Plagiarism is Love! I'm an anarchist in law school.
I've found reading for pleasure more difficult lately, but I enjoy non-fiction social critique, science fiction, 18th century fiction. Bonus points if it's public domain.
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"A legendary transgender elder and activist reflects on a lifetime of struggle and the future …
Reading this for Dean Spade's "Queer and Trans Resistance" class. I started with trying to skim the introduction so I would have context for the meat, but I ended up reading every line. Incredible biography of a life lived in concert with her values. Excited to read more.
Reading this for Dean Spade's "Queer and Trans Resistance" class. Harrowing stuff.
The Economics Anti-Textbook is both an introduction to, and critique of the typical approaches to …
Of course, my prior is that economics is a systematized way of talking about the world that imports assumptions that have nothing to do with what people want to say about the world. And, of course, I am right yet again, haha. The anti-textbook model where it completely describes the standard telling and then complicates it is really furtive for this sort of topic—the entire point of discussing economics descriptively is to address the issues obscured by the standard telling like power and other imperfect competition conditions. At least, when the point isn't indoctrinating people in capitalist propaganda.
A law book written this way could be a really useful tool...
The merits of the Problem Method of studying and teaching law, combined with a previous synopsis of the law, lie in the fact that it approximates the mental procedure that the practising attorney would follow if he were confronted with a new legal situation by a client. The similarity is too obvious to deserve much consideration.
The client's problem is the lawyer's problem which initiates the legal thought process, the lawyer's study of the facts is the induction, the lawyer's temporary opinion is the inductive inference or tentative hypothesis, the lawyer's search in the cases and the statutes for the prevailing law in his jurisdiction is the dual induction and deduction, and the true principle of law, as he sees it, is the conclusion, whether it be the prevailing principle of law or not.
— The case method of studying law by Landman, Jacob Henry. (Page 92)
This is a real "only law students know" kind of mic drop, lmao. Law is NOT taught this way. It's taught as a god model that can be changed by precedent established by cases where the facts which motivated the precedent may barely matter to your learning. It's just interesting to think about doing it another way.
I don't know anything about Murray Morgan, but Seattle's leftist history screams from these pages. A town dominated by monied interests that always has an underbelly of counter-cultural determination. Enjoyed it a lot, especially the 20th century material when these tensions came to the fore the most. Also elements of tragedy in this because the movements rarely succeed, but there are lessons in defeat.
Audiobook through Libby.
I read this short book in a day after seeing it on the SU Law Library shelf. I've been really into sociological jurisprudence of the early 20th century lately, so I've been glossing over a bunch of old legal scholarship. I was actually expecting to not care for this based on the name, but it is a CRITIQUE of the Case Method, AND one based in sociological jurisprudence!! What a surprise!
The description of how and why the Case Method developed was interesting and useful. It was an outgrowth of a movement in the 1800s to apply scientific reasoning to cases... and then it fucked it up because the law is not science. It substituted the reading of cases for teaching people to understand law as a dispute resolution process built entirely on precedential decisions rather than a system that responds to facts and comes to outcomes that may or …
I read this short book in a day after seeing it on the SU Law Library shelf. I've been really into sociological jurisprudence of the early 20th century lately, so I've been glossing over a bunch of old legal scholarship. I was actually expecting to not care for this based on the name, but it is a CRITIQUE of the Case Method, AND one based in sociological jurisprudence!! What a surprise!
The description of how and why the Case Method developed was interesting and useful. It was an outgrowth of a movement in the 1800s to apply scientific reasoning to cases... and then it fucked it up because the law is not science. It substituted the reading of cases for teaching people to understand law as a dispute resolution process built entirely on precedential decisions rather than a system that responds to facts and comes to outcomes that may or may not be in line with prior decisions. In other words, it leads directly to the world we live in now where the Supreme Court can just say "all homeless people deserve to die" and lower court judges feel obliged to use that holding in all of their cases regardless of the specifics of their cases.
More particularly, the book goes pretty deep on the differences between inductive and deductive reasoning in the law in a way I found neat. The Case Method tells us that it is scientific, but it only claims to use inductive reasoning. Scientific reasoning, when done correctly, uses both inductive AND deductive reasoning. In practice, the Case Method is basically only deductive reasoning from case opinions with statements of facts literally designed to suggest the outcome of the case as the jurist wanted it. Imagine if we just continued saying the Sun revolves around the Earth because other people said it and we only used their articulations of the facts to justify it.
Instead, the book suggests the Problem Method. He would give the student some facts and a list of readings and have them come to class prepared to discuss their thought process of how to resolve the case. As basic as this sounds, this is SO FAR REMOVED from what happens in law school, where we still primarily use the Case Method almost 100 years later.
Certainly, not all of the book is great. One of the examples of the problem method is rape for no reason. It gets some details wrong in places, like saying Johns Hopkins had a law school. (They still do not.) The descriptions of the reasoning also would have benefitted from modern typographical/visualization techniques.
