A Columbia Law Student Blog - Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil

August 25, 2006

And like that... he is gone

So that's it. RIP Three Years of Hell, June 2, 2003 to August 25, 2006. After all these words, there are only a few things left to say.

Two sites, the Imbroglio and the Volokh Conspiracy, have given me a slightly premature sendoff, and their words are very kind. (The site has received its final Kerr Package.) In answer to Ambimb's question as to why the site is closing, the answer is simply that the project is done. I don't know what my next big task will be. I've got two articles in process (much more difficult now I don't have free Lexis access). There's a few chapters written of a novel, a thought made more exciting by three friends who have already written books. The more I look at law and technology, the more I think that an open-source, XML-based framework for writing judicial opinions would bring caselaw closer to the public (as well as weaken the WEXIS duopoly). Perhaps that's a project worth looking into. Whatever the case, I'm sure I'll have no problem coming up with other tasks to occupy my (soon to dwindle rapidly) free time. This story was always meant to have an ending, and after all these months, it is finally here.

Thank you to the professors and students at Columbia Law School who made this journey such a rich experience. The same goes to the bloggers across the 'sphere who've linked, commented and otherwise spread the word. (A special note should go to Martin, who started me on this path.) My family, although asked not to comment on the blog itself, never failed to give me encouragement (and fodder for quite a few posts) throughout my years here.

And finally, of course, thank you to all of you who've read this site over the last three years and a bit. Journeys are made better with travelling companions, and I couldn't have asked for a finer bunch.

Best regards,

A.R.

Posted by Anthony at 7:09 PM | | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (1)

And for those without blogs...

Dear Wormwood:

Our correspondence over these last few years, put together, may be the single longest thing I've ever written. For old time's sake, however, I hope you'll allow me to give you one last list, a few things I hope you'll take with you in your own purgatorial journeys.

At long last, Wormwood, our conversation is at an end. Please take with you my best wishes, and may your time in law school bring you every joy possible.

Continue reading "And for those without blogs..." »

Posted by Anthony at 6:32 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Advice for 1Ls Starting a Blog: A Much Shorter Part II

Dear Wormwood:

I promised you two letters that might help your friend Scrimgouge in starting a 1L blog. The first letter focused mostly upon matters that any blogger, legal or otherwise, might find useful, be they technical or stylistic. But both you and Scrimgouge are now law student, which makes your efforts (and yes, dear Wormwood, I really am hoping that you too might start blogging) a bit different. So with the basics out of the way, I'd like to make a few quick notes and observations on what I've learned from law school blogging.

  1. Eschew anonymity: I've covered the reasons for this in one of my most oft-read posts. I know I bang on upon this, but anonymity certainly isn't as safe as you'd suspect. Besides, it's only polite that when you violate Godwin's Law, your opponent knows where to send the summons and complaint.
  2. Don't be surprised if your first year makes for the most interesting blogging: First year blogs are great, indeed positively addicting. Most 1Ls find themselves thrust into this bizarro land where Socratic Method suddenly makes sense as a pedagogical technique and everything--and I mean everything--starts being seen through the lense of law. On the other hand, 1L bloggers know that most of their readers aren't other law students, but their friends, family and associates from back in the "real world." The need to explain the pressure-cooker anxiety, and the urge to translate the experience to outsiders, makes for excellent writing.

    1L year is all about learning the game. 2L year, you merely refine it. By 3L, you're looking for another game to play because you know exactly how much class you can snooze through with minimal effect on your grades. Why do you think Scott Turow didn't write a sequel?

