Interesting, I was starving by the time we came out of the OCI informational session, oh sorry, we have a lot of acronyms on campus, OCI is On Campus Interview. This is when all the law firms in the country (literally) descend on the campus to interview the people who would like to slave away at a law firm for big bucks after graduation. Did I say slave away? ooops, I meant work hard, with lots of client interaction and due diligence doing deals that will bring lots of money to the firm.

Talking about Acronyms, there are too many of them, but here at Northwestern, there is one that stands out for the first year students - CLR!!!!! CLR is the polite way of saying "Communication and Legal Reasoning" It is the class with the most time involved and with little credit allocated to it.

There is nothing like CLR to remind you of the 24hour day. During the first year, there is always something due, if it wasnt the first draft of a memo, it was the brief during the second semester. Because of the time crunch, the first draft is all you will ever submit. If you are also lucky to have a crappy irresponsible partner for the "partnered assignments" you may well end up submitting a half baked brief that even someone in a no-tier law school would not dare to hand in. Woe betide you though, given the curve, you may well end up with an "I- " Thats an incomplete minus for the uninitiated. Then again, I made that grade up but I think some people deserve it.

Reading cases for your briefs can go different ways, it is like changing diapers, you do it over and over again till you get to the point where you want to drop the cases in the bin and set the bin on fire. The other part is the writing of the brief - why is it that lawyers like to write in the negative??? Lawyers writing in the negative is not dispositive to the outcome of the case. Lawyers also like to write complicated sentences and I will get you one, hold on:

“The duty owing from defendants to plaintiff in the abstract will vary . . . relative to the juxtaposition of the real world environmental encasement of the two sides. The concept of causation would seem less plastic.”
Gottreich v San Francisco Investment Corp., 552 F2d 866, 867 fn. 2 (9th Cir, 1977).

What the hell does that mean in English? Want another? hold on then:

Consider this sentence from a U.S. Supreme Court brief, asserting the constitutionality of Hawaii's use of eminent domain to purchase a landowner's leasehold interest to sell back to the tenant in fee:

Not since such decisions as Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1 (1915), which suggested that inequalities of bargaining power are “but the normal and inevitable result” of liberty of contract, id. at 17-18—decisions thoroughly repudiated by this Court for the last half-century-has it been doubted that regulation tending to offset the unequal bargaining power of employer and employee, or of landlord and tenant, see, e.g., Block v Hirsh, 256 US 135 (1921), is well within ordinary legislative authority.

Brief for Appellants, Hawaii Housing Authority v Midkiff, 467 US 229 (1984), p. 22.

That lawyer deserves to be fired by his client, disbarred and eternally prohibited from holding a pen!!

During the first few weeks of the first year of law school, they try to hammer it into your head how they want you to think like a lawyer. Truth be told, I am not sure when we cross that great rubicon and fall into the cesspool of lawyerly thinking but we certainly start to find ourselves having multiple outlooks to one issue, one which forms our frame of the issue, the others we accomodate because we know they exist. Our multiple outlook is our middle finger to the two-handed economist who never seems to have and stand by an opinion. On one hand, he will tell you that the economy is getting better but on the other hand, the unemployment numbers are getting worse.

Back to CLR, they teach you different methods of approaching your writing. I thought I was in a history/government course when one teacher first mention IRAC - such bad spelling I thought, but it turned out to be a way for us to arrange our writing to the court - Issue Rule Analysis Conclusion. Now that makes sense. Then another teacher intorduced TREAC and along with IRAC, it sounded like the new defense system to be used in the next gulf war! TREAC is another way to bullshit your way around a brief or memo. Lawyers like to write extensively, brevity has never been their forte but TREAC I will tell you is Thesis Rule Explanation (of the case you intend to use in your brief) Analysis Conclusion. I think there is a C missing before the Conclusion but I am trying to be brief so I will skip that.

Persuasive writing is a wonder, in your brief, you contend, you assert, its this court, that court, the lower court, the trial court but whatever you do, never say you believe in a brief, no judge likes to see that in a brief. These start to get blurry and similar after a while especially when you have been typing for two days and have only 3 of 15 pages to show for it.

Then there is Ethos, Pathos and Logos, I learned this from my Freshman English professor in College, I took it to heart then, he was right, twelve years later (yeah it took me that long to go back to law school) it was resurrected in CLR. Ethos, Pathos and Logos is enough to make you think there is a new CLR Fraternity on the 4th floor of Levey Mayer - thats where most of the CLR professors have their offices. Yes, CLR professors are pretty much at the bottom of the food chain, they get the 4th floor office, nice views you would think but noooo...there is no elevator that goes up there. Anytime I have an appointment with my CLR professor, I have to go to the Gym for two days before that. Even with that, by the time I get to the 4th floor, I am panting like a Boston Marathoner who finished 6 hours after the last person had crossed the finished line. CLR professors get no respect, from Administration I mean and I think this is at all schools. They teach one of the most important courses on campus and get the shittiest pay and the crappiest offices, oh yeah, I forgot, I don't think they publish!!!

Alright, let me get off my high horse and get back to work, I have a paper to type not in CLR though. I need to get cracking on it because even though its due in two weeks, there is this anal retentive naive girl in my class who spent her whole spring break writing the paper. The word limit is 4,000. Read again, the word limit is 4,000 and the first question she asks is whether her already written 3,992 word paper will suffice? Will the footnotes count? I have a better question, "can you shut the hell up", "Can you get a life", "Are you normal???"