Logic is very important to law. Depending on who you ask it’s all there is to law. A problem that lawyers have is that they have somewhat given up the advantage of surprise the moment they say they’re a lawyer – I don’t know how effective emotive pleas are if they come from someone you know is being paid to say it regardless of their personal feelings. I think it takes the shine off it slightly. That leaves you with logical argument to persuade people with.

There are a lot of other areas where logic is also extremely important. Causation in science is probably the biggest example in normal life. Homoeopathy is getting a lot of attention lately as the low-hanging fruit of implausible alternative therapies and a lot is being made of the niggling issue that bruises which go away may not go away because of the infinitesimally small amount of water in which arsenic was dissolved but then diluted away you drank. The sceptic community is very vocal about people who use this sort of thing as proof that homoeopathy can cure everything.

“I feel it worked for me, therefore it works for everyone” is not good logic, it’s technically called “inductive logic” which is generally fine as long as you question your presumptions (eg, that it actually did work for you) and don’t rely on it too much. Of course, if your entire argument is extrapolating a major premise from a minor premise, stop and get a new argument. It probably won’t stand up very well. You can get away with it if no one challenges it but the problem with legal disputes is that someone generally does.

Theskepticguide.org have compiled a list of 20 of the most common logical fallacies that they experience. It’s really worth using them as cautionary tales so that you don’t end up getting stuck with an argument that cannot withstand scrutiny.

Ad hominem

An ad hominem argument is any that attempts to counter anothers claims or conclusions by attacking the person, rather than addressing the argument itself. True believers will often commit this fallacy by countering the arguments of skeptics by stating that skeptics are closed minded. Skeptics, on the other hand, may fall into the trap of dismissing the claims of UFO believers, for example, by stating that people who believe in UFO’s are crazy or stupid.

This is very common in normal life and I’ve fallen for this one myself – it’s very tempting to spend your time as a respondent proving that a claimant is a bad person who deserved what happens to them when actually what you need to do is look at what you’re required to prove under applicable law.

Slippery Slope

This logical fallacy is the argument that a position is not consistent or tenable because accepting the position means that the extreme of the position must also be accepted. But moderate positions do not necessarily lead down the slippery slope to the extreme.

Although this is a logical fallacy it is a perfectly acceptable policy argument. It is often within a court’s discretion to consider policy arguments, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable actually relying on it to any great extent just because it’s so vulnerable to questions like “yeah, but what if we don’t immediately go out and kill all the children?”. There’s a lot you can say in an essay that a court might do that a court might never actually do.

Tautology

tautology is an argument that utilizes circular reasoning, which means that the conclusion is also its own premise. The structure of such arguments is A=B therefore A=B, although the premise and conclusion might be formulated differently so it is not immediately apparent as such. For example, saying that therapeutic touch works because it manipulates the life force is a tautology because the definition of therapeutic touch is the alleged manipulation (without touching) of the life force.

I actually really disagree with this one, I think what they mean to say here is just “circular argument”. If you really can base your argument on a tautology you’re actually on excellent logical ground. A tautology is something that is necessarily true. A circular argument is terrible, unhelpful to you and should always be avoided but if you rely on something that logically has to be true (or the universe doesn’t work) you’re not going to be wrong about it. For example “an armed robber is a robber who has a weapon” is a tautology, which means that if you can prove (to the standard of proof) the two points of 1) he was a robber and 2) he had a weapon he must be an armed robber, if you’re prosecuting him for armed robbery this is exactly what you’re there to prove. I find it really helps me to work out what legal issues are at question if I actively try, as much as possible, to reduce all logical questions to tautologies.

Tu quoque

Literally, you too. This is an attempt to justify wrong action because someone else also does it. “My evidence may be invalid, but so is yours.”

As far as I’m concerned as a bright eyed, idealistic LLB student who sees the world in strictly black and white this is the worst thing ever. It turns out, surprisingly, that bad things can happen to bad people. There’s simply no good reason why someone who did something wrong shouldn’t be able to get legal remedy for wrongs done to them.

This is why, for example, Napier v Scottish Ministers was right to grant Article 3 relief to a prisoner who was held in inhuman conditions even though he was in jail (if I recall correctly he was even awaiting trial at that point – merely accused). There’s no good reason to breach the human rights of people held in jail. It doesn’t work to say “well, they’re bad so you can be bad to them.” That just doesn’t follow – it’s a tu quoque fallacy.

