| Sorry for the four-post day and the generally downer themes. Here’s my last depressing post of the day. It’s my wedding anniversary on Saturday. Chapin and I will have been married seven years! We had a whole romantic weekend away planned, a first in four years of having a child! Pumpkinhead has never spent the night away from us before. Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned bad service provider, I am stuck at home dealing with the mess the provider made and we’re having to postpone our weekend. I’ve also missed two classes 
and am really behind on this week’s material. Guess this is the part that makes it hard. I can handle law school and work, but throw any monkey wrenches into my careful plan and it all goes haywire. 
Archive for June 28th, 2007
June 28th, 2007 Posted at Law School, Mommy stuff
June 28th, 2007 Posted at Uncategorized
The Supreme Court today struck down as unconstitutional two school districts’ plans to keep their schools’ racial makeup in balance. I haven’t had a chance to read the almost 200-page opinion yet, but my initial reaction is that this seems wrong. When I was in high school, we had probably 23 African American kids in my class of 740 students. Many of those students were bussed in on ONE bus from the far reaches of our district so that we could have a more “balanced” school. The districts in today’s opinion set limits of no less than 15% and no more than 50% African American so that the schools would be more representative of society at large. I would like to think they would have bussed in white kids to majority African American neighborhoods to make that happen.
That said, I’m a parent. I want my kid at the very best school he can attend and, believe me, we’re paying the school taxes to prove it. But I also know that his elementary school is 12% African American, 7% Asian and 18% Hispanic — much like the country’s makeup. I feel confident that he will be exposed to a variety of kids. But at least we have the choice. We lived in a majority African American neighborhood of DC (in fact, I swear we were the only White/Hispanic couple for miles). One of the reasons we left was that we knew our kids would be underserved at the local schools. Teachers don’t want to teach there and the really smart kids who are in those classrooms are shortchanged. It’s a very sad situation and I fear that the Supreme Court just made it worse. Instead of banning minimum/maximum diversity plans, perhaps they should have been making them mandatory.
June 28th, 2007 Posted at Uncategorized
I was very disappointed to read that it’s likely that immigration reform will be shelved until after the 2008 elections after today’s Congressional sessions. 
One quote from the NY Times says:
“The price of failure will be hundreds of more people dying in the desert,” said Eliseo Medina, an executive vice president of the service employees union. “The price of failure will be more workplace raids and families separated as breadwinners are arrested and deported. The price of failure will be more public anger at the broken immigration system. More states and cities will pass punitive laws that target immigrants.”
I think that the price of failure will be that more states and local communities will pass discriminatory over-reaching local laws and ordinances which will harm Hispanics and other immigrants, both legal and undocumented, in ways we can’t even imagine. I am feeling the same sense of dread I felt the day they announced that Bush had been chosen by the Supreme Court to run this country.
June 28th, 2007 Posted at Law School
Working in a law firm before attending law school is both a positive and a negative experience. On the one hand, you get to see what lawyers at different levels actually do every day. Especially as a secretary (versus a paralegal), I get an inside view at the nitty gritty of their daily lives. I know for sure which tasks I won’t enjoy and which ones I will most likely take on with relish.
On the negative side, sometimes the harsh reality can get a little too difficult to deal with. I’ve pulled the all-nighters required with a huge filing in litigation. I’ve seen the corporate associates with three levels of bags under their eyes after a particularly difficult week before a closing. I have to remind myself that I’m not going into the area of law that my current attorneys practice. My first boss in the legal field got divorced right when I was starting with him and he said, “The best advice I can give to new lawyers is to remember your priorities. Family needs to have some one-on-one time that is free of client demands.†With that in mind, I hope to make it through law school and come out on the other side with a clear sense of my goals and an intention to say “no†when necessary while still playing the game. Long hours are inevitable no matter what.
So here’s the depressing thing. One of my associates is leaving this week (announced Tuesday that her last day would be Friday). She’s only been practicing for about four years and she’s my age. When she told me, she said, “I went into BigLaw because I had ‘Big Debt’ and I wanted to pay all of that off. I thought I could work a few years and then move on to something else. But you know what? I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore. I never imagined I would get burned out before I could ever explore any other options. It’s not the people. It’s not the firm. It’s just the unpredictability. I hate going home Friday night thinking all is calm then getting a 9 p.m. call and having to stay up all night to get something to the client. I just can’t do it anymore.†So she’s leaving and she doesn’t plan to practice law in the future.
Lawmummy wrote a great post this week on those punch-in-the-stomach moments where the law just seems unjust. I hope that I can find a position where those moments are rarer than the moments of pleasure/triumph. Am I completely naïve to believe that I can? 
