Thanksgiving Recap: Taboo Version

Thanksgiving vacation has come and gone. A HUUUGE meal was prepared and halfway-consumed (seriously, there was about 5x the food we needed and at least 2 bottles of wine per person - we do not take holiday meals lightly around here, people). And the rest of the weekend - except for some excursions out to Crown Street's nightlife establishments, one of which found us narrowly avoiding a deadly stabbing - was basically spent playing long extended games of Taboo.

Let it not be said that YLS students are competitive - in the classroom. But when it comes to board/group games, some of our crowd can get downright intense! [Maybe it's easier to trash-talk when you're all good friends & comfortabably able to make fun of each other's game-playing idiosyncracies...and inebriated by leftover wine...] We probably could have used an Olympics-level arbiter on a few close scoring calls. :)

All-in-all, a super-successful weekend. Very little academic work got done. But a holiday plane ticket got booked, we tried out the new Mexican place across the street (YUMM!), and I did my laundry. Baby steps.

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Best Sentence of Today

"[I]n United States v. Ron Pair Enterprises, the United States Supreme Court split 5-4 over the significance of a comma in a bankruptcy statute."

This is from Richard C. Wydick's Plain English for Lawyers, which is my favorite and only reference guide for legal writing (and which is the real topic of this post). A supervisor at an internship suggested it to me, and I think it's really helpful. Legal writing is often totally abstruse and it's really hard as a law student not to want to pile in as many legalisms as possible. I myself enjoy writing about "proving up a case" and tossing in a "res ispa loquitur" from time to time, but it's probably not super useful in actually being understood. Wydick is clear about what not to do and has lots of good suggestions. Does anyone else have useful legal writing guides?

As a side note, I still have not wrapped my head around the format of a legal memo. The facts section makes sense, as does (obviously) the discussion section, but why can't the brief answer and legal question sections just be presented in a much more intuitive introduction section? Sigh . . . at least Legal Writing and Research died with 1L year.

Giving Thanks

I've never been a huge fan of Thanksgiving (especially because I *hate* lots of traditional Thanksgiving foods; see stuffing/dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie...each and every one = yuck), but Thanksgiving break during law school has been a huge blessing.

Last year, my roommate & I both stayed in New Haven for the long weekend...our families are far away, and the hassle of traveling wasn't something we wanted to mess with around Thanksgiving. We watched a full-day "Jon & Kate Plus 8" marathon. I went to a big potluck dinner with a bunch of our classmates. We passed the rest of the weekend being lazy and ordering takeout and occasionally venturing out to neighborhood bars; it was glorious.

This year, both my roommates and I are all staying here. And I get SIX WHOLE DAYS off. Woo hoo! We're again having a massive Thanksgiving potluck (coordinated this year with a Google Spreadsheet - hallelujah!). We'll be joined throughout the long weekend by friends who share our love of wine, cookies, and board games. We'll sleep in, with no alarm to be heard. We might do some online shopping. There won't be any "Jon & Kate" this year, but I'm sure we'll find something else on TV worth watching (personally, I'm hoping a "Dog the Bounty Hunter" marathon magically appears).

Sometimes in the midst of source cites and long lectures and fruitless searches for international and unpublished law journal sources, I forget just how wonderful a life we've been blessed to be living: we spent last weekend with visiting friends for the epic Harvard-Yale weekend, where there was school spirit galore and beautiful weather and a bountiful tailgate and only a little bit of homework. Now, just one school day later, we get twice as much of a weekend. Lovely.

Happy Thanksgiving! How are you spending your holiday? Are other law students buckling down with work, or are you taking a real break?

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Women in Law Firms: II

Cat, I'm so glad you wrote your last post! The lovely ladies over at Ms. JD have talked about the issue of "to ring or not to ring" before, and it's amazing to me just how stark the difference was in how you were treated across different interviews. As far as I know, none of my engaged/married female friends here took off their ring while interviewing...but I think you raise a good point about how, given that you took your ring off eventually [and took a job where you didn't initially wear your ring], you might/might not be expected to "keep up appearances" that you're somehow some young, unattached female associate. Obviously, your summer firm will probably have events where your (amazing!) S.O. will be invited...and presumably, he'll want to go to at least a couple! But hopefully, your firm will realize that your work product matters more than your relationship status.