Unstated Major Premise

This fallacy occurs when one makes an argument which assumes a premise which is not explicitly stated. For example, arguing that we should label food products with their cholesterol content because Americans have high cholesterol assumes that: 1) cholesterol in food causes high serum cholesterol; 2) labeling will reduce consumption of cholesterol; and 3) that having a high serum cholesterol is unhealthy. This fallacy is also sometimes called begging the question.

This is an important one – it’s so important to challenge your own presumptions when you’re looking at any legal problem. I think the best example I ever had was a time I was (too) casually reading a hypothetical scenario and I assumed the guy did it and actually he hadn’t. As you might guess this had an effect on what my answer ended up being. Law school essays get around this, through IRAC, by very much encouraging you to spell everything out.

They have a much longer list at the above link that’s worth checking out.

But, on a personal note, the big one that annoys me more for reading comprehension reasons than any logical issues is:

Begging the question

(So annoying I’ve mentioned it twice)

This does not mean you need to immediately state the question that you think needs asked. When it says “beg” it doesn’t actually ask for the question, it just means someone is assuming a principle. It means that the other person hasn’t asked a question they should have asked, not that you need to suggest one.

“That begs the question – what colour is my bike?” is a pet peeve of mine. It just means that someone assumes your bike is yellow when they should investigate their foundational principles. It doesn’t mean you should tell them they should ask you what colour your bike is. Just say either “you’re begging the question there” or “you need to ask [x]” but avoid saying both.

H/T to Crispian Jago.

You might also want to check out the gripping blog of Diane Levin who every month, like clockwork, debunks a logical fallacy. I’ve covered it on the blog before and it’s excellent.

4dd6465fc78a86d0987870f88dffcb9c

University is pretty much an industrialised way to exchange essays for potentially higher earnings in the future. There’s really not much more critical to the orthodox university experience than handing your essays in.

I imagine the general way people do this is they open a new document in Microsoft Word before alternately staring at it, typing words into it and checking the word count. They then sort their footnotes and bibliography, run it through TurnItIn or similar and then either print it out or submit it electronically. That way works but there’s so many other ways to do it.

I think Word is an amazing program, it gets a hard time but it basically does everything to text that you, and pretty much anyone else, could ever want to do to text. It’s such a substantial program there are many, many courses and books purely on the various intricacies of it. I do encourage everyone to do these, it helps to know how Word works. It’s so much more than it seems at first glance.

If you want to go beyond just writing all your stuff in Word the workflow you’ll come up with is one of the most individual decisions you’ll make. You’ll probably use a collection of various things.

My favourite tools for writing are:

1. Plain text
2. Text expansion,
3. Templates,
4. Backup and,
5. Word

Plain text

I don’t think I really need Word to write my essays. I type just about everything I write into Mousepad, (even things on blogs in case my browser crashes). It’s a lightweight plain text editor – just like Notepad. You type your words into it and nothing else. The biggest change is that I’ve started to use the Harvard citing model because Mousepad doesn’t support footnotes. I check my spelling with Aspell and check word counts with wc.

Text expansion

Is a surprising feature I never thought I needed. I first came across the concept through Low End Mac, where one of the principal writers has serious joint problems which make typing uncomfortable. He uses text expansion to let him minimise the amount of typing he needs to on health grounds. I use it for various things, I have some commonly typed terms arranged to expand – for example “pomo” becomes “postmodernism”- but the big thing I use it for is dynamic scripts. One of the big ones is that it will change $date into the current date and time which makes it a lot easier to type the date for record keeping purposes. I use Autokey for this. It’s Linux only but it’s the spirtual successor of AutoHotKey which runs on Windows.

Templates

One of the better features of many operating systems is that you can create new documents of various types by right clicking in the file browser. Ubuntu takes this as far as I’ve seen and lets you create a new copy of anything in your ~/Templates/ directory. For example I use a template for blog posts that looks a lot like this:

Start:
Title:
Word count:
Tags:
Category:
Posted:
Link:

4dd6465fc78a86d0987870f88dffcb9c

This gives me all the details I need for a blog post in one file and the fingerprint I use to track when/where my posts get scraped because I keep forgetting to put it in. Having it there gives me a checklist to work through. I just do “right click > create document > blog post” and fill in the fields so they’re there for WordPress when I come to post it. I also have another for essays which includes things like the deadline, the question, the word limit and so on. The idea is to make a checklist for things I need to remember.

