How many law students does it take to buy a greeting card?

"I like justice scalia this week... for the next couple of weeks..." - This from Professor Schnapper, most likely in favor of the fact that he wrote the opinion for Thompson. Anyways, the greeting card in question is for a classmate who just had a baby! Schnapper would like the whole class to give her a card - he's a bear in the courtroom, but occasionally his grandfatherliness goes beyond his preference for cardigans perfectly coordinated to his sky-blue eyes and into a fondness for the increasing faction of babies in our classroom.

Okay, so far there are now only two and most of the time, the new mothers watch from the remote viewing room, but they come in occasionally and Schnapper will reign in his excited utterances (bad law pun) and lecture at a whisper. I'm telling you, I missed the memo that I was not only supposed to secure the appropriate internship in my 1L year (in order to get the summer associateship in order to get the offer...), but that I was also supposed to secure a suitable progenitor in my 1L year (in order to get married in my 2L year in order to give birth in my 3L). I might have taken a page from last year's burst of babies in the 3L class, but somehow, my genetic testing kit just hadn't come in in time to really jump on it. Ah well - I didn't join law review either. I am such a rebel!

Rebel without a Blue Book

Cue abrupt segue that eventually ties back into something peripherally related to the above paragraph, but only insofar as it relates to the class itself and not really anything I actually wrote about: For some reason, this year's mediation clinic has been besot by attorneys. Last year we had a few attorneys involved, but mostly handled things before claims had been filed. This year, it's a whole 'nother ball game and I'd warrant over half of the cases we've handled have been referred with an impending court date and plenty of legal papers.

You learn a lot from these sorts of cases, unquestionably: Mostly a lot about how much attorneys can totally screw things up and how shockingly unprofessional some people with a J.D. can be, but sometimes other things as well. Of course, when we deal with employment discrimination cases, there are a lot of cases of extreme power imbalance. It's hard to prove employment discrimination - even in a namby pamby hippy circuit like the 9th - and plaintiff side lawyers know this. They work on contingency, so they don't take a lot of cases that aren't pretty sterling. This means there are a lot of pro se plaintiffs out there who feel wronged, possibly justifiably so, but have no clue how to articulate these wrongs into legal claims. And of course on the other side are attorney. Outside counsel, inside counsel, and lord knows how many levels of well trained associates underneath them doing all their research.

This in turn means, the intake process can be very different for both sides. I will talk with an employee and will get a story - an often heart-wrenching, thoroughly detailed, fit-for-tv story with all the juicy bits bursting at each bite. Then I will talk with the representative - or more likely his paralegal/receptionist/secretary until I receive a "mediation brief" presumably actually penned by the person planning to attend and recieved about ten days after the time we requested it be sent in - and I will get a review course on employment discrimination law!(See I told you there was some connection, sort of)

This can make for some interesting challenges for the mediators, since this evidences that the parties will be speaking entirely different languages and have entirely different perspectives of silly words like "right" and "wrong" and "is"... On the other hand, it's perversely pleasant for me to skim through them. "Oh yeah, that's what goes into a prima facia case - that's totally McDonnell Douglas!! But what if she argued more of a mixed motive kind of thing, but I guess from her facts..."  I feel oddly guilty about getting this sort pleasure out of reading that the employee is likely about to be screwed if we can't think of some good non-legal consequences to the company for letting this go forward.

At any rate, enough with this schooling nonsense! I have spring fever, damnit!!! I am really hoping that Puxatawny Phil's inability to notice his shadow (I suspect they blindfolded him this year in exasperation with the cold weather) is a good indicator of SPRING!! Because regardless, I have the aforementioned Primaveran Ague.

Signs of this (aside from the need to wear funny flower hats while pouting in repurposed hawaiian shirts) include: 

1. An inability to focus in general. Last week I may have been pondering the depths and joys of the fact that all the people we love will drift away or, well, die (DRIFT OR DIE!! sounds like a new NBC game show). This week I am more likely to be pondering the contours of walls and when a new stoner movie will include a scene where the protagonist steals some cell phones and then when confronted by the owner or police tries to wave his hand and say "these are not the droids you're looking for" - yeah. Spring.

2. A desire to burn all of my possessions and begin again. I am craving one contiguous wardrobe of quirky clothing that represents "me" as my new beginnings emerge. Somehow I envision this involving polka dots, colored linings, houndstooth, detailed and striking patterned tights, cleverly crafted and colored suede shoes that cost most than my monthly grocery budget, and things falling under the general territory of "accents"... this will fade in a few weeks, but the "new me" of spring is again the person contemplating bad puns in stoner movies...

Ok, but with more colorful flower hats!!!

Or maybe really I'm just totally still running high off the fumes of my admiration for Mondo Guerra's Project Runway stint (and unjustly awarded SECOND PLACE [?!?!?!?!?!?!]):

Hey, it's closer to flower hats!

3. Did I mention distractability. Hey here's another awesome flower hat that I am sooooo gonna have to get after burning my possessions and building a wardrobe off of houndstooth:

Oh and dude, a dress for when you want to go shopping but keep forgetting your semi-plastic "permanent" eco-friendly bags in the back of the closet where you threw them after buying twenty of them:

But I digress from a digression possibly involving a digression.

Hey, a squirrel! (Quick run away, run away, before I remember you're here... )