May Flowers: A Grace Manifesto

Ancient writers would call on the muses to inspire them as they prepared to weave their tales. I don't wish to weave an inspired tale, but rather tell it truthfully as it should be told, so I have asked the Holy Spirit to assist my tongue [keystrokes] to proclaim the events as they really happened.

Backing up to January of this year, finding out I was first in my law school class was overwhelming and humbling. After prostrating myself before God and thanking Him for his enabling power (see John 15:4, Without Him we can do nothing), I enjoyed the next few weeks eating hors d'ouevres with attorneys and feeling like hard work pays off. But during the semester I noticed my footsteps were a bit heavier, putting in the hours studying was a bit more onerous. When something you love becomes a mere contest, rather than vice versa, scary things happen. For me, I love the order and logical coherency of the law (especially the La. Civ. Code). But as March turned into April, I realized that it's not all a bed of roses; the crucible of 2 weeks of 4-hour law school exams had returned again.

The weeks leading up to H-hour were brutal. For not just me, but every law student across the country. My wife tried telling me I was hitting it too hard, I needed to exercise more, etc., and she was right (alas!). By the time I was 25% through with exam period, I had worked myself into a frenzy of studying and anxiety that I had hopeless insomnia, a thing I had never experienced before. All I could do was focus during the day as much as I could and literally throw myself on God's mercy. It was the hardest 2 weeks of my young life thus far.

The following week I started clerking with a Baton Rouge law firm, as well as working on a law review write-on paper over the next two and a half weeks. Just this past week grades came out, and I prostrated myself in worship...again.

With a handicap of 3-4 hours of sleep per night, I actually did better than the semester before.

This blog is over five years old. When I first started it I was a bumbling kid coming out of high school, and apparently, well, now, I'm something or someone a bit different. And perhaps, now this blog is subject to review by important people now since it's title makes it appear first on a Google search. I see no reason to discontinue the transparency my understanding of why things happen the way they do. Hard work pays off, but it was the enabling grace of God that makes hard work fruitful (see Psalm 75:5-6, that promotion comes from God).

Thus, 2009 lessons learned:

1. Whatever work you set your hand to doing, you have to love it if you want to either do well or enjoy your life, or both.
2. The Lord gives and takes away; blessed be the Name of the Lord.
3. The brain is a place where investments are made. If you make the necessary deposits, the knowledge you need will be available for withdrawal, even under non-ideal circumstances.

March

In the last month of blog news...
I'll start from tomorrow and work backwards. This week is nice because I'm doing something other than keeping my head buried in books on several weeknights. I can't help feeling like a bad boy, but tomorrow I'm going to see Jeremy Camp, Hawk Nelson, etc. in concert, tonight I'm going to the law school production of "Assault & Flattery," and last night I went to a scholarship reception. In the past week, I wrapped up my appellate advocacy class. I got to write an appellate brief and then orally argue in front of 2 "judges" why a noncompetition agreement signed by "my client" is not enforceable due to nullity. It was a semester-long case and it felt really good to be able to put everything I worked on into a final presentation in the "Moot Circuit" court. Amanda and I celebrated her 24th birthday this past weekend and conincidentally ended up eating out Friday through Sunday which was spoilingly nice, as well as going to the Baton Rouge zoo for the first time and getting to pet giraffes. Went to Acquire the Fire a couple weeks ago and enjoyed a great weekend seeking God with a bunch of high school kids. Several weeks ago I locked down summer employment at real legal firms that do real cases, so that is thrilling. And before that I evaded Sasquatch, the subject matter [jurisdiction] of the last post.

I'm sure other stuff happened in the last month that is actually more notable than what I am presenting but all I can think of is the dormant commerce clause, the vices of consent, bad faith acquisitive prescription, claim and rule preclusion, R.S. 23:921, and Officer McFadden.

Evading Sasquatch

After calling several campgrounds the morning of the day we were supposed to go camping and being told "there's no room in the inn," I finally found a place that had open tent sites over the Mardi Gras break: Chicot State Park in Ville Platte, Louisiana.

Amanda and I finally kicked into high gear at noon, packing our bags and getting supplies for the trip. Singing songs and bubbling with excitement we piled all our belongings, strangely including a laptop computer containing a DVD movie and a set of Chinese checkers, into my red Chevy pickup and cruised on down the road. Pretty smooth sailing till just past Opelousas, where the Mapquest directions were wrong again and again. Before we knew it, a fella at the Cabot Power Plant was telling us, "Shore, yessir, y'can drive right through the plant down them gravel roads and get to the park that way."

After discovering that the dirt roads dead-ended at someone's property with a lot of barking and snarling dogs, we reversed course and finally arrived at the park as the sun was preparing to set. We drove around looking for a site and found to our dismay that it was the zoo. The sites were right next to each other and you would have thought it was the annual campers' convention. It was a metropolis of tents.

With rays of sunshine slipping below the horizon, my wife and I decided on a whim to do the "primitive camping" site. This is the deal where you park and then walk to your campsite. 2 mile hike to be exact. Out into the middle of the swampy woods where if you yelled no one but the raccoons and alligators and wild hogs oh my would hear you. Virtually running up and down the wooded hills, we arrived at a breathtaking site. Our elevated campsite was surrounded by a swampy lake. Very pretty.

We scrambled to set up a campfire as the sun slipped behind the horizon. Amidst a few sparks of fire and our flashlights, we set up the tent in the dark, with the owls already beginning to hoot.