Backup

Backup is utterly essential, you just can’t afford to lose your work at any point and it’s really easily done. I’ve found that Flashbake is good for both backup and versioning. The creator explains it is,

seamless source control tool for ordinary people. Automated backup is nice unless you have files for which you want to view an incremental history. Source control is great for that history but most tools expect the author to manually commit their changes along the way. A seamless source control solution combines the convenience of automated back up with the power of source version control.

I’ve set it to save the changes I’ve made to my files every 15 minutes and these backups are copied to my Dropbox account. It’s a bit like the Time Machine backup system in new editions of Mac OS X in that it’s both backup and versioning, and it’s smart enough to check if the file actually has changed before it backs it up. You probably don’t need versioning but it’s the sort of feature that you are not going to regret having if you later find out you need it.

Word

I have a copy of Word 2007 installed on this computer which I run using WINE. I’ve never really got it to work brilliantly well but I don’t need to do very much in Word. After I’ve written the text in Mousepad I copy and paste it into a Word document and convert the Harvard citations into footnotes. I can then submit it like everyone else.

4dd6465fc78a86d0987870f88dffcb9c

Earlier, in the back to school period, I discussed the benefits and costs of going paperless as a student. I think it’s a really worthwhile choice which has a lot of benefits down the line. My main concern is simply the high initial cost of converting from paper to paperless which means that it is a better option for people who are making money from doing it as a job because it will severely cut into your beer money.

I think it’s hard to talk about people going paperless in 2009 without mentioning the eBook reader, the new group of devices which are being marketed as a way to replace the printed book.

The science bit

The market has pretty much expanded from very little into the next big thing based almost entirely on the invention of a small (but growing) American company that worked out how to make very small magnetic objects reliably rise and fall in a grid pattern. Unlike the great majority of modern technology this relies on moving part because once you’ve moved the parts to where you want them you can leave them there with no extra energy use. This means that the ereader expends energy “printing” the page – putting the eInk particles where they’re supposed to be – but then doesn’t need any more to keep the text on the page.

This differs from a traditional display because earlier technologies do not create a fixed image – a CRT monitor draws images onto the screen with a scanning electron beam on a phosphor screen and an LCD monitor uses an arrangement of gates which produces a coloured filter for a backlight to shine through. That electron beam and that backlight both require continuous power to operate. The main benefit of a fleeting, dynamic way of generating images is that it can be very good for conveying moving images, whereas eInk is limited by the physical speed of the particles. That’s bad for movies but text has never moved in its life and that means the technology is good for dedicated book readers.

This is really all by to the by, because how the underlying technology works rarely affects how good it is for users.

Ebook readers

The message to take away is simply that because it’s not a continuously operating device means that you don’t measure the battery life by how long it can be on for (because the device is only on for short spurts) but by how many times the display changes. That’s why the Sony Pocket Edition is rated as having enough “battery life for nearly 6,800 page turns.” The amount of time that is depends on how quickly you can read that number of pages.

Ebook readers have the option of, generally, being used to display books licensed from the sponsoring bookseller’s shop which is great if that’s how you buy books (it isn’t personally). I think it has great potential for updateable textbooks which apply their own errata and apply the differences between editions if that’s the way publishers want to play it. Right now I think the potential lies in the ability of these devices to display your own documents. I think the ability to load up an ereader with a load of case reports and then read that on the bus is paradigm shifting.

This has additional benefits in that because the image is static it doesn’t cause headaches from forcing people to squint at flickering displays and because there’s no backlight you aren’t forced to stare at a light.

The competition

Just because the underlying technology is well suited to displaying text this doesn’t mean that you should buy every product which uses it and displaying text on its own is something that computers have been able to do for a very long time. Ebooks readers are not the only option available here.

Your laptop

The obvious alternative is just a laptop – it will read any format you should care to name, runs off a battery, is portable, does more than just text and you probably already have one. It’s not ideal for reading on the bus, the LCD screen is backlit and the battery won’t last particularly long. But it does so many other things as well and it is likely to be a product that many people will already own, and that makes it practically free to use as an ebook reader.