But, on the whole, this was a fresh perspective to me. Would things be different if we taught law students to study the law by actually teaching them to research the law and come to their own conclusions? Would things be better?
From an award-winning civil rights lawyer, a profound challenge to our society's normalization of the …
This book was electric. One point—the legal culture's orthodoxy pressures lawyers to go along with abject cruelty—broken down with an incredible zeal. I will be revisiting this book regularly, I think.
I think this is the new book I will share when people respond to my criticism of the law with reservations based in what the law CLAIMS to be rather than what it is. The law is about power. Therefore, it does not need to be consistent.
A trial novel from the perspective of a public defender's son. A death is investigated …
The characters and their dialog are all well realized and distinct. The emotion underlying the story really comes through, especially when the siblings of the dead child testify.
But at its heart, it's just kind of a straightforward trial story about someone who fervently believes in the capacity of the system to produce justice. Not really my bag.
Sometimes, I say to myself that I should read more contemporary fiction, but I don't really find this era to be a good setting. Modernist universalism means this story is somewhat generic. It could have happened anywhere, anywhen. But it happened here. I guess.
Borrowed from the massive stack of books in Deborah Ahren's office, lol.
Nobody's Victim is an unflinching look at a hidden world most people don’t know exists—one …
I'm working on an article about stalking and Counterman v. Colorado for SJSJ, so I have been reading broadly about DV, battered battered woman syndrome, and the typography of stalking for the last several days. It's heavy stuff, but also somewhat... relaxing? In a way? Maybe it's just because I don't have a hard deadline right now, but that's how I'm experiencing it.
I put on this audiobook while I was cleaning my living room, taking a break from the hard-a Academic reading. Goldberg's delivery is very emotional for a coached audio reader, which I dig. The content is really evocative, too. Lots of great examples of stalking behavior and (after a fashion) how the law has (reluctantly) helped people in distress (sometimes). Chapter 4 is about a brutal attack, so I might skip that, though.
Aside from the misaimed (IMO) critique of Section 230 as a concept rather than …
I'm working on an article about stalking and Counterman v. Colorado for SJSJ, so I have been reading broadly about DV, battered battered woman syndrome, and the typography of stalking for the last several days. It's heavy stuff, but also somewhat... relaxing? In a way? Maybe it's just because I don't have a hard deadline right now, but that's how I'm experiencing it.
I put on this audiobook while I was cleaning my living room, taking a break from the hard-a Academic reading. Goldberg's delivery is very emotional for a coached audio reader, which I dig. The content is really evocative, too. Lots of great examples of stalking behavior and (after a fashion) how the law has (reluctantly) helped people in distress (sometimes). Chapter 4 is about a brutal attack, so I might skip that, though.
Aside from the misaimed (IMO) critique of Section 230 as a concept rather than how it is applied, it's a really compelling book.
I've never finished anything but Stella Benson, but she came to mind. Marvelous, really unique writer. Literally that obscure friend of all your 1920s-ish faves who they all thought should have been more popular.
The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It was …
I had some expectations for this, given how much I remember liking "The House of Mirth." While I won't go so far as to say this was a miss, I felt a bit too distant from the upper crust situation to appreciate it fully. The romance of it rarely struck me and every character except Ellen Olenska felt too manipulative to root for. Although, I will say that refusing to see her again because she felt more real in his head was a huge mood...
I listened to the LibriVox recording by Brenda Dayne.
Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, …
Examines how (sometimes quasi-) authoritarian high-modernist planning fails to deliver the goods, be they increased …
So what you're telling me is that the scourge of society is a bunch of nerds trying to design away all of life's problems and their solutions always seem to involve lower classes working to solve the politburo's problems? And their plans fuck up the environment and destroy community knowledge of how to, y'know, live self-sufficiently and otherwise? And that by now many of us discontents are kinda just doomed because the network we need to survive is actively recuperated and destroyed by the state?
Fucking nerds, I swear to God. The meek will destroy the Earth.
The collection of historical narratives was quite interesting, and the overarching message was essentially archetypical. It's a basic point extremely well-explained even if I simply could not retain anything in my head from the final part. Metis entered my mind. I got that. And then I seemed physically incapable of maintaining my attention.
This book was assigned for the homeless advocacy clinic I'll be doing for law school next semester. I did sin by buying it from Amazon, but it was randomly listed for like $4 new.
I've read the first few pages and it's definitely (predictably, necessarily) big on the idea that legal advocacy can meaningfully address homelessness, which I don't believe is true. Homelessness is a condition caused by the state for political ends, so the state isn't going to just give it up. Nonetheless, as the posture of the book is "fighting within the system," I'll reserve judgment because I know basically nothing about the nuts and bolts of homelessness law.
