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.