or, it really isn’t all that bad.
Either way, I am less anxious about a particular assignment than I was last week. I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I spent a weekend being totally and completely impossible to live with. My otherwise really great Legal Writing Prof decided that it would be good for us to write an appellate brief. Yep, one of those multiple page highly formatted (complete with a bajillion and one citations) briefs related to a particular fact pattern and politely telling a particular panel of judges that the previous panel got it wrong.
Why on earth would I want to do THAT?
It is not that I mind going down successive rabbit holes after detailed information. Both regular medicine and public health can both be about the details and figuring out, among all the red herrings – what is really going on.
But writing about it in a particularly technical manner? And, no matter what anyone attempts to tell me about “it all should be written in plain English” well, let me just say that is NOT the reality. So I spent all of last weekend either attempting to put that particular sucker together and not so quietly going nuts. The insanity continued well into Tues. There was a deadline of 1530 which I didn’t make, but managed to toss something together which made a late deadline in the early evening. It was written, it was argued. It was not cited. I had the cases but just was sick of the whole thing.
Between then and now, I really had been trying to ignore that particular bit of idiotic draft but today had myself convinced that I really should start on the redo. Then George reads it and tells me that he thinks I got all the main points and I just need to add some citations.
As turns out, he has actually written appellate briefs (I had forgotten about all the housing work he did for Legal Services in the late 70s and how much of it was paperwork followed by arguing before a judge. He is also not a fan of “baffle them with bullshit” so I figure to have the shortest submission.
But then, I am not a lawyer and am seriously resisting being brainwashed into believing that there are two valid sides to every law, argument or discussion. Repeat, I am not a lawyer, I don’t check my morals at the door resulting in mandatory ethics classes in all law schools….
And on to a take home exam….
