And there are no robots.

Changing planes

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Fri, 24 May 2013 03:53:35 GMT

I have been waiting in the Denver airport for about nine hours, now.

We're number seven! We're number seven!

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 19:28:14 GMT

A new study by a Pepperdine law professor ranked the state Bar exams from hardest to easiest, by measuring pass rates and controlling for the takers' LSAT scores. As of 2010-11, the hardest was California's (unsurprisingly), followed by Arkansas' (WTF?). Oregon's was the seventh-hardest. (Alaska, Delaware, and DC were not included in the study for insufficient data.) So take that for what it's worth.

The most obvious emotional implication to people who have taken these exams is that we get to feel smug about having passed particularly hard ones. The larger social context is that state Bar organizations are increasingly seeking to tighten admission requirements, in response to proliferating unemployment among new attorneys. So we can expect a lot of Bar exams to continue to get harder across the board. (This also implies that the profession will get older, over time, as fewer new lawyers can join the older ones already admitted under easier terms. Not sure if that's a good thing.)

The easiest Bar exam, apparently, was South Dakota's. So you can feel free to sass any South Dakota lawyers you run into.

California here we come, right back where we started from

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:03:50 GMT

So on the weekend of the 20th, I'll be driving with a friend down to northern California to help pick up some things left behind when she moved. The weather has improved immensely in Portland of late, but I still have traumatic memories of a road trip to California from Portland ten years ago - in the height of summer, natch - when we got stuck on a mountain pass in the snow for four hours. Given that, I'd like to plan a route, if possible, that goes around the highest mountains, rather than through them. Can anyone suggest a more weather-safe course for getting from Oregon to California?

The fifth freedom: Freedom from paternalistic condescension?

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 08:26:53 GMT

I carry a box of cigarettes in my messenger bag. I didn't buy them; I just found them around somewhere. I don't smoke, of course. I keep them to give to people who ask me for them - usually homeless people downtown.

Tonight I did this when leaving a friends' apartment, with my friend Marcus. He was surprisingly offended at this. He contended that this is morally problematic, because it encourages addiction and does harm to the person indulging in the habit. My counterargument is that it constitutes respect for individual autonomy to allow people to make that choice for themselves, that most people know the long-term health risks associated with smoking, and that they are more concerned with short-term gratification - and the pleasant acknowledgment of their humanity that doesn't try to give a paternalistic lecture. Marcus said that in that case, one might as well carry around syringes of heroin for people who ask. I say that there's a balancing test between autonomy and harm, and you have to draw a line. This brings up lots of other issues, like Marcus's love of fast food and my habit of keeping a box of granola bars in my car to give to homeless people at stop lights, and the legalization of different type of drugs... but that's the essence of it. To what extent do we follow the principle of 'doing no harm', even as applied to making choices for others; and to what extent do we follow a principle of individual freedom, even when it leads to bad results? As individuals, as friends, as policymakers? I would argue that 'freedom' almost always means the freedom to do something of which someone else earnestly disapproves; but of course, freedom is not absolute.

Why not leave your own answer in the comments!

Quick survey

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 23:39:41 GMT

Who still reads this site?

"Every time of year is a time of transition. That's what makes it heartbreaking."

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 06:40:30 GMT

Went biking for the first time this year. It's wonderful and liberating, as always. But the air was bitter chill, especially as the sun began to sink, and the sky turned from grey to slate. It felt like autumn, somehow. The air smelled like burning leaves and cold, and the dark clouds low under the sky threatened rain.

I know it's not true, and spring is on its way - one of my last springs, as a young (or younger) person. Right now, hope feels far away, and it's hard to shake the conviction that the present time, without security or conviction, will last indefinitely.

And then you volunteer

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 22:00:05 GMT

I just did my pro bono reporting for 2012. It seems I did over 36 hours of pro bono representation last year, plus 4 hours of non-representative legal volunteer work. The former was all in Grandma + the Methheads; the latter was in judging a mock trial competition. This makes me feel somewhat better about all the complaining I do at people who want pro bono representation on the internet.

