Scott Brenner » Law School

The current US government is illegal/unconstitutional

Scott — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:30:08 +0000

An interesting argument was put forth at this week’s UC College of Law Federalist Society meeting. Professor Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern Law gave a talk on the “The Quasi-Legality of Israel’s Annexation of the Golan Heights and Occupation of the West Bank”. As an aside he stated the US Government is the result of a coup. Prof. Kontorovich made this argument to support his view that at some point the facts on the ground must be acknowledged:

The Constitutional Convention was called to amend the Articles of Confederation.
The Articles of Confederation required a unanimous vote of all member states.
The current US Constitution was adopted by the state without a vote on the Articles of Confederation.

This syllogism is tempting but the ratification of the Constitution by each state that was party to the Articles of Confederation is in implicit unanimous amendment to the Articles replacing them with the Constitution.

This is not to say that the facts on the ground need not be acknowledged. In general the longer a situation persists the more acceptable it becomes—eventually to the point that it becomes accepted.

Ethics: Public Interest Presentation

Scott — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:42:55 +0000

Available as a Flash presentation:

Or as a PDF

Oral Argument

Scott — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:13:40 +0000

Here is the uncut, poorly framed recording of practice oral arguments.

1L Law School Study Aids

Scott — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 01:08:02 +0000

This semester I am using five law school study aids:

“Gilbert Law Summaries: Torts” (Marc A. Franklin)

“Gilbert Law Summaries: Contracts” (Melvin Aron Eisenberg)“Gilbert Law Summaries: Constitutional Law/With Supplement Included” (Jesse H. Choper)“Civil Procedure: Examples & Explanations 5th edition” (Joseph W. Glannon)

Gilbert- (Torts, Contracts, Constitutional Law) I like the Gilbert books because they really help me test my knowledge and fill in any holes in my understanding. These books are not great for learning a topic from scratch.

These guides are organized in four sections- Casebook map, short outline (~60 pages), long outline, and practice questions. The first section is a table that shows which pages in the guide correspond specific pages in the case books. This table is very helpful in determining what portions of the outlines correspond to what the professor assigned.

Obviously, the short outline is an abbreviated version of the long outline. The short outline is where I start reviewing. When I come across a section that is not clear to me I refer to the longer outline. Both the long and short outlines use the same numbering making it very easy to find the expanded explanation in the longer outline.

The last section of the book contains practice questions with answers. The first 100+ questions present simple, short, two or three sentence hypotheticals and one or two direct questions. The issue is clearly identified and the answer is also short and clear. I like reviewing these when I only have a short period of time to spend studying. Since there no need to “spot the issue” they work almost like flash cards.

After the short answer questions there about five traditional issue spotter essay questions with model answers.