Captain Copyright - A Canadian Creation. So I'm thinking about whether it is legal and/or advisable to sell my old 1L outlines to the hoard of current 1Ls that would undoubtedly pay dollars for a customized outline.  There was a service called TakeNote @ Cornell that produced custom class notes on red paper, designed to foil would-be photocopiers.  (They hired TAs to take notes during that class that you undoubtedly skipped because of your subscription to Takenote Example of Intro to Wines TakeNote). So I ask - Would be infringing upon a professor's copyright? The concept of copyrighting a lecture (technically, a live performance) was briefly addressed in my copyright class.  Additionally, an excellent law review titled "Note: 'Profiting At My Expense': An Analysis of the Commercialization of Professors' Lecture Notes" by Ashley T. Barnett - 9 J. Intell. Prop. L. 137 (Fall 2001) discusses the issue of commercial note-taking services, advocating that additional protections should be adopted. Does federal copyright law prevent a commercial note service from copying a lecture delivered by a professor? The answer is: it depends. The legality of buying and selling lecture notes or of posting lecture notes on the Internet seems to be a gray area of the ...

Students Rejoice in ... The new building will indeed be awesome.

I can't take credit for the idea behind this post. My awesome civ pro / con law professor / research adviser devoted the end of a civ pro class to watching some of these crazy depositions while we were studying discovery rules. Without further adieu, I give you the Top 6 Most Amusing Depositions. 6. "Background Noise on the Phone" [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz4YBrUML-8&hl=en&fs=1] Okay, so it's debatable whether this one belongs in this collection as the hilarity comes from a source other than the deposed. But it's still amusing, right? This is why I always hate being on conference calls. Is there a polite way to tell some random guy to shut his kid up? I don't even want to consider whether there is a polite way to tell someone to stop pleasuring themselves and/or others. 5. Thank God for Rape Shield Laws [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7T3HLvRrA8&hl=en&fs=1] In this long clip, a junior associate is set up by his firm with a fake, ridiculous deposition. I don't know whether I love or hate this firm for setting up this elaborate situation. The only thing that remains certain is that this guy has some awesome frames. 4. "Would You Object if I Wear a Mask Over My Face?" [youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1FdIDGmdSU"] I'm actually really excited about this ...

Document reviewers celebrated on Monday when the House passed S. 2450, a bill designed to add Federal Rule of Evidence 502 - "Attorney-Client Privilege and Work Product; Limitations on Waiver."  The main point, as described in this point of law article, is that since the production of privileged documents during discovery acts as a waiver to that privilege, firms are spending a significant amount of time on privilege review to ensure that documents don't slip through and destroy their case.  FRE 502 would remove this barrier, serving both judicial economy and junior associates' sanity. (b) Inadvertent Disclosure- When made in a Federal proceeding or to a Federal office or agency, the disclosure does not operate as a waiver in a Federal or State proceeding if: (1) the disclosure is inadvertent; (2) the holder of the privilege or protection took reasonable steps to prevent disclosure; and (3) the holder promptly took reasonable steps to rectify the error, including (if applicable) following Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(5)(B). And Josh - Happy Large Hadron Collider Day - I know you've been waiting for this for a long time.

As a research assistant, I find myself reading an insane amount of law review articles. Adding Law Review to the mix means that I'll be reading a super insane number of law review articles next year. I always read these articles and notice that they've been written in a nice outline format, but Lexis doesn't give you any kind of table of contents to quickly analyze the argument structure. Reading all of the headings can usually give you some idea of whether the article is going to be of any use, so why not have these headings given up front? LexisNexis, I'm looking at you. Anyway, I got tired of waiting for this feature, so I decided to write some python code to do it. OS X / Linux people, you're stuck downloading python and running python code linked above. If you need any assistance, feel free to ask. Windows people, you need to download and install python, and then download and install my program. After you install python, the outliner will run from your Start Menu or Desktop like any other program you've ever downloaded. It's real simple to use. Cut and paste everything from the Text Section of the law review article, and ...

I had no idea what to expect from law school classes. I knew that they would be taught using the socratic method, but I didn't know how I was going to extract information while other students were on call. As a result, I essentially transcribed the entire professor/student dialogue during my first torts class. While this was insanely stupid for a lot of reasons, reading it may give you a good idea of what kind of questions you can expect to be asked. Click here for my notes from the first day of class. Now I'm going to tell you why these notes are bad. 1.) If I did want to take anything substantive out of these notes, I'd have to go back through the conversation and pick out the important parts. It would have been just as easy to do it the first time, while it was being said. 2.) As you can see, I prepped that brief with a lot of useless information. If you insist on writing real briefs (rather than book briefing as I've discussed in previous posts) try to keep facts to a minimum. My fear was that I would be called to state the facts and forget some ...

I'm usually fairly good about following law school etiquette. I try to limit the number of comments I make in classes, I don't talk about grades to people outside my study group, etc. These are things that are obvious. So I'm in Chicago right now for the Loyola Patent Law Job Fair, and tonight, those of us that are being interviewed by Howrey were invited to a reception. It was a good time -- there were a lot of tech geeks, and lots of talking about law schools and 1L life, and the like. When the conversation moved to the job fair, I was curious how other people were preparing for interviews. Specifically, I wanted to know how people with 10 or more interviews were preparing (because dear god, that is a lot of information to have to know). The first two people I asked told me, and then later I asked the same question to another guy, who uncomfortably said, "Yeah, I don't really want to talk about that." And then it occured to me. I should have just asked his class rank while I was at it. Maybe what his worst grade was, and in what class. My argument (though ...

Andy and I found out that we made the Penn State Law Review today (as did our girlfriends). The law firm of Auriemma, Schnitzel, Ahmed, and Petrosky (ASAP) is coming together nicely.