Someone’s Got A Case of the Mondays

Actually, I don’t have a “case of the Mondays,” but Mondays will forever make that scene from Office Space leap into my head. And laugh. Sometimes that happens when I’m in public, and then I’m standing there laughing at nothing, which makes people look at me strangely. Oh well. Chalk it up to their own cases of the Mondays.

Worked out today for the first time since my wisdom teeth extraction. And in the interest of full honesty, here, it was the first time since finals that I’d worked out (for all my best intentions, I didn’t at all this summer, and frankly, I didn’t even care). It was good. I’m sure I’ll feel it tomorrow, but it felt good at the time.

Discussed Sexual Violent Predator Acts in my Criminal Procedure class today, and was taken aback and the number of students who genuinely believed that a sexual predator who openly declares to the judge, his counsel, and anyone else who will listen, that he fully intends to molest, rape and harm children once he’s free again, deserves the right to do that.

I chalk that up to the blinders that come from being a student one’s whole life instead of having any real connection and functioning within the Real World. The students arguing that tenuous and frightening point of view did so from the basis of high-idealism: constitutionality, due process rights, freedom for all! But when you blew through their smoke and mirrors, what you were left with was form elevated over function, and theory held tighter than reality.

Which leads to one of two conclusions: these students are ignorant in one of the vital points of the discussion at hand (e.g., sexually violent pedophiles are mentally ill; they do not do a cost-benefit analysis of “Shall I molest this child, or shall I not?” but are compelled beyond anything they can control to harm the child, period, and the recidivism rate for those offenders is through the roof), or these students don’t understand the constitutional procedures and freedoms they claim to be upholding. In response to one woman’s comment that “It is our duty as attorneys to make sure that the offender is given his full protections,” I responded that, “You’re suggesting that it is ‘our duty’ to to an offender who tells you he intends to rape a child, to give him that opportunity, and I’m telling you in response, That ain’t my duty.”

I was pleased, because I even rendered the professor speechless for a minute, before he began to ask me questions about my view. [I proceeded to give some of the above discussion in support of my "That ain't my duty" comment, and it was after I said my full piece that the speechlessness resulted. In the immortal words of Butthead, "Heh. That was cool."]

Anyway, it makes me glad all over again that I know where I’ll be working, and perhaps even more importantly, I know with whom I will be working. And it ain’t with the “It’s my duty to allow child rape!” activists, thank God. Seriously. I think so many of these off-the-wall beliefs would be tempered by time spent working in the real world. I don’t think it’s such a bad idea to require a would-be law student to spend a minimum of two years working. And I don’t care where–in a law related field, or otherwise. But go out and live in the real world. Get out of the classroom for a while, and start to experience real life, outside the protected shelter of Academia and its elevated view of theory vis-a-vis reality. Let the Real World bite you in the ass a couple of times, and get acquainted with how that feels, before you profess to understand “due process” and “fairness.” Because if you’ve never lived outside the sheltered world of academia, you don’t know diddly about fair, just, or due procedure.

And yes, to those of you who knew me circa May, 2000, I realize that the Me of that era would have scoffed at that previous paragraph, certain that the advice therein was stilted or misinformed. Which, I think, just proves my point.

Putting this all behind me, I now proceed to Dinner Making (a solo class taught and attended by moi) and later, to Non-Profit Organizations, where we will find out whether my brief overview skim of the 85 pages of reading material left enough tidbits embedded in my brain to make it seem entirely convincing to the professor that I read all the material and found it utterly intriguing. Ask N8–that’s a game I tend to play a lot.

Take care, and check 6.
(And don’t vote to release sexually violent pedophiles. That’s just common sense.)

Labels: anecdotes and opinions, law school, think-abouts