Citation Hell

I think I have developed a love/hate relationship with the Bluebook.

Because I Love Moot Court and All That

From Discourse dot Net:

This case, pitting the fatal-paprika-allergy-warning dog vs. the co-worker with the serious allergy to canines has great facts and a knotty legal problem — surely it is coming to a moot court or mock trial near you?

Fearing a fatal encounter with paprika, Ms. Kysel’s parents and grandparents chipped in to buy her an allergy-detection dog, which works much like a narcotics-sniffing dog. After she had extensive talks with her employer, the City of Indianapolis, officials gave her permission to take the dog to work. The golden retriever, named Penny, cost her family $10,000 — it jumps up on Ms. Kysel whenever it detects paprika.

On the first day Ms. Kysel took Penny to work, one of her co-workers suffered an asthma attack because she is allergic to dogs. That afternoon Ms. Kysel was stunned when her boss told her that she could no longer take the dog to work, or if she felt she could not report to work without Penny, she could go on indefinite unpaid leave. She was ineligible for unemployment compensation because of the limbo she was put in.

Perfect.

This would be a good problem for maybe a national team or the class we have.  Unfortunately our first-year Criminal Procedure competition focuses on the Fourth Amendment.

I’ll have to look into this one more.

Moot Court

So my first class of the term was the Moot Court class (Appellate Advocacy in some schools) last night.  My impressions coming out are varied.

The professor is…interesting.  Between what I noticed last night and what I heard today from a friend, he’s a tough grader.  He even said getting an A was hard (which is understandable considering the brief we have to write), but he came across a little odd.  Being on the Moot Court Board myself (as well as several others in the class), I think we spent too much time going over the procedure of the competition part of the class as opposed to the brief (which few have written anything like before).

Another thing he went on and on about was staples.  He spent maybe 2 or 3 minutes on “paper staples” and how he didn’t want to see them.  I’m more surprised that people are that lazy — how hard is it to just staple your documents?

After class, I read through the textbook we have, and noticed a lot of other rules that moot court competitions have.  Eek!

Also, we did an exercise where we had to interview another member of the class and introduce them to the class at the podium (yeah, I know, it’s law school and we’re doing high school things, but whatever).  The ubiquitous nature of Facebook made it easy for me to interview my friend, although he did say I came to law school to be the “Mother Teresa of law,” which was not really what I said, but still somewhat amusing.

The professor asked a lot of questions during the introduction part, and was not above making cracks about our home states (New Jersey, Texas, and a few about THE Ohio State University in particular).  Some students are getting a little testy.  Time will tell if that goes away.