I guess I should feel lucky not to have had to make the "ring or no ring" decision, but I definitely had a couple of my own awkward "this is only happening to me because I'm a woman" moments during the interviewing process. At one callback, a mid-level associate vented to me about how her chosen practice area meant lots of long nights and not much flexibility to start having a family right now. I appreciated her honesty, but I don't think she would have shared the same "my biological clock is ticking!" horror stories with a man.

At another callback (admittedly, in a smaller Midwestern market....so take that for what you will), three different women tried to sell me on the firm by saying that it was a great lifestyle firm, that their hours were reasonable, and that the firm was really supportive of flexible work arrangements and going part-time, even for those on a partner track. All of this was lovely to hear, of course, and they're things I care about - but they were not things that I asked about. The women seemed to just assume that as a woman, I'd want to weigh them as serious considerations. Again, I appreciated their almost "big sister" approach, but I question whether I would have received the same treatment (or had more "down to business" conversations) had I been a man...or if the two of them who met their husbands while working at the firm would have mentioned that, either.

Of course, there's a fine line to walk...I sincerely appreciate that law firms are trying to be more lifestyle-friendly in ways that will help to address some of the problems that have kept women from staying/rising to the top in the past; but I also hope that those measures are being adopted to help women and men alike to have more balanced lifestyles, and that women aren't automatically being written off as unlikely to work hard to make partner, etc. It's nice that accommodations are there should we choose to take advantage of them, but it's important to make sure that choice is ours, not theirs.

Women in Law Firms

I'm going to use a little of my day off to write a post on something I got angry about while we were still in interviewing mode: my experience of interviewing as a woman at a law firm. No, I don't mean gender-discrimination exactly. I think that firms have made great strides towards gender equality. But, I noticed that they're most interested in a specific kind of woman . . .

I am in a committed long term relationship and I (usually) wear a symbol of that on my left ring finger. Before we started interviewing, an engaged friend told me that she wasn't planning to wear her engagement ring out of an abundance of caution. I thought that was ridiculous, and didn't take off my ring . . . until I realized that not only was no one giving me call back interviews, the interview seemed effectively over after my interviewer noticed my left hand, and I was getting a lot of very probing questions about how committed I actually was to working in a firm (one gentleman even asked me if I was considering leaving the workforce at any point). So, I took off my ring, got some call back interviews, and moved on with my life.

I don't want to go too far - it's totally possible that this just happened by chance, or that I improved after my first round of interviews, etc. Still, I noticed while doing call back interviews at the firms themselves how few female associates had kids and how many of the female partners with kids had toddlers and were in their forties. I also have a friend who is visibly pregnant, and who is a law student at a different but equally "good" school - and who got no job offers at all.

I totally understand the thinking that goes into not wanting to a hire a married/engaged woman. It's probably more likely she'll leave for maternity reasons, and also possibly less likely that she'll actually come to the firm since 2-career couples have more trouble committing to one geographic area. In a tough economic climate, firms want to take no chances. But that leaves me in a tough spot this summer. What am I supposed to do for the 10 weeks I'm interning at a firm? Not wear my ring? Not mention my S.O. at all, even though we'll be living together?

All of the above made my life more difficult, but didn't make really made angry. The part where I blew up was when I found out that my male friends who are married (and some of whom have kids) had no problems at all when interviewing. Rather than being a liability, marriage was an indication of responsibility and stability.

Veterans Day!

No, we don't have class off (although the 1Ls do.) But due to an amazing convergence of events, I have (almost) no class/other responsibilities this Wednesday - a day that I am usually out the door by 7.30 and not home until 9.30! I will be using my extra day to:

1. Catch up on a little sleep

2. Catch up on a lot of reading

3. Eat a sizeable amount of the pumpkin pie I bought this evening.

I promise, I would be grateful to our veterans even if I had to spend all day in school. Is it bad that I'm just a little more grateful to them since I don't?

Loans

I am unbelievably in debt. In the middle of 2L year, I owe $103,000 for my law school education. I know that this is the cost of going to law school, but the fact that I owe this much money even with substantial grant assistance from the school is, in my opinion, totally nuts.

I know that this much debt is typical. I also know that if I went to work for a fancy law firm, I would be able to pay it off. I know that HLS has great loan-assistance programs, and that I'll even get the 3rd year of school free if I commit to working in public service for 5 years.

Still, I don't understand it. Why do they need all that money? What do they do with it? Does anyone else think that this is as crazy as I do? (Because it seems like no one else here is much worried about it . . . ) Doesn't this seem especially crazy given that there were people who were not able to find fancy law firm jobs this year given the economic situation?