True confession: If my wife had not been there, I don't know if the tent construction would have happened. I took one look at the instructions beneath my flashlight and knew that they were written by someone who spoke English as a second language, or perhaps a third or fourth. After she calmed me down, we got the thing established in less than an hour, built a roaring fire and ate hot dogs and marshmallows.

Things were going smooth, nice and wonderful until a wild beast started walking circles around our campsite just beyond the trees. I say "wild beast" because we never did find out what it was. But for the better part of an hour, we did huddle inside the tent, pointing our flashlights out at the trees and waiting for the sasquatch, or black bear, or whatever it was, to reveal itself. All I know is that sounded large enough to be a small man. Maybe I'm glad we never found out what it was. (Maybe it was a small man.)

But, oh, the stars! I've never seen them like that. I used to read about God promising Abraham and saying, "Abe, see if you can number the stars," of course with the latent idea that "No, Abe, you can't." I always used to think under my breath, "where I live, you can count 'em." Not this night. It was hard to find areas in the sky that were not "star".

You would think that three layers of clothes and a sleeping bag in Louisiana in February would be warm enough. But you'd be wrong in so thinking. It was frigid.

The evening of the next day after various wandering adventures in the woods, it was a little hard to say goodbye. As we hiked back to civilization, I thought to myself, "I could do this again." By the time I was asleep in my own bed that night, I had begun to second-guess that sentiment.

On Being a 1.5L

It's hard to believe that after last semester and the humbling and breathtaking success that it brought has come and gone, I'm nearly 1/3 done with a subsequent semester. On-campus interviewing has been going well. Getting the chance to get to know other attorneys in Baton Rouge who can joke about the "a fortiori" argument from Traditions class and to actually understand what they're talking about when they say they're trying to leap over the federal subject matter jurisdiction amount in question requirement for a case ...these things are rewarding.

Prof. Obligations is a favorite of mine. He expects you to be able to recite the facts of the cases in class; yet, he's a genuinely kind man, rewarding you with a smile and a nod of affirmation when you perform. Obligations, thus far, seems just to be a more cranial approach to the theory of contracts. The notable difference seems to be that we can make Great Uncle Fred's promise to give a gift enforceable, unlike the other 49 states, as long as Uncle Fred got a notary and two witnesses to sign the donation document.

Prof. Con Law runs a tight ship. Involving "stand and deliver" case recitation, it really is a class that makes you think on your feet. It's a class that squeezes the apathy out and replaces concern over such previously unthought-of questions as whether or not the Article III "case or controversy requirements" necessarily demand that the Supreme Court never issue an advisory opinion. Con Law is a class that has grown on me, a growth that is analgous to some point on a continuum between the growth of a young seed into a beautiful tree and the growth of an ingrown toenail. [pause for polite chuckling and other forms of laughter] All humour[s] aside, when I think of the democractic process and think of the power of the people to have created and later amend the Constitution, I cannot help but subscribe to the "Who's Ya Daddy" theory of law.

Prof. CivPro has become a legend in my book. 'Nuff said. And, of course, he teaches on such wonderful subject matter [jurisdiction]. It's no secret that all law students aspire to one day practice in the area of Civil Procedure.

Prof. L.R.&W. is teaching us how to write appellate briefs and conduct appellate oral arguments. My assignment this semester is to destroy a noncompetition agreement that my "client" signed, claiming that public policy, statutory construction and jurisprudential rulings demand that this agreement be nullified.

Prof. ACJ is teaching us about the police function and Constitutional limits on police behavior. We get to ponder on such questions as whether it violates a defendant's 4th Amendment rights for a policeman in a chopper to hover at 400 feet and look into the defendant's greenhouse, to obtain probable cause for issuance of a warrant to search aforementioned weedhouse...I mean greenhouse...for Mari J. This is probably my favorite class to read for. The recurring question becomes, "Should the criminal go free [and the evidence obtained unconstitutionally be suppressed] just because the constable has blundered?" Surprisingly, I find myself answering yes a few times, though I remain unyieldingly conservative in many cases.

Prof. Property, who called on me the first day of class, is probably the fastest talker in the Southeast. But she is also passionate about her area of knowledge and gives thorough lectures. Property is a very interesting area of law that involves study of a lot of "technical" rules and fact scenarios with regard to, for example, the navigability of lakes and rivers and whether or not a chandelier is a component part of a building such that under the Civil Code it must be included in the sale of a home. If there was ever a course that made me want to get my civil code autographed, it's this one. By Prof. Carroll. And of course, Prof. Yiannopoulous.

With that said, hopefully I'll be back before the end of the semester to blog again.
And hopefully it will be something actually interesting to the masses of humanity.

Law Professor Quote of the Day...Month...Year

"Why was there chicken wire around the marijuana? To keep deer out! You don’t want to see Bambi running around out in the road looking like he’s been smoking cigars and drinking brandy at Churchill’s, talking bad about Joe Stalin and saying nice thinks about FDR!"

Anything Can Happen

When it comes to dining at the spread of educational topics in law school, nothing is off limits. Though most days we get to make another notch under our desk for the umpteenth time we've encountered the word "reasonable" or one of its relatives, there are moments of surprise.

For example, in property law, today's reading and tomorrow's lecture involves a discussion of ownership and use rights of oxbow lakes.

The Hudson River Miracle

The Story