that class is going to be a bit of a crap shoot. At least it’s only one credit.

Anyway, regardless of what my grades show, I did learn a lot about the law in my first semester at law school, and am actually kind of looking forward to the spring semester. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to enjoy the hell out of the intervening month, though. I have several video games that I’ve been meaning to play, and they’ve been languishing alone since mid-October.

I’ll also be more likely to update PTGH regularly; maybe even multiple posts a day (ah, those were the days).

Thanks for sticking with me this semester!

Palace of Destruction

Finals week is come, and most of my nonsense is confined to twitter (for the time being).

Don’t be surprised if I tend to post more OST selections this week, since I’m listening to a lot of music while studying (and not being distracted by the internet, I swear).

And because instrumental music seems better for studying than vocal music, I’ve delved once more into my Falcom game soundtrack trove.

Today’s track: Palace of Destruction, which plays (I think?) in the first shrine/temple Adol explores in the first game.

The Ys I & II Chronicles arrangement is excellent, but SSH‘s* might be even better:

*SSH, for Saitama Saishuu Heiki (埼玉最終兵器), the ultimate weapon of Saitama, a doujin music group..