The mobile phone

An unexpected new contender is the mobile phone, people have been using PDAs to read text for many years and the phone is converging on the same areas. These are good because they’re so much smaller and more portable and have long battery lives. On the other hand, this all depends on the quality of the screen. One of the most often recommended devices for reading books is the iPhone, which has an undeniably pretty screen, on the other hand it is an excruciatingly expensive way to read on the bus. It’s a good product and if you use it as a phoning, mobile emailing, mobile webbing, app running device then it’s really good. If you’re only using it to read Westlaw PDFs on the bus, though, the initial cost and monthly fees make it a difficult purchase.

The photocopier

A good photocopier costs many thousand pounds and weighs an unbelievable amount. It is beyond the dreams of any student to own. However, many facilities give you access to such a photocopier for around 3-5p a sheet. That means that you can have a 5 page report to read on the bus in black and white for about 25p, and the truly frugal student will take steps to get that price down further – by printing on both sides of page or by fitting more than one page onto each physical page. I think the photocopier is the main enemy of the ebook reader because you need to print between 3600 and 6000 pages before you would have saved money by buying Sony’s cheapest ebook reader (the Pocket PRS-300). That’s a really long term investment to save a bit of paper. I think you’d need to really need the extra advantages of the ebook reader to make it a more convincing option.

Reasons to buy right now

This is the hard thing, I don’t see a reason to buy just right now. I think the technology is extremely impressive and I think the datapad from Star Trek is nigh but at present buying one is a huge expense, particularly because you know it will get better and cheaper as time goes on. It’s hard to justify the expense when centralised photocopying exists. Once prices come down I think we’ll really reach a point where it’ll be hard to tell why you’d ever print a document out but we’re really not there yet.

The main reason to buy now is simply if you want one, it’s not long til Christmas, but I imagine this will rapidly change as prices come down (and they will).

4dd6465fc78a86d0987870f88dffcb9c

Economy Gastronomy is a recessionary BBC food programme which basically has the central principle of “avoid throwing food away.” This is frankly not a bad thing. I think a person really should be looking to avoid wasting all that much food in their life, both to save money and just for ethical living. The case studies they use in their programme are really quite over the top though – with groups of people who really show quite galling wastage of food. I’m not talking about them not going as far as using brains and connective tissue in their food, I’m talking about throwing a quarter of it away. You really do get the sense that they end up saving the people on the show money would be more down to giving the people a right good slap than teaching revolutionary food preparation techniques. I was speechless when one child threw away a three egg omlette because he’d folded it unevenly — that was his dinner

Regardless of what I or anyone else thinks of the particular people involved the principles being taught are extremely worth while. It relies on having access to long term food storage and being able to cook large amounts so it may not be suitable for all students but for people sharing flats with groups of people it might be a sensible way of splitting the expense of food. It’s cheaper to live off shared, home cooked dishes than to keep separate shelves in the fridge and fight over crumbs. It’s not going to be suitable for everyone’s situation and awkward flatmates can ruin this but its advice of planning out meals, using what’s left after a meal to make a new meal instead of throwing it away, processing past prime fruit into smoothies and spritsers and so on is all sound advice

The BBC Food site is available here

Mac Observer has published an article on the tips and details for students wanting to deal with the hassle and benefits of bringing a laptop to university. I think he makes some good points, although the advice certainly doesn’t depend on the brand of the laptop.

Transport

Transport is the biggest concern for students who stay at home and commute to university. Those living in dorms get away with, generally, less travel but with the concerns of possible theft.

I think the best way to transport a laptop at uni is a lot like how you’d do it with a bike. You want to immobilise it to stop it swinging about as you move and stressing the components.

Another good tip is to get a case which you can slide the laptop straight into – so a top opening, padded, laptop compartment in your bag is pretty brilliant. I use a padded neoprene slip case which fits in my backpack like a document wallet. It works and it protects my computer for less than a new bag but at the cost of being slower to unpack and pack when I want to use it, for example in lectures and tutorials. This needs to be added to the time needed for the laptop to be ready for you to use – starting up and loading programs. In this regard good and reliable sleep/suspend modes are a great asset.

Weight

Weight is an important issue but I think it can be overstated. Even for those who will never play prop on the university rugby team it is unlikely that any laptop you decide to pack in your bag will be cripplingly heavy. Today’s laptops are considerably lighter an d smaller than those of yesteryear. At the very worst you may find your bag works as weight training and you build some muscle. Obviously avoid a huge laptop because besides being weighty it will also be unwieldy. Most laptops are still portable enough for university without spending more for an ultraportable model. I think Mac Observer’s suggested MacBook Air is a lot of money to spent avoiding 680g of extra weight and the difference between that and a regular MacBook could probably be spent better elsewhere. Obviously if, on reading this, you realise that your MacBook Air is unsuitable for your university backpack please get in touch with the Scots Law Student MacBook Air Re-homing project because I haven’t got one. You will most likely find the extra weight pretty unnoticeable, especially when you add a single textbook or bottle of water (always an idea to have in your bag) and neutralise that hard bought weight saving.