  3. Give your fellow students (and professors) some space: TYoH followed two pretty simple rules. First, don't mention a non-blogging professor by name. Refer to them instead as "Prof. Contracts" or "Prof. CivPro." It's not much, but it does mean that your blog entries won't end up as Google hits for their name. Secondly, if you have a story to tell about a fellow student, even if you're not mentioning them by name, shoot them a quick email with a draft of the post before you publish. They may not want their lives appearing online. Most of the time, no one will care, but it's a good habit that saves trouble later on.
  4. Blog about what fascinates you: Your text really comes alive when you have an interesting story to tell, or when you're passionate about an issue. All law student bloggers eventually create their own niche. I've posted quite a lot on gay marriage, for instance, but also on the appropriateness of professional status for legal practitioners (much more obscure) and strange tax issues. The Ambivalent Imbroglio should be one of the first reads for any law student thinking of becoming a public defender (or a prosecutor, for that matter). You don't have to comment fully on everything. If you find something interesting but don't have anything to say on it, an entry with a quick link is perfectly fine. Write in depth on those issues you care about.
  5. Engage others: Yesterday I wrote about connecting to other bloggers, but focused mostly on law professors or major players. Yet the real and lasting relationships in blogging will come from your own cohorts, your peers out there on the great wide internet. I've copied fair amounts of code from Heidi's effort. I've made fast friends with Chris. I've pimped Jeremy's book. These are the things I smile about when I remember TYoH, and I'll bet I do so a decade from now. Your cohort will be a source of support when things go wrong, both scholastically and technically. They'll also be something you'll carry away from law school.
  6. Keep a sense of humor: All too often, you'll be inspired to shout. When you do, put the post in "draft" and leave it to the next day. Remember that at the right moment and you'll thank me later.
  7. Keep in touch: Perhaps not advice, so much, but if there's a 1L out there starting a blog and they need a bit of help, don't hesitate to ask. I'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun reading your work in the years to come.

And that, dearest Wormwood, is that. I hope that Scrimgouge finds the next three years as exciting as I did.

Posted by Anthony at 4:45 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Welcome to the Continuum! or Passing the Torch

Say hello to Luis Villa, a 1L at Columbia law school. He's another coder turned lawyer, and his musings on code and law strike a cord.

If there's any other Columbia Law School bloggers who would like to tie their blogs into the Columbia Continuum, feel free to email me. (I will be keeping that site working, and maybe even improved, after this site goes quiet.)

UPDATE: Welcome also to Legal Economics, another Columbia 1L. This guy will have no trouble in Reg State. Too bad it's not a required class anymore, eh?

(Please note that the Continuum requires an RSS feed, so if you're on Blogger or Blogspot, you should get a Feedburner account.)

Posted by Anthony at 4:21 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Down to the Wire

Right... self-imposed deadline of tonight to finish this thing off, and still four or five posts that I need to complete. Right now all that quick typing in exams is coming in handy!

Posted by Anthony at 4:17 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 24, 2006

Advice for 1Ls Considering a Blog: A Very Long Part One

Dear Wormwood:

Who is this Scrimgouge whose email address you've forwarded me? It's certainly very flattering that he's asking you to ask me for advice on starting a law school blog. Nevertheless, there's no good reason for him to ask me at one remove. [1] You know full well I'd speak at the opening of a Doritos bag, and give away advice just as profligately.

Since your friend has asked, I'm happy to oblige. This particular project has run for over three years, and I'd like to think that in that time I've learned a few things that might help out a beginner. Of course, with the start of the fall semester, there is currently no shortage of advice for new law students, and I'm sure that similar wisdom about blogs is a dime a dozen. Hopefully your friend Scrimgouge will find one or two chestnuts here that he hasn't managed to gather elsewhere. Sadly for him, however, whatever angels generally look over my shoulder and force me to be brief have taken a tea break. What follows is quite lengthy indeed.

To help out a bit, I've divided the post into five sections that continue after the cut:
First, the commonplace.
Second, decide what you want to do.
Third, learn a bit about the technology.
Fourth, connect, connect, connect (to the Web).
Fifth, connect, connect, connect (to other bloggers).
Finally, have fun.

I hope it helps.

Continue reading "Advice for 1Ls Considering a Blog: A Very Long Part One" »

Posted by Anthony at 6:51 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Could Be Worse

A friend of mine just gave me a "post bar exam gift": a copy of Ichisada Miyazaki's China's Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China. From the first page:

Competition for a chance to take the civil service examinations began, if we may be allowed to exaggerate only a little, even before birth. . . . Prenatal care began as soon as a woman was known to be pregnant. . . .

