The Great One takes on Substantive Due Process

Spring semester exams are upon us.  First up, Con Law, tomorrow morning.

One of the thorny topics that has come up along the way: substantive due process, which could be summed up as the court intervening when they believe that life, liberty, and property have been taken away in ways they don't like/that make them uncomfortable.  One of the themes of the course has been moving past our own personal beliefs in thinking through the line of cases and looking at them on the basis of the constitution, the textual check on the democratic process.  With respect to judicial review, our prof's general position has been that once they reach a conclusion concerning constitutionality, the court's job is done.  The political implications and public reaction are none of their business.  

Tomorrow, I may spend an hour writing an essay fleshing it all out.  For now, I'll let the Rock sum it up. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETShkg-65fY

Hey, it's Enrico Pallazo!

Today in Property, takings and the question of conceptual severance. Can a piece of land be parceled out, or will it be treated as a whole, when affected by government regulation?

One of the cases that came up was Palazzolo v. RI, where a corporation, which was basically one guy, bought some land, dissolved for failure to pay incorporation taxes, then the guy took title.   His name was Palazzolo.

With it being the last week of class, student attention is understandably flagging.  Once I saw this, the first thing that I thought was, "Hey, it's Enrico Pallazo!"

Enjoy.

Thanks for the Memories

One of the things that I've discovered about law school is that it takes up prime real estate in the minds of law students, myself included.  Since most of us didn't know each other before school, it's the common experience that we can talk about, since we're going through it together, and it's a topic that comes up in most every conversation.  Even when we don't want to talk about law school, we still wind up talking about it...or talking about how much we hate talking about it, and I'm guilty as charged. 

So, now for something completely different...

These last few weeks, the preaching at church has revolved around the different types of songs in the Bible: songs of longing, love, and joy.  This evening, we went into Psalm 126 and looked at Israel's "Anti-Piracy Initiatives," the ways in which they adapted to exile and kept the Babylonians from stealing their songs.  [Sidebar: I'm focusing this post on how that functions at the personal/individual level; the sermon was loaded with implications for a community, which merit a whole 'nother series of reflections, each accompanied by action.]

Jamie pointed out that one of the ways they did this was remembering what God had done. He likened it to pressing the repeat button after hearing a song that you like, listening again and getting the track into your system, and suggested that specific spiritual practices can do the same thing in our lives.  It's a form of playlist creation, if you will.    That resonated with me on several levels. 

First, it's something I do all the time.  After I've been to a particularly memorable concert, I hit up Setlist.fm and make a playlist based on the show.  While I can't recreate the show, listening to the tracks in the order I heard them triggers memories, and music I listen to this way stays with me for quite some time.  Did it with Springsteen, Jonsi, Fleet Foxes, and now Flogging Molly, and those songs have taken up residence in my headspace. So the metaphor makes sense to me.

Second, the spiritual disciplines are things I'd like to develop, and I like the idea that they're a means of protecting our songs.  One of my mantras this year has been that law school is not my life.  It's a part of it, but it's nothing close to the full thing.  Fifteen years from now, I want to remember it that way.  Writing things down, from the things that have divine fingerprints all over them to those which simply mark the joys and traumas of life, is one way to do just that. 

While I trust my memory with a lot of things, I usually turn to the written record when I don't have a vivid impression of something.  Having that record helps balance out the scales when some of those vivid impressions are painful ones, which can all too easily repeat themselves and distort my memories of a relationship, community, or phase of life.  Also, there are a lot of things that don't leave vivid impressions in my mind, but that give shape to life.  Having stuff on paper helps to sort through the haze that builds up in my mind over time.  All the more reason to write these things down.

I've never really been consistent with journaling, and I'd like to be.  So here's my first effort at chronicling life through a top-ten list. In mostly-chronological order, here's this weekend's top ten. Some of the things on here were special events, while others were the stuff of life, the things that you and I could do on any given day.  Each of them is something that I'd like to remember.

