Tag Archives: family

7 years, now with more diploma

Posted by on 05/20/2011 1 comment

I offi­cially grad­u­ate from Law School today. Hur­ray for me.

Coin­ci­den­tally, today is also my anniver­sary. 7 years. Hur­ray for me again.

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Love of justice

Posted by on 07/02/2010 4 comments

This post is some­thing I have been think­ing on for a while, but Laura McWilliams prompted me to post it with her Love of the Law, part 2 post.

I went into law school with a gut feel­ing that I could never defend crim­i­nals, and that if I went into Crim­i­nal Law it would be as a prosecutor.

Then I was intro­duced, through the eyes of cases skimmed dur­ing class and through the per­spec­tive of the Crim­i­nal Defense attor­neys I “met” through twit­ter, to the Crim­i­nal Injus­tice sys­tem of our country.

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Think of the children!

Posted by on 04/30/2010 No comments

Sex offence is a treach­er­ous subject.

As a father, I am gripped by the slight nau­sea and imme­di­ate gut-reaction of want­ing to hurt some­one who hurts chil­dren. I’m okay with that. Child rapists are among the low­est of the low; that’s not some­thing I will change my mind about.

I feel sim­i­larly, if less vis­cer­ally, about a man who forces him­self on a woman — your stan­dard rapist.

If our laws were directed specif­i­cally at those mis­cre­ants, there wouldn’t be the (same) prob­lems we cur­rently have. Unfor­tu­nately, some­one, and I’m not sure who, decided that the only way to keep our chil­dren safe is to come down hard on sex offend­ers. Sex offend­ers has become syn­ony­mous with child rapists in the mind of the pub­lic, so any­thing done to and in pur­suit of sex offend­ers is fair game.

That by itself is wor­ry­ing, since even the low­est of the low have rights, but it just keeps get­ting worse.

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Life goes on… and on… and on…

Posted by on 12/05/2008 No comments

‘Tis the sea­son! The finals sea­son, as opposed to the hol­i­day sea­son. The two are nearly sim­i­lar: one is  a time of bit­ter­ness, depres­sion and strife; and finals sea­son is even worse.

Allow me to pause while you groan.

Being a non-traditional law stu­dent gives me a unique per­spec­tive on finals. My day job is extremely flex­i­ble and I am able to take days off to study; and my fam­ily — my wife, since the kids are too young to have a real say — is also sup­port­ive and won­der­ful, let­ting me study in (rel­a­tive) peace while I’m home.

That  being said, life for a non-traditional stu­dent does not stop dur­ing finals. I can’t study through the night since I have a fam­ily to pay some mod­icum of atten­tion to and work to go to (early) the next morn­ing. I can’t focus my entire brain power solely on the issues of the semes­ter since I have a job that requires the use of my brain. How fondly I recall my days doing con­struc­tion work! Ok, not so fondly…