Therefore, I don't have much to say. Things seem to be going decently well with my group project, and school is in one of those false lulls, where things aren't due this week, so I don't feel like there's much going on, but in reality I'm supposed to be using the time to study and start lots and lots of things I don't care about right now.
I played handball for six hours on Saturday, which was fun and even more fun because my arm didn't fall off.
I wrote the above yesterday before my group had a miniature crisis that I took care of by dropping this and staying up until midnight, then coming in early today to finish up before class at 8:45. We finished the project this morning a few minutes before it was due. It's amazing how that always seems to happen. We even started this way before I would normally consider starting a project, and things felt like they were in hand throughout. Yet it all came down to last-minute changes. We got another group assignment (same groups) today, so I guess we'll try and do even better this time.
Interestingly, I still feel sort of detached and bitter about things for what seems to be no reason at all. I'd try and blame seasonal affective disorder, but I've actually been less depressed than at lots of other points in my life, so I don't think that's it (law school is keeping me too busy to start obsessing over how meaningless my life is and how lonely I could see myself (a hidden upside you don't think about when choosing this path!))
So here are some things that I've experienced that might be worth sharing:
I've attended two lunch/lectures already this week. The first was by two guys who were integral in drafting some constitutions. FOR COUNTRIES! They wrote constitutions for whole nations! And one of them is a professor here. I don't remember the other's association, but that's still pretty crazy. The professor was responsible for arbitrating and overseeing the constitution for Kosovo, which was difficult because the goal was for it to be multi-ethnic, but obviously the different ethnicities don't see eye to eye. There was a group of Serbs, a group of Turks, and a group of Albanians.
(Just got distracted by Watsky linking a bunch of spoken word poetry on facebook! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtEG86krJRc is one example I liked.)
Anyway, the Serbs wouldn't meet in Kosovo, so when the writing was taking place, the professor was shuttled back and forth to Macedonia. The writers' first instinct was just to copy the US constitution, but they were advised against it because ours is completely inapplicable to current times without all the precedent and legal rulings that have been attached to it and have modified it.
The second guy was involved in stopping the civil war in Sudan! Well, I guess the fighting probably hasn't stopped, but he was initially asked to sit in on talks taking place in Germany between the north and south portions of the country. Both parties would just categorically reject any proposal from the other side, so after four days they gave up on a treaty and started drafting a constitution instead. He said he was probably personally responsible for about 60% of the document! He also said the constitution was a stumbling block for the treaty. I guess now South Sudan is independent though, so maybe it wasn't effective at uniting the two parties. On the plus side, they are basing their new constitution off the one he drafted, so I guess that's something.
Today I listened to a talk that was a "bit" closer to home. That's funny, but you don't know it yet. The talk was on bit-torrent litigation! I'm hilarious. Anyway, what's happening is that people are using bit-torrent to share things illegally. Lawyers in Minnesota are using this to make huge amounts of money. Here's how: they buy the copyrights to pornographic material and wait for it to be shared on bit-torrent sites. Then they threaten all of the people they can find that downloaded it and threaten them with a lawsuit unless they settle. They choose the settlement value to be just less than the minimum cost of litigation. People don't want to litigate because it associates their name with downloading porn, so they usually settle for between three and five thousand dollars. It's estimated that the Minnesota lawyers have made fifteen million dollars. And it's not even illegal from what I can tell! It sort of amounts to blackmail, but if the lawyers pursue litigation at least part of the time, it's probably possible to just keep on doing what they're doing. As far as I'm concerned, these guys are geniuses.
The guy giving the talk was hilarious, too. He's a judge who has dealt with the requests by lawyers for methods of discovering the names associated with IP addresses for people downloading the material. http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/blog/law/2013/05/prenda-law-star-trek-opinion-otis-wright.html?page=all is an article on the topic, but something that's pretty amusing is that a judge in california, while ruling on the topic, used a ton of star trek references! It's actually hilarious, in a groan-worthy sort of way. It sure livened up an otherwise dry ruling, at the very least.
Other than that, I've just been doing the minimum for classes while doing way more than the minimum for our group's stuff. One of our contracts cases was about Clint Eastwood trying to get an ex off his back, so that was sort of amusing. Basically he settled with her on whatever suit she brought, and as a part of that settlement he got her an agreement with his studio. However, he paid the studio back for the agreement, and the studio never took any of her work seriously. It basically just amounted to a purely monetary settlement, so she sued on the contract for bad faith. Interesting stuff.
There are worse ways to waste time than looking at good poets. Here's that guy again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5wbToZkJwY
Watsky recently uploaded a current poem I liked quite a bit, too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUmHLDIEBgk
Well, I'm bored. I think I'll do something else for a while and see if I feel any different. Thanks for reading!
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