November 29, 2004

The last week of law school, and an old law school doodle.

It's the last full week of the semester here at the law school. Consequently, I feel a lot of pressure to get through the material--none of the usual expanding into areas that stimulate good discussion. It's time to be crisp and on task. You can't just increase the flow of information because it's close to the end. That's not fair. Yet you have to get to the end somehow. In one class, we've stayed on schedule and will finish simply by continuing at the pace we've followed all semester. In the other class, I've had to use the technique of cutting readings and switching to lecturing. But then there is a special obligation to make the lectures clear. Things we would have puzzled over, had we read a case on the subject, must be simplified now.

I'll have some more news-oriented blogging later. I'm especially interested in two federalism cases to be argued in the Supreme Court today. But, for now, I'll leave you with a doodle I did years ago in the margin of my law school class notes. I used to find drawing in the margins like this helped me focus on what I was hearing. The date was 5/6/81, sometime close to the end of the semester in Federal Courts, where maybe we were encountering new material, tying things together, and still leaving a few threads dangling.

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