Reflections After Year 2, Day 1

It was quite a pleasure to return to school yesterday and begin classes without any of the fears or confusions that came with the first year. A friend pointed out that it almost feels like being a high school senior... we get to drive to school, we have all our friends, we know where we're going to eat lunch. Then there are the poor, pathetic 1Ls. They're actually briefing cases, they're talking about the reading with each other before class, they're carrying around Black's Law Dictionary. I can hardly believe I ever was one.

Seriously though, being back in school without those stresses has let me recognize how much I really enjoy law school, how positive an experience it has been for me (horror stories notwithstanding). I love the three classes I've been to (Judicial Role in American History, Foreign Relations Law, and Evidence) and the professors are all good teachers, a quality that clearly does not always correlate with academic reputation or tenure decisions. That's reportedly one of UVA's strengths, though the fact that I've not attended any other law schools limits my capacity for making such comparisons.

I also got a very good prompt for a potential paper from my ConLaw professor, Mike Klarman. I continue to be fascinated by the early years of the Burger Court, despite several potential topics going nowhere, and his suggestion is that I look for explanations for the disparity in the Nixon appointees' voting patterns on constitutional issues. Briefly, there must be some reason why they put a halt to much of the forward progress on race and crime issues, but also declared the right to abortion, (briefly) struck down the death penalty, and finally recognized equal protection on gender grounds. Klarman's intuition, which I share, is that it reflects the power of social and political context upon even those justices we don't think of as activists. That should allow a limited amount of archival work, plus the political/social science research in polling and the media which I learned to love as an undergraduate.