Security

The security tips are a good move – if you have a couple of thousand. pounds (potentially) worth of computer equipment in a desirable and inherently portable product it is necessary to consider the risk that someone might take it.

This is particularly important for students living in dorms and halls because losing a computer is both a loss of corporeal movable property but also a significant loss of information, work and time.

Think Geek sells, for a lot of money, a wall mounted laptop safe which lets you bolt the laptop, secure inside a metal case, to the firmament of the building itself. I have no doubt this would be an pretty effective anti theft measure.

For people less worried about the threat of theft a cable lock is probably all you’ll need. These bike chain like devices attach to the rectangular slot on most laptops and then loop around a sturdy piece of furniture. This will protect you from people up to the point of lifting furniture / cutting the chain. If these methods both fail you could follow the example of an American law student who simply fought off his robber with a warcry of “not my case outlines!”

I think their encryption tips – encrypted disc images in particular – are worth noting but personally don’t use it myself. I don’t feel I have all that much in the way of files that need protection, I have an encrypted password database and that does me instead.

Insurance

If your laptop is still stolen the best option is to make sure your computer has been insured – you may lose your computer but you report it as stolen (as it may well be), and then replace it on, ideally, your parent’s home contents insurance and you offer to pay the excess. I wouldn’t be a law student if I didn’t point the need to check that your belongings are indeed protected under the policy while you are away at university.

Backup

If your computer is stolen you’ll probably lose a lot of your work. I keep a lot of notebooks, files and boxes of notes but I still have a considerable amount of work on my computer that I would desperately not want to lose. This differs from trying to keep possession of your computer, but is just as important.

Backup doesn’t need to be difficult. Mac Observer points its readers to the Time Machine feature on recent versions this provides versioning backup for all of your files with very little configuration. All that needs is a suitable Mac and a big external hard drive. Apple offer their own Time Machine wireless wireless hubs which are obviously wireless and convenient but any external hard drive will work and with Misco.co.uk offering a 1 terrabyte one for £67.8 – or under 7p a gigabyte (I have used just about 2 GB in my entire university career) so they are becoming very reasonably priced.

Backups don’t need ts be particularly fancy, just as as long as they are regular. Copying your home directory (Mac/Linux) or My Documents folder (Windows) onto a portable hard drive, assuming it’s done regularly, can be just as effective as buying a professional, automated product to do it for you.

A good backup protects your data from accidents that destroy your computer like battery fires etc and even robbery assuming if it isn’t taken along with the computer.

These tips apply to the lowliest netbook to the shiniest boutique gaming laptop, from the sveltest ultraportable to the chunkiest mediacentre. Get a good bag so you can carry it healthily. Get a security setup, make sure losing it isn’t irretrievable and be able to continue with your studies without, it even temporarily. This is particularly important around assessment time.

I believe there are two ends on the online legal resource continuum – sites can be inward looking or outward looking or some combination of the two. With inward looking sites being those intended for people studying, practicing or merely reading about law itself. The outward facing sites are for those affected by legal issues as lay people. The difference, is generally, but not always, simply the amount of evaluation and editorialising that goes on with the content and the approximate degree of separation from the original source material – inward looking resources are used by people who, when it comes down to the nitty gritty, have to tell a tutor, examiner or another professional that the dicta in paragraph X of case Y or that section a(b)(c)(i) of statute Z supports their position better than the other guy. Users of the outward facing sites simply want a reasonably straight forward answer to questions like “can I build a fence in my garden?”

