SPLENDIDBAUBLE v. CASEY

Our summer job involves writing, and we just figured out a surefire way to impress our bosses. We are going to simply begin every assignment with, "Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt."

IRAQ CASUALTIES

Every Monday we post updated figures for U.S. casualties in Iraq. You can find them on your own here.

As of today:

U.S. troops killed: 814 (up 17 from last week)
U.S. troops wounded in action: 4,682 (up 158 from last week)

In the past month, 60 U.S. soldiers have been killed; approximately 800 have been wounded.

WE F%#KING HATE THE WRITING COMPETITION

There. We got that off our chests. Now we'll go back to work. F%#k.

IRAQ CASUALTY UPDATE

Every Monday we post updated figures for U.S. casualties in Iraq. You can find them on your own here. (We did not publish an update last week.)

As of today:

U.S. troops killed: 797 (up 26 from two weeks ago)
U.S. troops wounded in action: 4,524 (up 391 from two weeks ago)

In the past month, 76 U.S. soldiers have been killed; 660 have been wounded.

WHAT'S LONG AND HARD AND FULL OF ...

Which brings us to the topic of this year's Fordham Law writing competition. Which we are forbidden from discussing. With anyone. Even you.

LET LOOSE FROM THE NOOSE THAT'S KEPT US HANGING ABOUT

We're back after a long post-finals decompression. At first we felt bad about neglecting our little blog for so long. But when we checked our site visits reports, we discovered a curious thing: traffic to our website actually increased during our absence. More people came to splendidbauble.blogspot.com when we published nothing than when we were publishing almost every day. We can think of no explanation for this.

Anyway. We are tempted, now that we've made it through our first year, to offer various observations and pieces of advice for 1Ls. But we think we will hold off on that until we receive our grades. We have definite ideas about the way things should be done. First semester went very well for us. But this second semester, it nearly killed us, what with civil procedure and our strange con law professor and all. So we won't subject you to our thoughts on how to conduct your first year until we know whether what we did worked.

In the meantime, we're going to be concentrating on how to make this blog look better. Let us know if you have any ideas about where to find a good template.

JUST IN TIME, TOO, SINCE OUR "LIQUOR IN THE FRONT, POKER IN THE REAR" UNDERGRAD FRAT T-SHIRT IS ABOUT WORN OUT

The new spring fashions are hitting the Fordham runways. Get yours while you still can!

MONDAY WAR REPORT

Every Monday we post updated figures for U.S. casualties in Iraq. You can find them on your own here.

As of today:

U.S. troops killed: 771 (up 17 from last week; up 69 from three weeks ago)
U.S. troops wounded in action: 4,133 (up 864 from three weeks ago)

MOVE ALONG ... NOTHING TO SEE HERE

Finals have us down. But allow us to direct you here. Or here.

WE DOUBT THE PROSPECTIVE STUDENT TOUR LEAVES THE FIRST FLOOR

Brooklyn Law 2L Andrew Raff covets the Herman Miller Aeron chairs in the main reading room of our little old Fordham law library.

If it makes you feel any better, Andrew, the only Aerons in there are the ones visitors can see from the window. If your ass is on any other floor of the library, your ass is on wood.

WE'RE THINKING THAT WHEN HE SAYS "BY FAR," HE MEANS THE ANSWER IS "NOT MUCH"

Jeffrey Toobin's profile of John Kerry in the current New Yorker begins under the subhed "What the Candidate Learned as a Lawyer."

And it ends like this:

"In all, Kerry’s achievements as a lawmaker, while real, are also modest. To parlay them into the Presidency would be, by far, the most successful advocacy of his career."

MONDAY WAR REPORT

Every Monday we post updated figures for U.S. casualties in Iraq. You can find them on your own here.

As of today:

U.S. troops killed: 754 (up 33 from last week; up 52 from two weeks ago)
U.S. troops wounded in action: No updated figures available (3,864 as of last week)

A concerned reader (see the comments following last week's post) writes to say that he considers our Monday postings to be part of a growing alarmist tendency in the press to handwring over setbacks in Iraq while ignoring positive developments there. He writes that it is unfair to compare every military action to Vietnam and that in any conflict a certain level of loss of American life is necessary and to be expected.

