A friend of mine who's going to be a 3L somewhere this fall has to write a paper this week for a pre-semester course next week on Professional Responsibility. Lawyer ethics (oxymoron?) and stuff like that. How ironic would it be if someone plagiarized the paper for that course? "Uh... I didn't know I wasn't allowed to copy someone else's work for my paper on ethics...."

I flipped through a book called "Planet Law School" in a bookstore this afternoon. Okay, I did more than just flip through it. I sat down on the floor (Barnes and Noble used to have more chairs... have they finally decided that making it easy and comfortable for people to read the books for free in the store is a bad idea?) and read a few chapters. The author of this one thinks all incoming law students should spend the summer beforehand learning the law and then not buy the casebooks and sporadically go to class. I'm not in any position to cast doubt on whether this method can lead to good grades -- but it sure does seem like a waste of being enrolled in school. Maybe I'll feel differently once I get there, I don't know.

Saw the Jennifer Aniston movie, "The Good Girl" this afternoon. No lawyers in that one. A complete aside -- ever since "American Beauty" came out and was successful, I've noticed a lot of movies about relatively ordinary people living relatively typical lives. And these relatively typical lives are miserable, unfulfilling, and without meaning. Personally, I find this more than a little disturbing and frightening. These movies scare me into thinking that everyone's lives are like that, and I don't know that that's true. I also wonder if the people who live these kinds of lives -- in "The Good Girl," Jennifer Aniston plays a retail clerk in a small town, and I'm sure there are millions of people in roughly the same situation -- go see these movies, and what they think about the "your ordinary life is worthless and meaningless" attitude that is portrayed. I don't know how much sense I'm making... but, regardless, that's just the reaction I had to the movie...