Sites are not entirely one or the other, there’s a definite continuum online, but users of one kind may find themselves disappointed by the other. I quite like the soft edges of outward facing resources to gain a general, big picture analysis of what I should expect to find when I have a look at the source materials – I learned the basic provisions of the Unfair Contract Terms Act through consumer rights education while still at high school. It put me a good position when I studied statutory interpretation in my first semester of first year and needed to make some sense of the quite notorious piece of legislation. I find statutory interpretation very difficult – though not nearly as hard as statutory drafting – simply because there’s so many techniques, some modern and some truly ancient, to help you gain meaning from statute. Let’s not even mention Pepper v Hart which is distilled essence of “more hours researching in the library” wrapped up in a cute case name. Effectively knowing what I’m going to find is a massive crutch that will be awkward if it’s not there but certainly helps if you’re already just finding your feet. That means that reading sites that I’m perhaps not going to cite in my bibliography is still very helpful – the whole concept of academics is based on “standing on the shoulders of giants” and there’s nothing wrong with standing on the shoulders of giants who write in simpler language. Being able to back it up in a more scholarly manner, which generally seems to mean by quoting like a man possessed, is the goal but comprehension is a infinite help in writing an essay.

The ultimate inward facing legal websites are obviously Bailii, HUDOC, Lexis Library, Westlaw and the rest of them – sites that exist to give you access to source materials. The commercial databases do a remarkable amount of what database engineers would call “input sanitising” – Westlaw US checks so thoroughly that it often sends source documents back to the courts that wrote them with errata, for example, but all remain initimately connected with the original text and are fairly hard going for someone without a legal background of some description.

Up from this very source level are sites where there is still heavy reliance on source documents but they are accompanied with editorial content – I particularly like eulaw.typepad.com for this sort of thing.

The next level up are what is effectively the online textbook. I’m actually unaware of anything that I would class in this category which is still very much material for those studying, and perhaps practicing – I was certainly pointed to my textbooks as the basis of a mooting submission and the advice seems very sound – law. I would certainly use it though, so I’d appreciate a pointer for that if any reader can think of one.

Beyond that is a marked distinction into those intended to “simply” provide an answer – the Wolfram Alpha to Westlaw’s Google, if you like. Writing high quality legal reporting at this level is a very different beast which requires a much more reader friendly approach, sites may not even mention the source material or if they do it’s in very vague terms – like the “Sale of Goods Act” (an act with 64 sections and 4 schedules) providing you with “statutory rights”, rather than talking about Part II ss.10-14 adding “implied terms” to “contracts of sale”. These sites are generally very easy and quick to read, and while they don’t really provide the sort of detail you’d get a particularly meritorious mark for at uni they will hopefully settle your legal issue quite straightforwardly. Sites like this are relatively numerous but are generally fairly specific in the material they cover – taking ukecc.net or gardenlaw.co.uk as examples. Consumer advice sites are most helpful, frankly, at this level.

Generally the simpler things are the hardest to write. It’s easy to read out a bit of statute, point to it and say “that’s the law” but it’s unexpectedly difficult to point a statute, decide what’s relevant, what it means in context and then decide if it helps. It’s not a flaw with legislation, it’s just a result of living in a complicated world. The harder material is still extremely hard to write but being able to explain concepts to someone without a background in the particular field – even intelligent people with skills in another field – is a bit of gift. For example I certainly know that a lot of medicine goes straight over my head, even though a reasonable amount of computing and an increasing amount of law won’t, and I need it explained to me in quite small words.

Merry Christmas to everyone who reads this, I hope the holiday is relaxing and no one needs to do too much today. I’m looking forward to ridiculous calorific intake over many hours today, it’s at least one day of the year when the Pot Noodle is simply not on the menu for students after breakfast.

I thought I’d mention a story from across the pond which might reassure everyone who thinks they might be taking this law thing “too seriously.”

Alex Botsios is a 1L (first year of law school) at Arizona State University. Like many students his dorm room is a ripe target for thieves. One particularly bold individual appeared in his room through the unlocked window during the night brandishing a baseball bat. The thief (committing aggravated theft, of course) demanded he hand over his possessions. Botsios, being trapped in a room with an armed man, agreed and later said:

“ he had no problem giving a nighttime intruder his wallet and guitars. “

However, greed was to be this thief’s downfall, not content with the gift of music he went back for more:

“When the man asked for Botsios’ laptop, however, the first-year law student drew the line.

“I was like, ‘Dude, no — please, no!” Botsios said. “I have all my case notes…that’s four months of work!” “

I agree with this feeling, I slipped on ice during the recent freeze and escaped a pretty nasty injury by landing on my laptop and cushioning my fall with a mighty cracking sound and I recall, straight through the sense of embarrassment at decking it and the pain of landing so heavily that I felt physically sick, firstly because I might have had to find the money to buy a new computer from somewhere and also because I might have lost my work right before I was to submit assignments.

