Picking up steam

Busy, busy, busy though I may be, I hereby resolve to not shirk my blogging in October as I have been September shirking. And the thing is, you (fair readers) are totally missing out on lots of good stuff because I'm just too darn busy to blog about it. Oh, the injustice!

Among the forty, fifty, sixty hours I spend doing law schooly things I must say I have some great textbooks this semester, beyond the fact that I am just plain interested in my classes. For example there's Patent Law, in which was written maybe my favorite textbook sentence thus far. It was talking about the development of patent law in the world, starting with Europe and into the U.S. (Brief history of patent law: there was none, then hardly any for centuries, then recently a whole bunch.) The book said, "But as the industrial revolution picked up steam (so to speak)..." Ha ha ha ha ha !

Another great one was in my Regulation of Lawyers text for Ethics/Professional Responsibility class. This one was in a Supreme Court case, though, and over the years in law school we law students definitely come to know that some Supreme Court justices pepper their opinions with pithy, snarky, and sometimes quite brilliant lines and that some have magnificent writing skills even if their reasoning is often prejudicial or flawed (ahem, Scalia) and that some just have the most boring, snooze-inducing writing styles known to humankind (I'm looking at you, O'Connor).

Anyway, this one was in a 1988 decision written by Justice Brennan about lawyer advertising, targeting advertising, and print advertisements versus lawyers soliciting in person (i.e., ambulance chasing, like the guy who went to see the girl in traction in the hospital to say he could represent her). In talking about why in-person solicitation by an attorney puts more pressure on someone in a fragile state than an advertisement, even a targeted letter sent to a certain group of people, Brennan writes, "A letter, like a printed advertisement (but unlike a lawyer), can readily be put in a drawer to be considered later."

I shall go through the rest of my day grinning every time I so much as think about putting a lawyer in a drawer to consider him later.