One month in

One month into law school, and I feel a lit­tle like Neo af­ter be­ing jacked into the in­for­ma­tion pipe. But, as you might re­mem­ber from the next scene, he was far from ready for the Matrix. That’s the lev­el that we’re learn­ing things at right now—a ba­sic lit­er­a­cy of broad ar­eas of law, so we will know how to un­der­stand new cas­es, what ques­tions to ask, and what ar­gu­ments are valid. I also feel quite un­pre­pared to ap­ply any­thing just yet. Maybe it will al­ways feel like this!

The most com­mon ques­tion I’m asked is: “How has your first month been?” I keep say­ing that it’s been man­age­able. It’s also been stress­ful. It’s also been real­ly good.

I think the stress has more to do with the stress in­her­ent in any change rather than due to some­thing specific to law school. This new thing I’m do­ing is dis­plac­ing some old things: no more Overwatch, no more Hearthstone, less read­ing for pure leisure, no binge-watch­ing The Office. It’s also su­per en­gag­ing and stim­u­lat­ing. So, when I wake up in the mid­dle of the night, in­stead of falling right back to sleep, my mind jumps to a top­ic we’ve been talk­ing about in class or to a read­ing I just com­plet­ed. I also moved to a new apart­ment at the be­gin­ning of October—an­oth­er change and more work that I had to fit every­thing else around.

The sec­ond-most com­mon ques­tion I’m asked is (from peo­ple around me in class): “What are you us­ing to take your notes?”

I’ve been us­ing org-mode to take class notes and I like how that’s been work­ing. In case you haven’t heard of org-mode be­fore, it’s built in to a plain-text ed­i­tor called emacs and it looks like this:

Things I like about tak­ing notes in org-mode:

• The au­to­mat­ic in­den­ta­tion, lists, and col­lap­si­ble sec­tions
• Tags, al­though I’m bare­ly us­ing them right now
• Super sim­ple markup for mark­ing things ital­ic or un­der­lined or for mak­ing block quo­ta­tions

And, I’ve set up my org-mode sys­tem to au­to­mat­i­cal­ly ex­port the notes to an html file that’s saved to Google Drive. That lets me re­view all of my notes on my phone on a nice-to-read web page.

The third-most fre­quent thing I’m asked is: “Why did you come to law school? How are you go­ing to use your com­put­er sci­ence back­ground?”

At the out­set, I’m in­ter­est­ed in civ­il lib­er­ties, pub­lic-in­ter­est law gen­er­al­ly, de­fen­dant rights, and copy­right. I’m not sure whether I’ll use my com­put­er sci­ence back­ground (oth­er than tan­gen­tial­ly, like my note-tak­ing sys­tem, or fac­tum-au­thor­ing tool), but there are some top­ics where my in­ter­ests seem to in­ter­sect. I’ve thought about some of these more than oth­ers, but here are a few ex­am­ples: copy­right in AI-gen­er­at­ed art, pro­tec­tions against search and seizure of dig­i­tal and net­work ev­i­dence, anonymi­ty and pri­va­cy rights in gen­er­al, al­go­rith­mic de­ci­sion-mak­ing in law, and copy­right/fair use of code, APIs, and pro­gram out­puts. These are not things that I’ll get to think a lot about in first year, but I’m en­joy­ing the foun­da­tion­al top­ics that we’re fo­cus­ing on in the mean­time. They’re cer­tain­ly com­plex and in­ter­est­ing enough.

Favourite things from each class

• Legal re­search and writ­ing: Getting ac­cess to real­ly good case-law re­search data­bas­es. WestlawNext 👍. Lexis Advance Quicklaw 👎. And CanLII is ac­tu­al­ly a pret­ty good free data­base.
• Public law: Legislative re­search and statu­to­ry in­ter­pre­ta­tion. So fun to think about words and mean­ing.This isn’t a Canadian case, but it is a good example of the kinds of questions that arise in statutory interpretation. Yates v United States, 135 S Ct 1074 (2014). Is a fish a tangible object?
• Contracts: Thinking about the bal­ance be­tween for­mal­i­ty, giv­ing effect to in­tent, and pro­tec­tion of weak­er par­ties.
• Criminal law: Causation. Someone did a thing. Later on, a bad re­sult hap­pened. Is the per­son’s ac­tion sufficiently con­nect­ed with the re­sult to war­rant pun­ish­ment?
• Federalism: That in de­ter­min­ing whether the fed­er­al (or provin­cial) gov­ern­ment has the pow­er to make a par­tic­u­lar law, there is a well defined se­ries of ques­tions that you need to work through, yet in an­swer­ing those ques­tions, there’s much room for le­gal re­al­ism (in the sense that that term is used here).
• Property law: Public prop­er­ty and how it re­lates to home­less­ness and tent com­mu­ni­ties.Cassidy Gale, “Summary of Victoria (City) v Adams”, CanLII Connects (20 November 2014).,Victoria (City) v Adams, 2009 BCCA 563.,This argument is still playing out in cities around North America. See Martin v City of Boise, No 15-35845 (9th Cir 2018). This is almost the exact situation as in Victoria (City) v Adams: there are more homeless people than shelter spaces, but sleeping outdoors on public property is illegal. Sleeping would be illegal for at least some of those without private space. The challenge to the law was successful. Also, the eco­nom­ic analy­sis of law that is so pro­mi­nent in prop­er­ty law to­day.
• Torts: Implied con­sent to bat­tery in sports set­tings. What harms are real­ly just part of the game?Michael McCann, “A Look at the Possible Consequences of Brad Marchand’s Tactic of Licking Opponents”, Sports Illustrated (6 May 2018).

Some of my favourite readings brought to me by school so far

• RH Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost” (1960) 3 Law and Economics 1.
• Aaron Mills, “The Lifeworlds of Law: On Revitalizing Indigenous Orders Today” (2016) 61:4 McGill Law Journal 847.
• The dis­sent here, which reads like some­thing by Lovecraft. Edwards v Sims, 232 Ky 791 (CA 1929), Logan J, dis­sent­ing.
• Jeremy Waldron, “Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom” (1991) 39 UCLA Law Review 295.

What I’m looking forward to

• McSweeney’s 54: “a col­lec­tion of es­says and in­ter­views fo­cus­ing on is­sues re­lat­ed to tech­nol­o­gy and pri­va­cy com­piled with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”

Miscellany

• One of the patents I worked on got is­sued! (US Patent 9,977,955) This ac­tu­al­ly hap­pened back in May, but I just found out about it. I’m one of the in­ven­tors and I helped to draft the specification.
• I joined Pro Bono Students Canada and will be spend­ing a few hours each week help­ing a Vancouver-based pub­lic-in­ter­est or­ga­ni­za­tion.
• I am still work­ing on a fac­tum-au­thor­ing sys­tem. As an au­thor, you would use a slight vari­ant of Markdown (very close to plain text) and would need to cre­ate a bib­li­og­ra­phy file. My pro­gram would then au­to­mate the ci­ta­tion lay­out, para­graph notes, back-ref­er­ences, the ta­ble of au­thor­i­ty, and all things re­lat­ed to for­mat­ting. In case you’re fa­mil­iar with LaTeX and think it might al­ready do this, it doesn’t. It needs to be co­erced. The per-para­graph notes for BC fac­tums are not sup­port­ed in LaTex and it is hard to get BibTex or Biber to work with le­gal ci­ta­tions. This is my hob­by pro­gram­ming project right now.