Botsios, unlike myself, had a target to vent his rage at and attacked his robber. Literally, he managed to hospitalise a hardened robber in his quest to save his laptop.

“ At that point, the law student wrestled the bat away and began punching Saucedo, Botsios said.

“I basically grabbed him and threw him this way, and he held onto the bat so it threw him to the ground,” he said.

Police said they took Saucedo to the hospital for stitches before they arrested him on charges of armed robbery and kidnapping. Other than a bruised knuckle and a few scratches, Botsios was unharmed.“

In a fairly amazing job of rubbing salt into the robber’s not-only-figurative wounds he left with this final quote:

“It’s my baby,” he said. “Don’t mess with my computer.”

A sentiment I think we can all get behind at T minus 1 hour to a deadline.

And the man who suffered all this?  This is the robber, stitched lip and all:

NB: Speaking as a not very secret IT person I would recommend that anyone else who has invested enough into their work to fight to defend it from robbers should invest in a reliable backup strategy so that even if you wake up or come home to find your dorm / house trashed and your laptop missing you can still get back to work quickly.

The thought occurs that this is a big enough topic and important enough to be a blog entry on its own at a later date, so stay tuned.

Every year since 2006 the Times newspaper has sponsored a competition for law students – this is open to all A-level, LLB, LML, LLM and Diploma/LPC students throughout Britain.

Even though the contest is open to older students with more qualifications the contest appears to have been friendly to students at university for the last few years. The idea is to write an academic, engaging essay on a topic of the Times’ choosing. It’s is always a hot button, topical issue – the contention between human rights and counter-terror actions, for example. This year, to commemorate the Mosley v The Sun libel case it is “Should people in the public eye have a right to privacy?”

Presumably, given the fallout which has hit the Express and the Sun this year alone, this is a legal issue which the Times is very interested in itself.

New students shouldn’t be put off by their inexperience – the very first case I and many other student were introduced to on starting law school was the case of Douglas v MGM which is a hugely important privacy case involving the wedding photos of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones, you’ve already been exposed to it and remember that the Times site also provides a very useful basic foundation to the subject to build on, your university’s law library will as a matter of course have textbooks on the subject and it is just a case of reading ahead to get the material you need.

The format is a short essay – no more than 1000 words, only about twice as long as this post – which is double spaced and emailed to One Essex Court on the subject of privacy law as it affects public figures. It is to include legal authority, remember that in law it is equally important who said something as it is what the content actually is, and discussion and is written just like any other piece of coursework.

The difference between the Times law student competition and your coursework is that the entrants to the Times competition are competing for up to £3500 for the first prize, £2,500 for the second and a prize of £1,500 for the third. Even after this, three runners-up will still walk away with £1,000 each – a nice wodge of book money. There’s also an awards dinner for the winners which is a highlight of any student’s essay writing career.

Anyway, I once listened to a former director of BBC Scotland describe the job of a lawyer in a media organisation and it sounds like one of the better positions that a practicing lawyer can get a hold of and there’s probably a benefit as far as informing a group of newspaper men dealing with reformed defamation laws, and a highly respected Chambers, that you know your way around both a pen and the law as it relates to privacy, isn’t there?

Law students have until the 28th November 2008 to enter their views on the subject.

Useful links

[TimesOnline Article] http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article4944261.ece
[One Essex Court] http://www.oeclaw.co.uk/

I’ve just had my first round of the law’s school’s internal law moot competition for this year.

What is mooting?

Mooting is a style of student debating – it was originally used in Inns of Court to train pupil barristers and advocates. The name comes from the moot problem which the competitors argue over– a problem which doesn’t matter but we discuss it anyway for the practice.

It’s good because it lets real trainee advocates and barristers practice their presentation and preparation skills without the risk of actually consigning a real person to years in jail. It’s all the stages of a regular court appearance, the finding and locating cases, constructing a legal argument to support your client and then presenting it in front of an arbiter while another person argues exactly the same point on the opposite side.

Why do I moot

I personally joined up in first year because it sounded very cool, in a geeky law student way. I didn’t sign up to law school for the essay assignments after all –I’m not concerned about the money I can earn from being a fully qualified lawyer yet, since that’s in the future and I’m still learning but I do, and have always, loved public speaking. When you combine that with my long lasting interest in law and my interest in how it works it’s completely natural and inevitable that I’d join my mooting society.