We do not see American casualties as ever being a reason to cut and run from a legitimate conflict. We find it sad -- outrageous even -- that the loss of 19 U.S. soldiers in Somalia caused us to abandon that country and to make excuses for not intervening in the Rwanda genocide.

We do, however, find in the mounting losses in Iraq a reason to question the leadership that put our military there. Remember: that leadership provided a fraction of the troops the Army itself estimated it would need to secure the country. We don't advocate abandoning Iraq, but we grow increasingly doubtful that the current administration will bring things to a successful end.

We didn't bring up Vietnam, but since the subject is on the table it's also worth remembering that so far the number of U.S. troops dead in Iraq is almost double the number of troops killed during the first
three years of major U.S. involvement in Vietnam. (The linked-to article puts the two conflicts in perspective, noting that the number of troops in Iraq far exceeds the number of troops present in the early years of Vietnam.) It may be that we can stay in Iraq for the "next 100 years" and never see Vietnam-like casualties. But that's impossible to predict. We doubt any American in 1964 would have guessed what the next decade had in store. U.S leadership failed then, and there are signs that it's failing again, in many of the same ways.

IF LAW SCHOOL WERE FRENCH CLASS, THEY'D JUST LOCK YOU IN A ROOM BY YOURSELF WITH A FRENCH-ENGLISH DICTIONARY FOR NINE YEARS

Okay class of 2007. You want to know how it feels? It feels like there was once a clean, crisp picture of contract law. Then someone cut that picture into tiny, irregular pieces and spent the last nine months flinging the pieces at us, one by one, in no particular order. Some we caught, some we didn't. Now it's up to us to put those pieces together. How do we do that?

Imagine that those pieces we're holding is a jigsaw puzzle. Now imagine that our commercial study aid is the picture on the box that the puzzle came in. We take each little piece and hold it up to the picture, trying to figure out where it goes in our outline. We spend days -- weeks -- doing this. And all we get in the end is a shitty half-picture -- one whose lines don't quite match up and that gapes with holes.

There has got to be a better way to teach the law.

AND THEN WE READ ABOUT THESE POOR BASTARDS AND REMEMBERED THAT SOMEDAY ALL OF THIS WILL BE WORTH IT

The promise of future earnings wasn't our only (or even our biggest) reason for coming to law school. But no matter how much we're cursing our fate as we sit here teaching ourselves contract law at two in the morning, it's nice to remember that things could always be worse.

We're Writing a Movie About One of Our Professors, Too

...but the Working Title of Ours, as We Sit Here After Midnight Slaving Over an Outline, is "Damn You. Damn You to Hell."

Two Columbia 3Ls have landed a development deal for a movie about the life of one of their professors, the legendary civil rights lawyer Jack Greenberg.

Yeah, Because If College Football Has Taught Us One Thing

...it's That Nobody REALLY Wants an Undisputed National Champion Anyway

The NYU student newspaper has this story about a federal antitrust suit filed by the owners of the NIT college basketball tournament (the owners apparently include Fordham and NYU) against the NCAA.

Iraq War Monday

We published a post last Monday about casualties in Iraq. We think we'll revisit those numbers each week. You can look up the latest figures on your own here.

As of today:
US troops killed in Iraq: 721 (up 19 from last week)
US troops wounded in action: 3,864 (up 595 from last week)

Where Are They Now?

A concerned reader e-mailed us recently, pointing out that we are not quite alone in the Fordham blog waters. He directed us to Budgie Roo's Rants & Raves, a blog published for a few months last year by a Fordham law student with the guts to admit in public that her boyfriend's nickname for her is Budgie Roo. We admire that, we wonder why she stopped publishing so soon, and we wish she'd come back. The more the merrier.

Why Couldn't We Have Seen This Before We Evaluated OUR Professors?

We haven't had a thought of our own today more worthy of publication than this posting from buffs law:

We've been filling out teacher evaluations the past few days. I insist the only fair way to do this is to grade on a curve. As it stands now, everyone gets As and Bs on these things, and every professor averages between a 3.5 and 3.6. So we don't express our true feelings, and the professors all win. And then next week, half of us get B-s and C+s. I don't see the justice in that. So why not fail a few professors? Throw in a few Cs. You have three good professors, but can only give one A, so the other two get Bs. The final two professors are pretty decent, but hey, sorry, you only have a C and a D left.