A description of my work using only the thousand most common words in English

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 08:34:17 GMT

I write a lot of letters to people. I listen to people and tell them what to do so they do what they are supposed to do. Sometimes I put on good clothes and go ask big important men (and women) who wear black to do what I want them to do.

Today I went and asked a couple of men a lot of questions, in a way that they had to give true answers or get in trouble. They weren't happy about it.

(This being a reference to this xkcd strip, and this application that enables easy duplication of the effect. Well, straightforward anyway. It's harder than it sounds.)

The daily ophidian census

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 09:45:05 GMT

The other day, on an impulsive, indulgent lark, I bought a brand-new hardcover copy of Lois McMaster Bujold's latest book, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. A few days later, on another impulsive indulgent lark, I spent most of the work day ignoring everything and reading it. Chapter 5 has this marvelously relevant summary of the daily task of checking morning emails:

Ivan had developed a personal metaphor for this first task (after the coffee) of the day. It was like opening one's door to find that an overnight delivery service had left a large pile of boxes on one's porch, all marked "miscellaneous." In reality, they were all marked "Urgent!" but if everything was urgent, in Ivan's view they might as well all be labelled miscellaneous.

Each box contained one of the following: live, venomous, agitated snakes on the verge of escape; quiescent venomous snakes; nonvenomous garden snakes; dead snakes; or things that looked like snakes but weren't, such as large, sluggish worms. It was Ivan's morning duty to open each box, identify the species, vigor, mood, and fang-count of the writhing things inside, and sort them by genuine urgency.

THIS IS SO WHAT I DO. Except that Ivan gets to pass the snakes off to someone else.

Parsecs are a unit of distance, anyway

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 07:58:48 GMT

I love that the White House has an official position on building a Death Star.

Christmas was actually much better than this

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 04:25:03 GMT

I'm just saying

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:11:45 GMT

Taylor Swift's 'You Belong With Me,' though a monument to the most obnoxious kind of American anti-exceptionalism, becomes vastly more tolerable when you imagine that the singer is a boy.

If it fits in the glove compartment of a car, it's not a dog.

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 17:34:32 GMT

And now for something completely different and kind of gross:

An Oregon circuit court has made the news in the ABA Journal. Judge Bailey has ruled in favor of a woman who has a 77-pound Dachshund, in a suit against her by Oregon Dachshund Rescue (which apparently is a thing). The animal rescue group claimed she was treating Obie cruelly by taking him around the country on media tours, and not doing enough to help him lose weight. Apparently the parties are now proceeding to arbitration, where they will hopefully work out a plan that will satisfy everyone that the dog will be well-treated.

I don't know how everybody makes it through the daily drill

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 00:05:11 GMT

Today contained a lot of good things, and a lot of very distressing things, but I can't talk about any of them for one reason or another. This comes up a lot in this business.

So instead, I'll tell everyone who didn't know that Dar Williams wrote a song about the Milgram electroshock experiments, which is basically the most amazing thing ever. Or at least, the most cogent and clever response to a disturbing demonstration of human banality ever produced in folk-song format, of all time.

But he never can find a parking space

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 20:59:07 GMT

Today I had planned to go to the OTLA family law section meeting. I arrived downtown on time, and spent about 15 minute circling the blocks looking for a place to park. No space in lots, no spaces on the street, anywhere. I finally gave up and went back to the office, rather than keep looking and eventually wander in half-way through.

It's one of those days.

Scale

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:47:44 GMT

Over the past few days, there have been several bits of internet arcana that produce a positively vertigous effect of scale. I can't imagine they're at all related, but there's a strong common theme.

First, the Astronomy Picture of the Day people produce this fascintating application for showing The Scale of the Universe. It illustrates in simple geometric progression both how vastly, mind-bogglingly huge the universe is compared to us, and also how utterly tiny are the pieces that make up everything. It's almost comforting to think that, in some sense, we're in the middle.

