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Seriously

Eggnog scented candles?  Check them out at your local Yankee Candle shop.

*pukeface*

Fantastic

“Finally, if the language of the contract is to be construed as broadly as defendant urges to encompass the presence of poltergeists in the house, it cannot be said that she has delivered the premises “vacant” in accordance with her obligation under the provisions of the contract rider.”

169 A.D.2d 254, 572 N.Y.S.2d 672

Bumble Bee

I apologize for the extended time between posts.

I’ve recently learned that I am not being allowed to continue law school next semester, due to the nature of my current job. This has been a fairly trying time for me.

In lighter news, the Washington Post has finally admitted their bias.

Decorate Yourself

Never Despair

When the coal was crushed, he never despaired

When the diamond was cut, he never despaired

It’s better to walk the line, if that line is yours

Show strength with every step

You are impenetrable.  Untouchable.  Immutable.

Define Yourself.

NEVER DESPAIR.

Decorate yourself from the inside out.

The PULSE Review

The PULSE Review is a non-partisan Public Policy, Law, and National Security review. Our goal is to establish a credible source of information and opinion regarding the latest relevant issues, while providing stimulus for intelligent debate.

www.PulseReview.com

If you’re really cool, you’ll go there, leave a comment, and check back regularly. That means you, ITK, Melissa, Sprinkes, and Dave.  Don’t make me beat you.

Screaming Obscenities

So, over the past 2 days, I’ve been attempting to keep my mouth shut in class about the parol evidence rule. The idea behind it is that you don’t allow outside evidence regarding the terms of a contract when the contract has been written in clear, precise terms. You do allow it in some situations such as if there are ambiguities in the contractual terms, etc.  This is largely to protect the enforceability of the contract – outside evidence alters the view of the contract from the cut and dry plain meaning of the words to interpretation based on testimony, etc.

At some point, we began discussing the evolution of the law, and how more and more parol evidence is eventually making it into cases through the liberalization of the interpretation process. Some legal scholars are thinking that all evidence should be allowed in, and then let the jury sift through it.

That was first brought up yesterday, I was tired, cranky, and just – unhappy. I managed to abstain from saying anything stupid.

Today, the professor brought it up again, and I was unable to refrain from a sneer and an eye-roll. As fate would have it, my professor saw my reaction, and asked for my thoughts.

This is how it happened:

“Mr. O’Hara, you seem to have an opinion of dismissing the parol evidence rule”

*I put my hands up in the air in a concilliatory manner*

“Ma’am, I don’t want to say anything inflammatory”

“Oh, come on, Mr. O’Hara, law school is the time to have strong, outrageous beliefs!” – At this point in the semester, she knows she can count on me for something entertaining, because I rarely tow the new age-liberal interpretations of the law.

*I sigh in defeat*

“Alright, well, I just don’t think that giving the jury too much to work with is smart. It took me 5 weeks to figure out the difference of ‘meeting of the minds’ versus ‘manifestation of intent’, and how to apply it. Do you really think the juries going to be able to? They’re going to sympathize with a sob story, and the fact that every term and condition was spelled out with precision in the contract will have no weight. Why even have a contract in the first place then, when there can be no reliance that the terms will be upheld in court??”

*Class kind of goes silent for a little while, as they mull over the fact that I just called juries stupid/incompetent

*Professor looks at me with an amused expression, says I have a good point, and moves on to the next person.

What’s funny is that once I broke the dam, all of a sudden a bunch of people thought it would make sense to have stricter rules as to what was admissible, and I think one person actually explicitly said that juries were stupid. Law school ain’t so bad!

For those of you who’ve read Ender’s Game

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

Editor’s note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President’s Men and thinking: That’s journalism.  You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere.  It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan?  It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups.  But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay?  They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it.  One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules.  The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans.  (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me.  It’s as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn’t there a story here?  Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout?  Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal.  “Housing-gate,” no doubt.  Or “Fannie-gate.”

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled “Do Facts Matter?” ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): “Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago.  So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President.  So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury.”

These are facts.  This financial crisis was completely preventable.  The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party.  The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie.  Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What?  It’s not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let’s follow the money … right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate’s campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an “adviser” to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama’s people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn’t listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents.  Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link.  (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth.  That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans.  You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that’s what honorable people do.  Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences.  That’s what honesty means .  That’s how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one.  He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards’s ownadultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all?  Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women.  Who listens to NOW anymore?  We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That’s where you are right now.

It’s not too late.  You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation’s prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama’s door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis.  You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

Britney Spears, meet Civ Pro.

During my usual nocturnal Civil Procedure musings, I’ve stumbled across a fairly relevant (and perhaps glamorous) case regarding Britney Spears. I believe that the media is confusing residency with domicile, however.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Today) 10/18/08 – The jury in the case involving entertainer Britney Spears allegedly driving without a valid license began to deliberate Friday night, and the determination of her guilt or innocence will depend on which state she’s considered a resident of—California or Louisiana.

If her peers decide Louisiana, Spears’ childhood home, she will be off the hook. If they decide California, she will be in violation of a law requiring new residents to get a California driver’s license within 10 days and face possible, though unlikely, jail time of up to six months and a fine as large as $1,000.

Spears held a current Louisiana driver’s license on Aug. 6, 2007, when she hit a parked car, and her defense team has argued that since she pays income tax to that state, owns property there and is registered to vote there, she should not legally be considered a California resident.

The prosecution claimed that since Spears has lived fulltime in the Los Angeles area for several years and allegedly began, but did not complete, an application for a California driver’s license, she was actually a California resident, making her Louisiana license void.

The trial spanned only two days before jury deliberations began, including Friday, when Spears’ father, Jamie, testified. He is currently the co-conservator of Spears’ estate—a position to which he was appointed on Jan. 31, following his daughter’s two hospitalizations for psychiatric evaluation.

An attorney for Spears originally attempted to delay the trial by claiming that since her personal and professional lives were still under the control of her father, she was not fit to stand trial—a claim that was rejected by the court.

In a lengthier article here (http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20233865,00.html), the father testifies that she has every intention of returning to Louisiana, and is therefor not a CA “resident”. Again, I think this is incorrect. She has residency in CA, but not domicile, as she owns property, but does not intend to stay there.

Unless there is different vernacular in use in CA, and they really do mandate a CA drivers license for anyone who owns property, I think she’s off the hook. However, I find it unlikely that a mere “resident” of CA would be required to have a CA drivers license. If I just so happened to be wealthy enough to have some investment properties in Beverly Hills, but I lived in a posh section of NYC and only rarely stayed in a home in CA, it wouldn’t make much sense to require a license of me, especially if it would declare my NY license void. It seems that might even infringe on the powers of other states.

Winter

Today was a pretty nice day, filled with shooting, football, and the end of the baseball season for the only team that matters.  Some pictures-

As I was walking into work today, it literally felt like winter was blowing into DC.  All of a sudden I flashed back to last year and preparing for the LSAT, working the Mid-Shift.  There’s something kind of depressing about winter, a certain solitude seems to arrive with it.  It makes me want to make myself some tea and have a seat next to a roaring fire on a lonely night in Massachusetts, watching the snow swirl around in the street light.  Nothing feeds my introverted side like the advent of the dark, cold weather.