It's the system baby, can't hate the system.

And the 2004 John Mitchell Award for Alumni Achievement Goes to

...this couple, members of the class of '97.

Art Imitates Life

We swear we hadn't seen Doonesbury's current storyline when we wrote our previous post.

Some War Reporting We'd Like to See

We are having trouble getting control over the sinking feeling that overcomes us in response to the news out of Iraq this month. Our impression is that, as ominous as things sound, the reality over there is even worse. It seems to us we read somewhere a while back that the death count of U.S. troops is not a reliable indicator of the level of mayhem our men and women in uniform are actually experiencing. Our understanding is that advances in battlefield medicine are saving many more lives than was possible with the same injuries in Vietnam. The flip side to this, of course, is that, while spared from death, many of our troops will now live with debilitating injuries.

The problem with the casualty reports we've seen -- 702 U.S. troops dead, 3,269 wounded in action as of today, according to CNN.com -- is that the wounded aren't classified by severity. As far as we can tell, the 3,269 includes everything from minor flesh wounds to permanent disfigurement or paralysis. That doesn't tell us much. So, what's the information we'd like to see reported? We'd like to know how many soldiers have been injured to the extent that they'll likely never again be fit for combat duty. That would be the best measure of the true human cost -- in terms of American blood spilled -- of the conflct. And we doubt it would make us feel any better about the job the Bush administration did in preparing for war.

U.S. News & World Report Rankings

The U.S. News rankings for 2005 came out a few weeks ago, to much chatter on other blogs. We were surprised that, to our ears at least, there wasn't much comment among our classmates, especially as the Fordham news wasn't so encouraging. This year, Fordham tied for 34th place with Brigham Young, University of Washington, and Wake Forest. Last year, we shared the 31st spot with Brigham Young, UC-Davis, the University of Georgia, and the University of Wisconsin.

Why the drop three spots? What do we have in common with any of the schools near us on the list? We don't know, and we don't have time to analyze the rankings. Even if we had time, we aren't sure the analysis would be worth the effort. We tell ourselves we don't care about rankings. We do, however, find it interesting that no one at school seems to be talking about it.

A Voice in the Wilderness

We are not experienced bloggers. We have not even read many blogs. We began to get into them when, during the first semester of law school, we Googled around trying to find study tips online. We enjoyed the wealth of information and the humor (tip of the hat to BuffaloWings&Vodka on this score) on the law school blogs (who knew there would be so many) and wished that little old Fordham Law had a blog of its own. And eventually we conceived an experiment. We decided to start publishing this blog to see how long it would take for someone to notice us. Our thought is that one day someone might type "fordham," "law," and "blog" into Google and arrive at this site. Not being very tech savvy, we have no idea whether this is possible without active networking on our part. We don't have much time for that sort of thing. But we are happy to sit back and see whether simply publishing regularly will put us on someone's radar screen.

The Splendid Bauble FAQ

WHO ARE YOU?
We are in our first year at Fordham Law School in New York City.

ARE YOU ORIGINALLY FROM NEW YORK?
We prefer not to disclose any more identifying information than we already have.

WHY ANOTHER LAW SCHOOL BLOG?
Why not? As far as we can tell, there's not another one published by a Fordham Law student. Maybe people don't know enough about Fordham. For example, did you know that Vince Lombardi attended Fordham Law as a night student before embarking on his storied professional football coaching career? You did not. And did you know that John Mitchell, Nixon's disgraced former attorney general, is a Fordham grad? No. We doubt you knew that either.

WHAT OTHER BLOGS HAVE YOU BEEN A PART OF?
No others. This is our first.

I DON'T BELIEVE THAT.
Perhaps the Splendid Bauble's sophisticated design is deceiving. But it's true -- this is our blog debut.

IS IT TRUE THAT "MY BIG, FAT, GREEK WEDDING" IS THE MOST OVERRATED MOVIE OF ALL TIME?
No. The most overrated movie of all time is "Signs."

WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE CLASS IN LAW SCHOOL?
Yes, we believe North Dakota IS the "Flickertail State."