The sky is falling...

... or maybe it's just raining. Apparently, there is more rain on the way and that is bad news for people in NH and CT that have been flooded in the last few days. It seems like every time I turn to a news site or channel, there is some new disaster going on in some part of the world. Maybe the sky really is falling.

School is going good. 2L year is not completely different from 1L year, but at least I got to pick my classes (and boy, does that make a huge difference). I actually enjoy all of the classes I'm taking right now, although there are times when I wish that I wasn't taking the tax class. There are parts of it that just go right over my head. For the most part, I am able to follow what is going on and keep up with what she is saying. It doesn't help that we have so many days off this month. That is an important thing to consider for anyone thinking about going to school at Cardozo--the holidays! Last year, all of the Jewish holidays fell towards the end of the week and so we had several 4-day weekends. This year, they are in the middle of the week, so we never go to school for more than three days in a row. They also change the schedule around to make up for the missed classes. For example--in real life, tomorrow is a Wednesday, but at Cardozo, tomorrow is a Friday schedule. Then on Thursday, we have the day off for Yom Kippur. When we come back on Friday (in the real world), Cardozo is on a Thursday schedule. There is really no obvious logic behind what days are scheduled when and even the person who designed the schedule for the month has to refer to a calendar to keep is somewhat straight.

The IP classes I'm taking are great. When I was checking out law schools, Cardozo kept coming up as having the #6 ranked intellectual property program in the country. Well, if the quality of the teaching is any indication, then I can believe the program is ranked that high. The professors really know what they're talking about and are enthusiastic about the subject. In the last few weeks, I have had the opportunity to attend some wonderful guest lectures/symposiums on IP. To be honest, these great programs help me feel confident about my choice to attend Cardozo. The professors are obviously connected to or are some of the leading players in the field and that inspires confidence in my chances of succeeding in IP. Now if only certain other areas of the school could do the same (ahem, OCS).

I'm supposed to be working on my journal note right now. We are supposed to have 10 pages done by Friday. Luckily I have most of tomorrow and Thursday to work on that. The journal is an interesting experience because it seems obvious to me that some people really don't care about it or what it publishes. The articles that we have been editing may be by leaders in the field, but of the stuff I have worked on, nothing has really shined as a piece of good writing. I'm not trying to say they're terrible. I'm not much of a writer myself, but I believe that most of my writing is coherent and easily understandable to a reader. The papers we've been editing are barely comprehensible in my mind and supposedly, I'm being trained to understand this stuff. No wonder there is such an emphasis on legal writing--they know that the state of writing in law needs to be improved and so they're trying to help us out. In my opinion, there are a lot of improvements they could make in the process at Cardozo if they wanted to be more effective in their legal writing curriculum. I will say that they're trying, but some of it is not working out. They tried to make it so that our writing requirements will be evaluated by a faculty member. We were supposed to get a faculty member to agree to advise us on our paper. This is a great idea because we have such a well written and highly published faculty. The only problem is that they want to be writing and getting published; not advising some measly 2L who has no clue about what is relevant in the legal world. I guess the problem was prevalent enough that they made it so that we don't have an individual faculty advisor anymore for each student, rather, several faculty were assigned to each journal to peruse the notes from that journal and make suggestions after the editorial staff has done so. That's great if you're on law review and have some of the best writers around editing your note, but what if you're on a journal where the editors don't really care about anything besides the extra line on their resume that says "editor." Oh, well.