Having actually done it, last year my one and only question was on a topic that forced me to read ahead an entire semester and I suddenly discovered that not only was this really interesting it was also extremely helpful to my own.

This year it was a look over a topic I’d studied from the very start of my studies – criminal –and it was fascinating to go back and, instead of roughly scanning it within the limits of the accredited course from the Law Society and learning those cases and principles that were potentially going to turn up in the exam but not one paragraph further because I was working on other subjects at the same time. The moot problem gave me an incentive to go back and really read my textbook with more care than I previously did.

I very quickly discovered that you only study the rough edges of the course when you sit in your hour long lectures in your first, painful months of student life and that coming back and looking at the textbooks – reading them in a very focused, time conscious way is a great way to pick up an entirely different understanding of the law which will stick with you.

Why should you moot

Mooting is a much a game as it is a performance art. It’s a pubic speaking opportunity played by people who hope to become professionals – therefore there’s huge potential for the quality of your competition to be utterly astonishing. The level at the beginner stage is safe enough to step up into and since the scoring is more to do with the style of your presentation and ability to keep some rules in your head than any understanding of the law involved. Occasionally, with a sympathetic judge, a good understanding of the principles involved will carry you through but nevertheless – you aim to win on style while your opponents should be happy with the consolation prize of winning on the law.

There’s more money in it than high school debating as well, just as law firms like to show largess to student competitions you can see sponsored contests where the competitors walk away with both money and a nod in the job market. Speaking as someone who once won a handful of Argos vouchers for a national inter-school competition I’ll never get over the prizes of law competitions.

What it’s good for

Mooting should not always be seen as an educational experience – even though it’s a particularly good one and you’ll never, ever forget the points you’ve forcibly scored into your brain – because it’s also extremely good fun. It’s innately social – you’re working with another law student at close quarters for a long time and you make good friendships through it.

You work astonishingly hard when you’re preparing a moot. I’m not the most dedicated worker the world has ever seen yet as soon as I’m introduced to the social sanction of letting my well prepared partner down in the moot court it’s hard to separate me from my books.

It boosts your presentation skills, while most obviously it’s a crash course at presenting orally for up to 15-20 minutes at a time you also have to prepare a bundle for yourself and the judge and the presentation of these is another issue which is worth looking into. The bundle needs artfully juggled as you tell the judge where your next quote is coming from and this is a useful preparation skill in itself. Too often I find myself only reading the basic principle from a textbook or journal article and not looking to the primary source to give my argument support, it’s a terrible academic technique and it’ll never succeed in mooting, so you stop it very quickly.

It boosts your presentation skills – this bears repeating. You talk, present, on a technical point of law for a double figures of minutes (at least 10 minutes) periods of time. This is an eternity to spend on your feet and it teaches you skills, including simply the stamina to keep going, which you can’t pick up talking in other ways. If you want to become an advocate or a barrister, this is something you need to look at improving and training. The small sized group and competitive nature means that there is little problem standing up and talking, so it’s good for people who suffer from performance nerves. Genuinely, in the years I have been mooting there is no one present who is looking for you to mess up. Both of the teams are too focused on their own points, the clerk is more concerned about court behaviour and timing and the judge has a fairly hard interactive role to perform to cheer for any individual’s mistakes.

If you attend a university with a good society it’s altogether a fantastic social experience and I think, although this blog stays out of details, that my own society is lead by a number of very talented and very nice people who look after new members in particular extremely well. If you attend law school in Glasgow you have a one in three chance of getting to experience this.
Remember, the societies attached to your law school are even more important than the lectures. You can catch up on nearly all the material covered in lectures on your own time from books but you’ve only got the short time you’ve got in university to attend the clubs and societies. Don’t miss out on the extra bits, they’re often very useful and they can be fantastically good fun.

I dropped by my law school this week on the way to the library and picked up a copy of the current student law magazines while I was there.

The Student Law Review, published by Routledge Cavendish is a publication bordering on the “terrifyingly polished” and I find it to be a very interesting read that I try to pick up whenever I can.

I’ve done a quick and rough digest of the contents of this edition, and it’s a very, very long post so I’ve added it after the break. I will be back later to fact check but right now I’m just impressed at myself for getting this typed up. These are in no way the whole articles, or indeed perfect outlines of the articles themselves, I was more interested in putting out what the publication covers instead of violating the copyright on the articles themselves:

Read the rest of this entry »