1. Kicking it off with a long run down Lake Shore Drive.  If you'd told me back in November that the Chicago weather would pull me away from the treadmill and onto the streets in mid-February, I'd have been mildly skeptical, to put it mildly.  I'd have been even more skeptical of claims that said run would last for an hour, and that I'd go further south down the path than ever before...and I'd have been wrong.
2. A healthy home-cooked dinner, ready in 30 minutes. Spicy chicken cutlets, along with steamed broccoli and rice, for the win.  I'm with Bittman: Cooking Solves Everything.
3. Friday Night Movie: 50/50. Well-written and well-played, with appropriate doses of levity and comedy.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt kills it as the world's most unlikely 20-something cancer patient, while Anna Kendrick has my actress crush list on lockdown.
4. Saturday morning breakfast.
   My first attempt at making banana pancakes was a great success.  That's going to happen again. 
5. Lunches on the go: Harold's Fried Chicken on Saturday, and Big Star on Sunday.  Have I mentioned that I love my neighborhood?  These are two of the reasons why. 
6. Flogging Molly at the Aragon Ballroom.  Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears joined The Middle East and Daniel Ellsworth & the Great Lakes on my personal Mount Rushmore of "Great Opening Acts I'd Never Heard of Before Seeing Them Live."  Flogging Molly was great; they played with the polish of a band that's been playing together for years, and the enthusiasm of a band playing for this crowd for the first time.  All my favorites, plus three or four more that I listened to about a half-dozen times each in the 24 hours after the show.   [One frustration from the night: the mosh pits that broke out near me when it was time to dance: you're never too young to be too old for those things!]
7. Caroloke in Lincoln Square.  A friend got a private room at Lincoln Karaoke to celebrate her birthday, and we had a blast.  It was my first time doing Noraebang-style karaoke since Korea, and we had a fun group of people, who weren't shy about using all four mics and doing group singalongs.
8. Sunday Worship at Urban Village Church, Wicker Park. 
   This could be an entire post in itself; needless to say, I love my church, and am feeling more and more connected to this community. Worshiping here every week structures my life around something than the academic calendar, and after a decade or so of following Jesus, I'm grateful for the ever-evolving ways in which I'm affected by music, preaching, and the Eucharist.  All three spoke to me this week.
9. Koyanisqaatsi.  This 1982 documentary, now on Hulu, was mentioned in a story on Joshua Bell's Washington DC subway concert, linked from a friend's blog.  I watched it tonight, and it was unlike any other film I've ever seen.  There's no dialogue, and with no real characters, it's hard to discern a plot, making the film almost entirely dependent on the strength of the atmosphere it creates through time-lapse photography and music.  And it was compelling.  The film gets its title from a Hopi term meaning "chaotic life," "life out of balance," or "a state of life that calls for another way of being." Highly appropriate viewing going into Ash Wednesday.
10. Being on pace going into a Wednesday deadline.
    Between the work my writing partner had already done and the time I spent at coffee shops over the last few days, we've made enough progress on the brief that I feel good about it with two days to go, and never once felt guilty about enjoying items 1-9 on this list.

There's a Ghost in the House

Today in Property,  Stambovsky v. Ackley, quite possibly the most entertaining case we've read this year.  The short story: there's this house that has a reputation of being haunted/possessed by poltergeists. The owner had publicized this in national magazines like Reader's Digest, but didn’t tell the buyer when she tried to sell it.  Once the buyers learned about the house's reputation, they sued to get out of the contract. The opinion is filled with allusions to Hamlet's ghost, Ghostbusters, and other gems like:
"as a matter of law, the house is haunted."
"Applying the strict rule of caveat emptor to a contract involving a house possessed by poltergeists conjures up visions of a psychic or medium routinely occupying the structural engineer and Terminix man on an inspection of every home subject to a contract of sale."
"Finally, if the language of the contract is to be construed as broadly as defendant urges to encompass the presence of poltergeists in the house, it cannot be said that she has delivered the premises 'vacant' in accordance with her obligation."

Reminds me of the first-ever Treehouse of Horror, where the Simpsons move into a mansion, which they got for an unbelievably low price.  The moving man knows that there's a curse on the house, and the seller presumably knew too.  Provided that Homer, Marge and the kids can survive the house (and one another), they just might have legal recourse. 

That is, unless you take Mr. Bloot's word that he did inform Homer that the house was built on an ancient Indian burial ground.

Mr. Bloot?  Homer Simpson here.  When you sold me this house, you forgot to
   mention one little thing:  YOU DIDN'T TELL ME IT WAS BUILT ON AN INDIAN BURIAL
   GROUND!  ...   NO YOU DIDN'T!  ...  Well, that's not <my> recollection. ...
   Yeah?  Well, all right, goodbye!  [angrily hangs up]  He said he mentioned
   it five or six times.
   -- Homer, ``Bad Dream House'' in ``Treehouse of Horror''
   

Watch the clip: http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/64929/detail/

Improper Lineups

This semester's legal writing class revolves around writing persuasive memos.  Our topic: improper police lineups and the exclusion of evidence derived from such lineups at trial. 

Just to be clear, this isn't necessarily an improper lineup.

Neither is this (although suggestivity and misidentification, which come up often in the literature, are at the heart of the film).

Anticipatory Rebuttal

In our legal writing class, we're going through the shape and content of arguments that are included in persuasive legal writing, ie, the briefs that are submitted to the court.

One strategy to employ when you know that your opponent has a particularly strong point that they will make against you: mention it in your own brief and make the case against it. They call that anticipatory rebuttal, and it's preferable to just ignoring the point or claiming that the judges were on crack.

This happens in a lot of different settings, not just legal briefs.  Here's the best example of anticipatory rebuttal that I've seen: the final battle from 8 Mile.  Take it down, Mr. Mathers.

LOTR as Property Law

Turns out that I'm not the first law student to draw this analogy.  Jacob Kaufman, a Canadian law student, did as much a few years back, and his initial post, treating the film like a fact pattern,  was linked and commented on via the Volokh Conspiracy.

My take is forthcoming, along with some other stuff.  Watch this space.