For those who weren’t paying attention…

A nice article about Souter’s commencement speech.

Getting Psyched

Harvard is getting carried away with the tenting for graduation.  My window faces a small parking lot and yard that is not near anything graduation-related, and yet this is the view from my window:

How many extra tuition dollars did I pay for these??

Student ID Adventures

So, when I was in England last year, the Harvard ID that I got as a 1L expired in June.  Which was a problem that I had anticipated well in advance – in the summer of 2008, before I left for England, I spent some time trying to track down the new ID that I would need to have upon returning in Fall 2009.  The ID office told me authoritatively that the law school registrar would have my ID ready and waiting for me at “registration” in Fall 2009, and not to worry.

So, over a year later, “registration” for my final semester of classes happened online with no discussion of my ID.  No problem; I went to the registrar’s office.  They acted particularly clueless, but told me not to go back to the ID office, and instead just wait.  It would come over from the ID office eventually.  So myself, and the other three HLS students who did the Cambridge program with me, waited.  For about two weeks.  Meanwhile, we had to go through complex negotiations to get into the library and the gym; we learned the secret codes that we had to say to the desk guards to get them to let  us in without our working IDs.  Every so often, one of us would get motivated and go bug either the registrar or the ID office, but they would just say, quite authoritatively, that the other office must have them.  A few of us managed to get some “old-style” IDs missing one of the magnetic stripes they were supposed to have, but that was about it.

Finally, one of us went to the ID office and lucked out – he got a new one printed on the spot.  Inspired, I marched in there, waited in a 10+ person long line, and was then sent to sit in a chair when I explained my situation.  At first, the guy who I spoke to wanted to send me to the registrar’s office, but I told him very authoritatively that “they sent me here.”  After a number of phone calls, he finally located all of our IDs (which had actually already been printed after all).  They were hidden “in the red box.”

So, fourteen months after I first tried to get my new student ID, I finally managed to get it out of the red box.  (I directed the other HLS/Cambridge students looking for their IDs to go to the ID office and demand the Red Box.)

This is still vaguely concerning to me, because I expect that I’ll need another new ID printed in the spring if I continue to do research here at the Harvard Law Library.  And that will be a whole new adventure.  Stay tuned!

Blogging Again

So, now that I’m done with finals (and pretty much done with law school!) I can start blogging again.  At the moment, though, things are pretty much up in the air.  This spring, I might be doing copyright research work with the Harvard Law library – but maybe not.  I might be living in Westborough, I might be in Cambridge.  I might have tons of free time, I might be extra busy (especially when it comes time to take the bar exam in the summer).  Stay tuned!

I also have lots of old things I never got around to blogging about – so expect more to come!

Where do I live?

Well, in the spirit of this old post of mine, I’ve taken some pictures of my dorm room set up this year.  It’s similar to how I’ve set it up in previous years – basically, everything has a spot, and if you bring one extraneous item into the room the whole system falls apart – because all spots are already allocated.

 

Since the last photo was taken, one of the plants in it has already died (when I got back from Las Vegas it was flat as a pancake).  The other one still seems to be alive, though, despite minimal watering.  So that’s good.

Tomorrow I’m going up to Rumney to freeze.  Forecast doesn’t look good:

Stay tuned…

Fall Classes

So, everyone has asked me for details on what classes I’m taking this fall and how they’re going.  Without further ado, here’s the schedule:

Copyright and Trademark Litigation

This class meets once a week on Thursday mornings for two hours.  It’s taught by Dale Cendali, who’s best known for being J.K. Rowling’s lawyer and has been involved in a lot of interesting IP cases, including not only Harry Potter ones, but also the Shepard Fairey lawsuit and some of the Barbie-Bratz disputes.  She’s clearly very big into strong IP rights, which is interesting.  The class has only met a couple times so far, but it has been good.

Sex Equality

This class has a complicated schedule.  During September and October, we meet for three hours on Monday and Tuesday mornings, and another hour and 45 minutes on Wednesday mornings, for almost eight class hours a week.  However, after October, we don’t have any more class meetings.  So I’m particularly busy right now because of this, and will have a lot more free time in November.

The professor for this class is Catherine MacKinnon, which also makes this class really interesting and good – I really like her.  So that’s a good class, too.

Communications and Internet Law and Policy

This class meets for an hour and a half on Monday and Tuesday afternoons, and is taught by Yochai Benkler.  So far, we’ve been focusing more on the history of early- and mid-20th century communications issues with respect to radio and television, but we’re getting into more modern things soon.  This will be interesting with respect to the latest net neutrality developments.

Legal Profession

This class meets for an hour and a half on Monday and Tuesday evenings, and is taught by Annette Gordon-Reed.  It’s a required class for graduating, and hasn’t been all that interesting so far, but I think will start to pick up a little bit.  But I’m still more excited about my other three classes than this one.

So, those are my classes – they’re generally pretty interesting with a good mix of teachers.