Life Within The Law

So, lots of stuff happened since I last posted!

• First, I got kind of stuck/bored with Retrospectus. I still think the story itself has a lot of promise, but I think I spent too much too soon, and threw it off the rails. I didn’t have a way to finish out the month with the story I had in my head at the time, so I just let it die. Apologies to the .00015 people who read it!
• Second, I took the bar again in February.
• Third, I passed the February bar.
• Fourth, I got a job as an attorney at Legal Aid of Arkansas. (I thought about hiding the name, but my position includes a bit of press about me personally, so it’s not really practical to try to hide it. More on the press bit in a later post.)
• Fifth, I moved to Mississippi.

So now the plan is to get lots of experience at LAA for awhile, and then hopefully go back to school for an LL.M. and a J.S.D. In the meantime, I’m doing a lot of non-job reading, and sniffing around for good legal articles to write. I’ll post more on what I’m reading, what I think about what I’m reading, and what I’m writing at a later date.

Oh, and given this blog’s infinitesimal audience and the vast storage capacity of the Internet, I just have to do this:
EEEECHOOOO (Eeechooo) (eechoo) (echo) (echo) (echo)

Hello, faithful reader. (I’m speaking to the only person that reads this.) I’ve been away awhile. Not much to write about, and not been in much mood to write since I failed the bar. Still not, really, but I’m going to take a whack at writing a fictional story on here anyway.

The way it will work is that, officially, I’m part of NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month. So I’ll be posting every day in November. During that stretch, I’ll be posting new entries in a fictional story I’ll begin tomorrow – as if I were participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) – but I’m not part of it.

Okay, that’s about the long and short of it. Starting tomorrow, a strange story begins, and every day will be a new chapter of this story. If I still have a single reader by December 1, I’ll consider myself a lucky man indeed.

Well, no posts in 6 days invariably means virtually no traffic; but more than that, it means I’m not sure what to do with this place. An old blog of mine (now gone from this world, mercifully) saw frequent updates because I used it as an emotional outlet; but that’s not what I need anymore, and so I have no interest in repeating that experience here.

The truth is that I don’t know what all this place will be used for. Maybe nothing – maybe it will fall by the wayside, like my last blogging attempt. The only certain thing is that I’m going to use this place as a publication method for scholarly papers I intend to write.

You see, my academic qualifications are fairly lacking. I have a J.D., yes, but what I ultimately want to do – teach law – requires much more than a middle-of-the-pack class rank from a decently-ranked (but not superb) law school. What I need, then, is more postgraduate education – specifically, an LL.M. (Masters of Law) and a J.S.D. (Doctor of the Science of Law – basically a law Ph.D.). But in order to gain admission to a good LL.M. program, I must demonstrate my scholastic ability. Having so dramatically failed to establish that at law school, the only remedy available to me is publication.

Of course, given my poor qualifications, my chances of getting published in a respectable journal are virtually non-existent. So I expect that I will, at least at first, publish my papers here on this site. And along the way to writing papers, I’ll publish short posts about what I’m reading and writing. So far, all of the material I’ve requested to come in has been material on various aspects of legal philosophy, so expect some material on that in the near future. In the meantime, I’ll be posting another volume of Ask Steve – hopefully by tomorrow.

I’ve added a page called “Ask Steve,” where you can submit any question you’d like me to answer. I’ll tackle anything you want to ask (with one exception noted below). My training is in law and history, but I’m an amateur at lots of things, so feel free to submit anything you want.

Please note the caveat I’ve included on the page about specific legal advice. Ethical rules for these kinds of things are harsh and unforgiving, and I’d greatly prefer not to lose my law license before I even get it.

That aside, ask away!

I’ve decided to take another stab at blogging. As so many resuming bloggers say, I don’t know whether this will pan out in the end. I thought it worthwhile, however, to try chronicling certain of my thoughts in this new period of my life. Here I find myself in a new town, pursuing a new occupation (lawyer), and in a marriage (to the much more famous blogger, The Redheaded Skeptic) that in some ways seems is only now getting off the ground.

So that’s the justification alright…but what’s the impetus? When I last successfully blogged – which is to say, NOT my last actual attempt) – I did so as a way of processing things that I couldn’t handle internally–even if I did so in code. (I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of why that blog was the way it was; I did that at the beginning of my last actual attempt at blogging, and there’s no need to rehash any of that material here.) Now, however, I’m no longer in a state of psychological flux, so the impetus behind this attempt remains somewhat uncertain. I like writing, I like debating, and I like voicing my opinion; maybe I can make this place be a better recipient of that than the random social network postings of friends.

I anticipate that some of what will be forthcoming will be academic, and some will be personal. I remain, as I always have, attentive to the desires of my audience, so if anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to submit them.

See you on the other side.