Saturday, May 19, 2007

Guess who's back

Greetings. A full week and two days without a new post on WMBW. The reason for my sudden unexplained lack of wackiness (at least wackiness available for web viewing) is a little thing the Law Review calls "petitioning" and that I call "hell."

Basically, what happens is this: the Law Review editors give you 300 pages of stuff. The stuff includes one "main case" and a bunch of related cases, articles, book excerpts, blog posts, etc. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read it all closely and come up with 10 pages of intelligent prose accompanied by 10-15 pages of intelligent footnotes. This is what is known as a case comment. To make matters worse, you have to do it in no more than a fortnight, and you have to use a referencing style that you have never been taught because those goons over at the Harvard L. Rev. have everyone convinced that their way is the only way to do footnotes.

In my case, it was even worse because my fortnight was cut down to about a week. All last weekend I was in Dallas, Texas visiting family, and starting on Tuesday, I'll be in Fargo, North Dakota getting trained. So why am I posting now if I have such short time to finish? I am what you call "burnt out." I discovered that doing this 14 hours a day eventually has that effect. A non-law related activity for 15 minutes is what I need.

After the petition thing is over, I can comment on the case. Right now, I'm required to not discuss it, at least not with any other U of M 1Ls. I don't know if any of them read this blog, so I better be safe.

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