Law School Strategies for Success

MV5BMTk2NTY2Njg5MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNTc3OTQ2__V1__CR68,0,283,283_SS100_As we officially open the school year, I have been thinking a lot about what are the secrets to success in law school.  I understand that Dean Rofes spoke at Orientation about the sausage races at Miller Park.  (I personally always root for the Chorizo Sausage!)  Law school may sometimes feel a bit like a race, or, to think more classically about Aesop’s fables, like the story of the Tortoise and the Hare.  In that story, the tortoise ultimately wins the race using slow and steady steps to the finish line.

What does slow and steady have to do with law school?  Be steady by being methodical.  Read and brief cases before every class.  Be steady by outlining every night when you get home from class.  An hour of outlining nightly will save you from the panic of trying to cram material at the end of the semester.  Outlining each day also helps you to see where you have questions, so you can ask your professors or study group members to help you unravel those questions.  One of the benefits of a Marquette education is that the faculty are accessible; use that accessibility to your advantage.

Be also like the tortoise by being slow.  The study of law takes time.  It takes time to ponder why a decision was rendered or to think about whether a court’s reasoning is sound.  One of the ASP leaders in my Orientation section said that it takes at least ten minutes to read each page in a casebook.  Good legal reading, like good legal writing, is slow going. 

What tips do others reading this blog have for success in law school?  Share your strategies for success here!

Best wishes for a wonderful school year!

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What Is an Author?

MV5BMjEyNTcyMTUwNV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNTc4ODQ2__V1__CR0,0,311,311_SS90_I greatly enjoyed last week’s exchange among colleagues Bruce Boyden, Ed Fallone, and Gordon Hylton regarding literary sequels and the general purposes of copyright law. It is my impression that most blog posts do not purport to be “scholarly,” but the posts by Boyden, Fallone, and Hylton had the length and depth necessary for that characterization.  I hated to see the exchange end. 

The exchange rekindled for me the intellectual question of how to best understand what an “author” is.  The notion of an “author” in modern western culture is a weighty one, carrying with it some sense of origination.  It connotes more than “writer,” which is a less prestigious characterization that goes primarily to a particular activity.  We customarily assume “authors” are intense and even tortured souls heroically working alone.  We also sometimes assume that their chief incentive must and should be monetary enrichment.  These assumptions grow out of dominant ideological prescriptions related to, respectively, autonomous individualism and the bourgeois market economy.

I think it is better to conceive of an “author” as socially constituted. 

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The Public Health Option and Lessons from the San Francisco Experiment

Medical_symbol2 As I prepare to provide brief commentary on various legislative provisions for a CCH publication that will explain health care reform legislation once it is finalized, I could not help but take notice of this important op-ed. It is by a trio of labor and health economists that ran in the New York Times this weekend on the much discussed public option and its relations to employers being mandated through a pay or play system to provide health insurance for their employees.

Here’s a taste:

TWO burning questions are at the center of America’s health care debate. First, should employers be required to pay for their employees’ health insurance? And second, should there be a “public option” that competes with private insurance?

Answers might be found in San Francisco, where ambitious health care legislation went into effect early last year. San Francisco and Massachusetts now offer the only near-universal health care programs in the United States . . . .

[W]e have seen how concern over employer costs can be a sticking point in the health care debate, even in the absence of persuasive evidence that increased costs would seriously harm businesses. San Francisco’s example should put some of those fears to rest. Many businesses there had to raise their health spending substantially to meet the new requirements, but so far the plan has not hurt jobs . . . .

So how have employers adjusted to the higher costs, if not by cutting jobs? More than 25 percent of restaurants, for example, have instituted a “surcharge” — about 4 percent of the bill for most establishments — to pay for the additional costs. Local service businesses can add this surcharge (or raise prices) without risking their competitive position, since their competitors will be required to take similar measures. Furthermore, some of the costs may be passed on to employees in the form of smaller pay raises, which could help ward off the possibility of job losses. Over the longer term, if more widespread coverage allows people to choose jobs based on their skills and not out of fear of losing health insurance from one specific employer, increased productivity will help pay for some of the costs of the mandate.

In case you think this is all a bunch of liberal, Democratic mishigosh, one of the authors of this op-ed happens to be non-other than William Dow, a senior economist who worked for President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers.

In other words, increasing evidence is out there that health care reform with a public option and an employer pay or play mandate might be just what our system needs to rein in health care costs while at the same time providing health insurance to a much larger segment of American society.

[Cross-posted on Workplace Prof Blog]

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