Then, today's xkcd reveals itself to contain a vast, almost unchartable hinterland. My friends and I would assemble worlds like this in our notebooks together during boring classes at school - but to properly match the size of this one, we'd have needed a notebook the size of the entire classroom floor. It does have boundaries, mind you - but I can't even begin to find them all.

For some reason, there's something disconcerting, almost terrifying, about great variations in scale - about seeing that things are much, much bigger, or smaller, than other things, and trying to wrap your mind around them all at once. This lesson was first viscerally driven home to me at merzo.net, a neat little fan site that shows different science fiction spaceships side by side for scale. Which is a fun little project, until you scroll down, and down, on the '-100x' (one pixel equal to 100 meters a side) page, past the inch-long Babylon Five and palm-sized moon of Phobos and tiny flecks of Star Trek ships, and the huge, bloated sphere of the Death Star swallows the entire screen. It's not because the Star Wars station is inherently scarier than anything else - it's just something about that sudden shock to your sense of scale. (The same thing happens on the '-10x' page: the peaceful, innocent Island Two space colony proposed by Gerard O'Neill to NASA is just as breath-catching, compared to more sanely-sized science fiction vessels.) Maybe it's because there's something frightening about not being able to hold the whole of something in your perception at once. Or maybe we just don't like shifting back and forth too fast.

Edit: Some enterprising soul created a scaleable version of the xkcd map. It's not quite as daunting that way, but you lose some magic in exchange for the knowledge.

Criminal jurisprudence comics. Literally.

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 20:31:49 GMT

The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law is a fascinating summary of the criminal justice system, including its implicit philosophical underpinnings and jurisprudential concepts, presented in an easy-to-understand cartoon format. The art is somewhere between xkcd and rageface comics, but the ideas are sophisticated and comprehensive. This is just the sort of thing we need to expand public awareness of legal concepts - though there's the risk that the only people who read it will be law students.

Job offer

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 05:59:47 GMT

My office has need of a temporary employee, fluent in English and Spanish. Close to full-time work for the whole of this coming week. (The reason is that Stephen, our immigration attorney, is going on a trip out of state for the week. His duties will be taken over by Laura, but that means someone must take over her duties, answering the phones and scheduling things.) Duties include answering phones and some initial client intake, but no legal or administrative experience is necessary as long as you have your wits about you. Please let me know if anyone is interested.

...or were you looking at the man in the red dress?

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 03:30:55 GMT

Dear Portland,
Can someone explain why there was a crowd of maybe 30 men and women jogging down SE Stark at about 5:30 today, all wearing bright red dresses?

(Cross-posted to damnportlanders.)

Following the saga of the ABA slowly getting it

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 17:59:11 GMT

Seriously, every month now they have one of these 'Wow, I guess things suck for the younger generation' articles. It should be an official column or something.

Four things baby boomers shouldn't say, legal practice edition

The frivolousest claim

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 20:54:39 GMT

We have a new winner in the category of the stupidest thing someone wants to go to court over.

It is relevant in context that the narrator is a woman.

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:52:23 GMT

Sometimes, courts decide child custody cases correctly.

When fascism comes to America

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 09:29:39 GMT

In the 'News no longer distinguishable from satire' category:

Republican lawmaker is dismayed to discover that state law she supported that grants government funding to religious schools, may be used by religion that isn't Christianity.

Also: Texas Republican Party officially opposes teaching of critical thinking.

Really, what else can be said at this point.

Stay with me

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 01:06:06 GMT

... And I just found out that our roommate is moving out. A place opened up right near his school/workplace.

So we're looking for a new housemate again. (Or, I suppose, an affordable two-bedroom apartment near downtown, which could save a lot of gas money, but I really don't think we want to move again.) Does anyone need a place?

Overheard at the office

theotherjay@livejournal.com — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 03:12:48 GMT

"You know, there's something inherently paradoxical about taking career advice from a high school guidance counselor."