Legal education system take note: you have something to aspire towards.

Posted by Anthony at 3:01 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Grumpy Old Man Alert: "In My Day, We Didn't Have the 'SONI' System Like You Youngsters. We Read Two Hundred Spam Emails From Every Society Imaginable, And We LIKED It."

Forwarded from a current Columbia Law Student, from one of Student Services' fantastic new staff members:

We have put in place a new system, the Student Organization News and Information (SONI) System, which allows student organizations and journals to email students directly and allows you to select to which student organization and journal email lists you wish to subscribe or unsubscribe.
We hope that you find this system a helpful way to receive information from student organizations, and a good way to cut down on your email traffic.

The SONI system works as follows. All students in the Law School are initially subscribed to each student organization's email list. You may choose to unsubscribe from any list, at which point you will no longer receive email from that particular organization or journal. If you wish, you can later choose to resubscribe.


What a fantastic idea! I'm sure this entry will attract a lot of groans from the Class of 2006 and older, though. They can take heart: scuttlebutt is that you still can't avoid the daily deluge of emails from the public interest folks.

Posted by Anthony at 10:36 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 23, 2006

New York Pungent

Strange circumstances conspire to bring me back to New York just before the blog ends. I drove through Jersey late last night. A blind man could smell his way up the Jersey Turnpike. My memory of New York will be forever mixed with the smell of garbage. Tokyo has its sweating salarymen with natto-breath crowding the subway. Summer winds blow stinging road dust into your eyes in London. But the smell of rotting dinners sets New York apart, simply because it's always there, and especially strong in the summer. No part of Manhattan escapes it. Walk up from a Times Square subway exit, the cleaned-up area for tourists, and spoilt meat assaults your nose. Walk down Broadway for a romantic meal and you're certain to pass at least three corners reeking of fish. Take a badly air-conditioned cab through slow traffic to a job interview on 54th street and you have a choice: roll up the windows and sweat or arrive with your suit smelling as if you cleaned a drainage ditch in it. Maybe as the years go by I'll grow nostalgic and I'll forget. But for the present, summer in New York is remembered with my nose.

Posted by Anthony at 8:33 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 18, 2006

The Beginning of the End

Dear Wormwood:

The bar exam is over. I've moved away from D.C. to Another State. [1] And today the last signs of law-student living left me: my free Lexis account no longer works.

I feel I shall soon have withdrawal symptoms.

In any event, it's about time for this project to end. After all, Wormwood, while your journey through law school is beginning, it's time for me to go on about my life. There's still a little left I have to say, mostly about blogging, school, and a few observations to send you on your way. But even of that, there's not much. I'm going home to visit my parents this weekend, but I should be back to writing on Monday.

So by way of forewarning, Wormwood, you can expect the final entry of TYoH to appear one week from today, on Friday, August 25th. Now I just have to get everything in order. There is, of course, a project plan.

[1]: Incidentally, if I hadn't believed it before, this move would have convinced me that the Scion xB is great value for money. Over 30 miles to the gallon and I can fit massive amounts of cargo in the back.

Posted by Anthony at 1:07 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Giving The Devil His Due

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Thailand: The Ultimate Holiday

By on Aug 28, 2010 in Blog, Featured Posts, Laura's Blog, Thailand

Looking South Thailand: The Ultimate Holiday

Our time in Asia was coming to a close. Our journey had taken us from incredible India to the breathtaking heights of Nepal. We witnessed the natural splendor of tragic Tibet and grew wildly fascinated with Big Brother China. We lingered in lackadaisical Laos and had our hearts broken in Burma and Cambodia. We’d survived countless overnight journeys on rickety buses, blackened our lungs on one too many rickshaws and even shared a train car with rats.

After five months in Asia, only one thing was certain: this continent had blown us away!

Packing so much into the past few months, we’d saved our last ten days for pure indulgence. On a flight from Bangkok headed south we were bound for the islands of southern Thailand.

