Chattanooga Republican Wants to Get in Your Pants

What’s the point of being in gubbiment if you can’t oppress non white, non Xtian, non straight people and women?

Sounds like “white straight” male privilege.

Well, purely from a jobs perspective, this is a pretty decent bill.

/Stinque legal emergencia/

So I’m taking this business law class this quarter, and it turns out that it’s a comprehensive review of the entire US legal system(!). Law School 101. The professor used to be US military, and he goes down the line in class barking out questions until he gets the answer he’s looking for.

Q “What’s the highest court in Washington!?”
A “The Washington State Supreme Court, sir!”
Q “What are the next highest courts!?”
A “The court of appeals and then the district court and then… and then… The People’s Court? IDONTKNOW–aaaahhhhhhh!!!!!1!!

Anyway, we have six (!) chapters of reading due for the next class, approximately 240 pages. I consider myself a fairly resourceful student, but is there a secret to memorizing massive amounts of information in a week or less?? I wish it were the Matrix and that I could just download the three-inch-thick book into my brain.

@¡Andrew!: is there a secret to memorizing massive amounts of information in a week or less?

Is crystal meth legal in Washington?

If you think the TSA is bad, just wait until you have to deal with the Restroom Security Administration.

Is there a secret to memorizing massive amounts of information in a week or less?

In law school I reduced my class notes to an outline, supplemented it with information from the textbook, then shrunk the big outline by editing out what I thought I didn’t need to know, then shrunk the resulting outline to 10 pages or less. Graduated in the top 10% so that method clearly worked, at least for me.

@nojo: There’s a reason that the new name for Orting, WA, is Snorting.

In undergrad, my peeps swore by Ritalin, and now everyone takes Adderall. I’m too scared to ask the law students.

@blogenfreude: Exxxselent.

@¡Andrew!: Here’s what I did:

First time through read slowly and carefully. Write salient data points in the margin if possible. If not, write each page’s data on a 3 by 5 or 5 by 7 card which is clipped to the source page.

Second time through, read at medium to brisk speed and compare your cards to the text. The goal here is to catch what you missed before, learn to trust your notes/cards, and hopefully get fluent enough at reading this shit that you can read it for sense without agonizing over it.

Third time through (which may well be the morning of the test) just read your notes/cards. You’ve learned to trust them. They’re your thoughts, not the thoughts of the pontificating windbag author, and they’re in your style.
It doesn’t hurt to have the book around to clear up any last minute confusion, but at that point you shouldn’t need the original text at all.

Good luck. This method got me through law school.

P.S. I used class notes to inform my second time through review and not much else. Then again, I was a shitty note taker.

@¡Andrew!: Sounds like it’s more or less a Civil Procedure class? I got through 1L year thanks to these Examples & Explanations series of hornbooks. These books exist for every area of the law, and are written in regular English, which is especially helpful the first time you’re dealing with law school and the bizarre learning style of reading cases and trying to figure out the point of it all.

In terms of retaining shit – everyone’s learning style is different, but I can’t remember things unless I write it out in my own words. OTOH, I’m very anti-highlighting and don’t understand students who have 15 color coded highlighters. My approach sounds similar to Walking Still‘s: in law school, I’d do the assigned reading, taking copious notes by hand in a spiral as I went along. Then, I’d go back, and type up my handwritten notes in more of a distilled outline format (less detail than the book, less than my handwritten notes). Then, when I was in class, I’d have the outline of the reading up on my laptop, and I would have a second Word document and visible side by side, where I would take my notes from class. I type very fast so I could get a lot of what was said. Then, after class and before going to the next assignment, I’d cut and paste things from the class notes into the outline I had made, and save it in a third document that was a giant document of all of the combined notes for the semester, and what I used to study for the final. Needless to say I was neurotic about saving things to back up drives.

I didn’t graduate Order of the Coif like blogenfreude…not even fucking close…but this got me through.

@¡Andrew!: I drank beer, went fishing, hung out, played in my band. I also got an award for most improved GPA in my law school class for going from zero to not quite hero.

@SanFranLefty: Ah, highlighters. Forgot all about those. And their utter futility.

Since philosophy is more dense than even law, the only way I could absorb a text was by writing out passages longhand. It’s not that I ever referred back to them, but slowing it down — and physically passing it through my fingers — really helped comprehension.

But then, I’m weird.

Laffer’s just another word for Ponzi.

http://gawker.com/5875943/supply+side-hero-arthur-laffer-sued-for-hyping-ponzi-scheme

@redmanlaw: We used stone tablets. I spent most of my free time playing basketball and relied on my good memory (back then) and rigorous training as a philosophy major to get by.

@¡Andrew!: I took a Land Use law class as part of my grad program, and felt lost every single day. I’d freeze up when the prof called on me in class, and could never keep up with all the reading – i had bands to see, Barton Springs to check out, and beer to drink. I felt like Emilio Estevez in a John Hughes flick, and started sitting in the back, goofing off.

The grade was based entirely on a midterm and the final. A law student from my retail job told me to “study my notes” and when I went back and checked the course outline and my notes from class, I realized that they coincided! So I just crammed by making sure any gaps in my notes were fleshed out by comparing notes with other classmates, made sure I understood the logical progression of each class, ignored the imperious bullshit the prof spewed in an attempt to make us feel inadequate, and I ended up out scoring the other students on both exams.

I remember getting my mid term grade in class, and the professor looking at me like “You? Really?” I was one smug back-rower after that.

Oh, and I also read the “In A Nutshell” edition on Land Use Law. Sounds similar to what Lefty recommends, but I borrowed mine from the bookstore I worked at. Everything I needed was in there.

