My Friends Are Better Bloggers...And I Hurt My Thumb

3 things before I get back to staff editing:

1. The illustrious Jeff Woodhead sends Senator Burr a well-reasoned argument that The Graham Screw Human Rights Amendment - aside from being a violation of human rights - will undermine the War on Terror. I doubt Burr will read it, but it should be required reading for every Senator.

2. My colleague-in-humor, Zhubin Parang, gives the following accurate assessment of the MPRE, the legal ethics exam that every law student must take:

I took the MPRE last Friday, and I may very well have failed it. You just can't tell with that test. But let me advise all you 1Ls and 2Ls that it is very important to know under what circumstances a lawyer's disqualification from a case is imputed to his firm. It's especially important because all real-life legal ethical dilemmas occur exactly as they do in the MPRE, with someone walking up to you and saying, "You have to represent a client whose mother was a former client, from whom you learned confidential information relevant to the current case. You have two minutes to decide which of the following four courses of action you will take. Number One..." And if you choose incorrectly or run out of time you're immediately disbarred. Not a profession for slackers, folks.

I really hate legal ethics. First off, it has nothing to do with being an ethical person. Legal ethics is so anemic. It's about what behavior is so horribly below the standards of common decency that even lawyers will punish you. Second, actually a lot of the rules are not common sense. Like all this stuff about fee-splitting, imputing conflicts to your firm, and advertising. It's actually quite easy to violate some rule unwittingly. So it's a bunch of rules that aren't intuitive, don't help you to be an ethical lawyer, but do make you really nervous.

3. I worked 4 hours with Habitat for Humanity today. It kicked so much ass! It was so fun. And at the end of 4 hours, I could see the results of my work: a roof with shingles and a house with siding. What am I doing in law school? This was so much better!

(Yes, I know making a living doing manual labor is actually harder. I wouldn't be so nonchalant about the fact that I hammered my thumb so many times there's a black mark on it if that happened every day. But it doesn't happen every day to me. So it was quite a relaxing break. And I helped a couple to own a house. That's cool.)