My Mountain of Debt

I was thinking about all the debt I’m racking up and decided to do some computations.

Projected total loans for law school: $150,000.

27 months of class work = $5,555/month

30 days per month = $185/day

24 hours per day = $7.71/hour

That means I’m paying $50/night to sleep. Depressing, to say the least. Let’s see, that means it costs me $21 to go to church once a week. $7 to wash my car. $8 to mow my lawn. About $20 to go on a date with my wife (totally worth it, though). And all of it at 8% interest. Again, depressing. But I signed up for it, so no crying over my self inflicted suffering.

Rotisserie chicken, alcohol, urinating in a car and a purse snatching in a Catholic Church

If only I could take credit for writing this article.
Todd, thanks for pointing this out to me.
This would make a great fact pattern for a final exam.

By Nicole Klauss - Mar. 7, 2011 10:22 AM
The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team

A man who was released from a hospital after being treated for injuries from an aggravated assault with a police officer was arrested on charges of stealing a purse from a woman who was kneeling in prayer at a downtown Mesa church.

Mesa police said Monday that the 51-year-old woman was kneeling and praying in front of a pew at the Queen of Peace Catholic Church in the 100 block of North Macdonald Street in Mesa, when a man snatched her purse. 

The woman heard someone ruffling through papers that were on the pew beside her, and she turned to see the man grab her purse, police said. 

The woman tried to grab it back, but the robber pushed her down and fled. The woman sustained injuries to her knee. 

Police located found a man matching the description of the robber in an alley about a block away. 

The woman's purse was recovered in a nearby dumpster. 

Ronald Slavin, 44, was booked into Maricopa County Jail on suspicion of robbery. Police said he had walked out of Arizona Regional Hospital, where he was being treated for injuries sustained during an assault on a police officer that had occurred after a vehicle burglary the night before. 

The owner left his vehicle running so he could run into his home on the 1000 block of N. Pasadena Street near Brown Road. When he returned to his vehicle he found Slavin sitting in his vehicle with a rotisserie chicken and alcohol. 

The owner asked Slavin to get out of his vehicle and Slavin responded that he would when he was finished urinating. 

A Mesa police officer arrived on scene and recognized Slavin from an incident earlier in the day at a Goodwill thrift store located on the 300 block of E. Brown Road, where he found Slavin defecating in one of the dressing rooms. The business didn't press charges because Slavin cleaned his mess up. 

The officer tried to arrest Slavin at the scene of the vehicle burglary, but when he reached to grab a blanket from the trunk of his police car, Slavin slammed the trunk on the officer's head. 

The officer sustained minor head injuries. He took Slavin to the hospital for minor injuries and intoxication. Slavin claimed he had drunk 30 beers, police said.

Analyze Mr. Slavin's potential liability under applicable tort and criminal law... 

Clammed Up

Justice Thomas doesn't have much to say during oral arguments before the Supreme Court. So little, that he's not said a word in five years of oral arguments. CNN has an article here.

Before Deer Die, They See The Light

Last Wednesday in Contracts, Professor Contracts was talking about a few things at the beginning of class and I was writing some notes down. I looked up, made eye contact and then he says, “Mr. [dumb schmuck], what are the two things in UCC 2-209?" I asked him to say that again. He repeated and I gave him a blank look. He asked if I had the text of it there. I picked up my book and started thumbing to the page. He says, “Be aware, that we are well into the second semester. There’s no reason to have that 'deer in the headlights' look.” The remainder of the class brought a barrage of confusing and difficult questions of which I batted maybe .500 at best. I was pretty ticked. Typical Professor Contracts, and I’m tired of it. He assumes too much after teaching the same course for thirty years. Not everyone, after reading the cases twice and trying to ingest all this information so fast, understands it the same way as he does. No big deal. Everyone in the class gets the ball thrown at them when they're not looking. A few people mentioned to me after class that they wouldn't have had a clue what he was talking about either. It made me feel better. A little.

Semester 1

Law School: Semester 1 from aaroneous on Vimeo.

Slacking Already

Procrastination is not a trait that I want to be associated with me. In fact, I'd prefer it if procrastination took a flying leap. However, since my orders to vacate tend to go unheeded with the old "I'll do it later" feeling, I have to just force myself to overcome. Keeping a journal of sorts is so much easier when you just do it regularly. I learned that in 2009 when I kept a journal of daily events every day of the year. It's interesting to go back and read some of the entries. Many things that happened to me, while inconsequential, I'd forgotten about. If you get out of the habit of making a daily record, which I did as soon as we moved to Oklahoma, it is very hard to get back into it, which I've failed to do despite having a journal sitting on my dresser since moving here. Here we are already into February and still, I haven't taken it up again. Gotta work on that.

This week all of OKC suffered through a pretty substantial winter storm. We probably got about 8 inches of snow, but it was hard to tell because the wind pushed it all up into drifts everywhere, so in some places there was just a skiff, but other places were knee deep. The knee-deep places were on my driveway and back porch. The skiff places were the front and back lawn. I would never need to shovel the lawn, so naturally that is where the least amount of snow accumulated. Did I mention that I left my snow shovel and snow blower in Utah? If you feel like morphing into an angry sailor, just try to shovel two feet of snow off a sixty-foot driveway with a flathead shovel. At least I can put a check mark next to that experience.

School is going well. The classes are interesting and the professors continue to be cryptic at times. Trying to understand the Erie Doctrine is like trying to put that square in a round hole. As smart as the Supreme Court Justices are (or at least claim to be), you'd think after so many years, they'd figure out a way to make things a little simpler than what they are. Oh well.

Deontological Desert

 If you feel like making your brain hurt, read this quote. If you want your eyes to bleed too, read the whole article.

On the other hand, people's shared intuitions about justice are not justice, in a transcendent sense.  People's shared intuitions can be wrong. In the end, however, the retributivist may find that an instrumentalist distributive principle of empirical desert will produce far more deontological desert than any other workable principle that could or would be adopted.

Paul Robinson from the Social Science Research Network

Back At It

January 17, 2011

A month has gone by, but I’m not sure where it went. The time spent with the family during the break was a welcome change of pace. Now, back to the grindstone, classes are picking up and the routine seems all too familiar. Grades for last semester still have not come in. Hopefully they’ll be posted by the 21st. I’ve talked with several people who are in their second or third year and the conversations usually always go the same. “Oh, you’ll be fine.” they tell me. Or “You won’t believe how arbitrary it seems. You can feel like you nailed it and come out with a C-.”

I suppose a student’s particular motivations for school or their later career may play on how they feel about grades. For instance, if I was hoping with all my heart to do well enough to be admitted to the law review, I imagine I’d be sweating bullets. Or, if I were interested in landing a job in a larger firm (read 50+ attorneys) I’d also be anxious to make excellent grades. But as it stands, I’m not interested in either. That’s not to say that I don’t want to have a great GPA, but it does decrease the anxiety to controllable levels because I’m not scared of flunking, as I’ve put in way too much time to worry about that. But whether I make C’s or B’s or an occasional A, a diploma is likely to be hanging on my wall within three years so I’m not too fussed about how I get it. I’ll continue to put forth my best effort–for the amount of debt I’ll be in, I can’t bear to put forth anything less–and hopefully I’ll be mostly satisfied with my results. In the meantime, I still have to wait another week for those four letters.