It’s not so often in life that you have the chance to sit with a map in hand and ponder over which of thirty idyllic islands has your slice of heaven written all over it. Sitting at home on our living room floor mulling over atlases and guidebooks, these were the moments we’d dreamt about. This is why we stayed in all those Friday nights, why we scoped out drink deals and routinely cooked in. This is why we got rid of TV and cable bills and laughed off all the bad jokes that came our way for those antiquated cell phones we were hanging on to. Flying over the palm-fringed beaches of this tropical paradise, I realized we were now living our dream.

After strong recommendations from several traveling friends we’d met along the way, we settled on spending all our time on the island of Koh Pha Ngan. The island is notorious for hosting the famed full moon parties, which draw nearly 10,000 visitors to the island each month to partake in every hedonistic pleasure imaginable. Looking for nothing more than sun, surf and sand, this was clearly not our draw. We had our hearts set on a secluded area of the island, along the white, sandy, remote beach of Thong Nai Pan Noi.

One flight, one bus ride, one ferry and one rickshaw ride later, and we finally arrived to our destination. Here we found a stark, white beach with piles of white ‘pillowy’ sand. The beach sits at the shores of a bay with mint-colored water and surrounded by lush forests. Ode to our new home sweet home!

We’d booked ourselves a basic beachside bungalow. The wooden hut was plain and simple, offering all the amenities two beach bums might need. We were equipped with the simple pleasures: a blossoming tree of frangipani outside our front door to shade our little haven from the sun, a bucket of water to wash the beach off our salt-water sticky feet and a ceiling fan to cool down our sun-kissed bods at night. What else could ya need?

In the life of a traveler, our days are consumed with decisions. Where will we sleep tonight? Where are we going next? How many days will we stay there? Will we need a visa? Where will we eat for breakfast? How will we get there? How much does the metro cost? Which bus do we need to take? Is this guy ripping us off? Will anyone speak English? How much do we need to tip? Where’s the closest ATM?

Our goal in southern Thailand was to take every question, every decision, out of the equation. And that’s just what we did. Our greatest challenge each day was deciding when to flip our bronzing bodies and which beachside joint served up the strongest cocktails.

When I think back on the fondest memories of my twenty eight years of life, I tend to remember the moments not days. Thinking back on our time in our Thailand paradise, these moments are so vivid…

Beginning each day lingering over heaping plates of fresh fruit…Kayaking out in the open sea over turquoise waters…Burying myself in a book while waves lapped up against me on the water’s edge. Snorkeling with schools of brightly colored fish…Runs up the cliff for breathtaking views of the bay…The smooth, citrusy taste of banana and mango shakes – my afternoon thirst quencher…Endless cocktail hours at sunset over one too many mojitos…Indulging in spicy coconut curries and king prawns the size of your head…Feet in the sand under a blanket of stars…Swimming in the ocean as monsoon rains crashed down all around me…Reminding myself over and over how lucky I am to be living this life…

Yes, this is exactly why I stayed in all those Friday nights.

pixel Thailand: The Ultimate Holiday

Comments (3)

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  1. Becky says:
    September 11, 2010 at 4:20 pm

    Wait a second. You’re trying to tell me, Asia is better than going to McFadden’s on a Friday night? You’re nuts! No way beautiful beaches, sun-kissed bodies, and beachside bungalows beat frat guys, drink deals, and over crowded bars. By the way, whose watching your cell phone while your gone? I’d like to use that vintage technology if its available.

  2. roundwego says:
    September 5, 2010 at 12:42 pm

    @Jaime – Seems like yesterday we were in your shoes, planning away and dreaming of our departure for our RTW trip. It’s surreal it’s actually happening and yes, worth every single sacrifice and then some. Actually, jealous you still have it all ahead of you. We are in Italy now, on the last stop of our time in Europe before three months in Africa. Let us know if we can be of any help as you finalize details for your journey. Happy trails!

  3. Jaime D. says:
    August 30, 2010 at 3:07 pm

    Wow sounds like yall have had great time so far. This is great motivation for me as I prepare for my RTW trip. I still have 11 months to go but I keep telling my self all these weekends I stay in are going to payoff in the end. Well after reading this NOW I KNOW they WILL!!! Congrats on completing Asia! Where yall going to next???