@¡Andrew!:
read it, say it aloud, write it.
you can also use this nifty trick: make up a sentence, the first letter of each word representing what you need to memorize. works like a charm.
good luck!

Muchas gracias y abrazos a todos! Let the studying begin.

@ManchuCandidate: Why do his investors/victims hate capitalizm?

@¡Andrew!: Good luck. I’m exhausted just reading about it.

@¡Andrew!: What’s the casebook and who wrote it?

And I bet it has to be a US Birth certificate. Not one of those Hawaiian ones!

I am sooooooo pissed off about this sort of idiocy. I thought the gvt was meant to stay out of the bedroom and restroom (Unless you have a wide stance.)

@JNOV: Business Law and the Regulation of Business, 9th Edition, by Richard Mann and Barry Roberts.

@¡Andrew!: How appropriate with Mitt in the race. Look up the sections on leveraged buyouts and fraudulent transfers. They should be close together.

@¡Andrew!: Sorry, can’t help you there. Everything I know about Corporations/Bid-ness Law was learned in six hours during Barbri a month before the bar exam. But I’m sure there’s a nutshell/examples & explanations book for bizness law.

@Dodgerblue & @SanFranLefty: You’d think at this point that “business law” would fit on a pamphlet rather than an 1,100 page doorstop.

@¡Andrew!: Hmmmm. I couldn’t find any commercial casenote briefs or outlines for that book. It was published in 2007? Did your professor make you buy a supplement?

Right now, all I can tell you is that piercing the corporate veil is where it’s at.

You might also see if the law school has an outline repository. Some law school associations have files and files of outlines they share. I read that you’re not keen on asking law students for help, but I’d approach a student group like Outlaw and see if they even use your book at the law school.

Supposedly it’s a “layman’s” text, based on the Amazon reviews I read. Despite claims to the contrary, a lot of leegul bidness is written to frustrate and confuse. They’ve cut down on the Latin some (and I think that’s a shame), but obfuscation is still the name of the game.

So, I’d bite the bullet and see if the GLBT law students can lend a hand or even tutor. Your life will be soooooo much easier.

ADD: Is this douche a law professor? If so, your exams should be open book/open notes. There is no way you can memorize all this shit.

@SanFranLefty: Yes. It does sound like civ pro.

@¡Andrew!: Are you dealing with any of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure?

@JNOV:

Thanks sooooo much for checking into that for me. It looks like the edition that I have was published in 2005 and updated in 2008.

I’m up to Chapter 3: Civil Disputes. It covers Federal, State, & Civil Procedure, as well as Arbitration, Mediation, and Negotiations. There are only two grades in the class, a mid-term and a final, with no notes or study guides allowed, though they are multiple choice. The prof seems like a pretty decent guy–he also has his own private practice–but the lectures don’t seem to follow any structure in the book at all. Typical law school bullshit of endless digressions, like my former undergrad roommate used to bitch about when he was in law school.

I’m using the outline method that Bloggie recommended to try to break the info down into something comprehensible and manageable.

I actually tried building relationships with the Outlaws last year, but they weren’t interested, and I don’t have any Adderall to trade. Apparently MBAs and JDs don’t mix (even though the University is constantly pushing the joint program “it’s only two additional years” ah ha hah hah).

10 years of Law & Order don’t fail me now!

If worst comes to worst, I’ll just slam my fist down on the desk and yell “I OBJECT” or the ever popular “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH.” I’ve heard that the profs really like that.

OK, my brain feels like reheated macaroni. Nighty night…

@¡Andrew!: Try a “this whole class is out of order”. It never fails to get a crowd behind you.

@¡Andrew!: Ugh. They sound like people who took 1L and The Paper Chase to heart. Many schools breed that kill-or-be-killed crap.

If he’s a decent guy, go to his office hours to chat. Really — to chat. See what comes up.

Yes, it’s cuz you B-school folks buy your fancy cars and get offers after your first year. Second only to doctors (because law students are pretty much a group of wanna be doctors and actors), B-school folks are our enemies. We dress better for class, though…

ADD: Do you have any friends in class? Study group. Seriously. You can break down the reading so each person does an outline of their chapters and distributes it to the group and discusses it. Skim the chapters you didn’t read, and don’t choose any idiots.

OH! And best cinematic representation of civ pro esp. FRCP 11 is A Civil Action. Not that you have time to watch movies, but, yeah.

@¡Andrew!: Did you check out this website that goes with the casebook?

ADD: Here’s an example of what JNOV was talking about. American University’s law school has class outlines online. I didn’t look to see if the Business Associations courses used the same casebook.

For an overview of general civ pro, check out a nutshell. Or check out the US federal courts website

@SanFranLefty: Dude. Festivus present to myself — Coveroo for mah phone with logo and “FEAR the TREE” in big fucking font. (Hey — they let me personalize it.)

@SanFranLefty y ¡ANDREWWWWWW!: Yup. You can usually find nutshells in the law library.

@SanFranLefty: Oh! Great find! (re: casebook website.)

@¡Andrew!: Dude. Totally pass on his ass one day and see what he does. His head might explode, and you’ll all get As

@JNOV is like, Peace?: Nice! I wore my Fear the Tree shirt to the Y last week and a retired gentleman who said he graduated from The Farm before I was probably born, stopped me to commiserate about the Fiesta Bowl – he was there and noted it was “interesting” to see the difference between Tree and Okie State fans. I forgot to ask him what the LSJUMB did to offend for the halftime show.

@Nabisco: Ha, I love it. “I DECLARE A MISTRIAL.”

@JNOV & @SanFranLefty: Thank you so much for the suggestions and the book website. Will implement enseguida. Only 10 more weeks till the final ; )