Now that I’m in “Work you to death phase”…..

September 7, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

Fellow 2L law school victim, Luke Gilman echoed the oft-repeated truism of the ladder of law school life which goes something like this: “Scare you to death, Work you to death, Bore you to death”. These allegedly represent your three years (in my case 3.5-4yrs) in law school.

I don’t think I was ever really scared my first year. Okay maybe a little when my hair started falling out and when my cholesterol shot up 45points in 6weeks. But it wasn’t out of fear. I was just burdened more than I had ever been before. So I thought.

My 2L year is a kaleidoscope of multiple bright points that however small unto themselves, have this aggregate effect of making me feel like I’m on the rack. While I can’t tell you enough about how much I’m actually learning about methamphetamine production and use ( courtesy of the Houston Journal of International Law) and spousal abuse and infliction of emotional distress (My Moot Court arguments); I will say that along with that and my classes in Constitutional Law with Prof. Peter Linzer (probably the most interesting class I’ve taken in law school thus far) and Family Law with Prof. Tom Oldham, my cup certainly runneth over.

I will have to also account for Factor X, in this regard, who sailed into my life mid-summer. I guess no man, not even this Brown Boy, can live as an island, so I’ve now found myself juggling many-a-thing besides law school and a full-time job. I certainly do hope that the “bore you to death” phase is all that it’s cracked up to be. I for one am looking forward to the day in law school, when I can confidently say “gosh I’ve got nothing to do”.

Posted in Blogging, Evening student, Friends, Houston, Houston Journal of International Law, Law school, Life, Moot Court, Part-time, UH Law, University of Houston, Work. 2 Comments »

Boxer or the Bag: Lily Ledbetter speaks!

August 1, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

The case I had to comment on for the Law Review write-on was Ledbetter v. Goodyear (127 S. Ct. 2162) which is essentially a gender discrimination case gone awry because the lady didn’t know she was being discriminated against for a very long time. Goodyear just paid her less than the men who did the same job and after years of diminshed pay raises Ms. Ledbetter ended up with a salary that was close to half of what the men were getting. The Supremes busted Ms. Ledbetter on a statute of limitations issue which was rather horrid. In fact in my paper I called the Supreme’s reasoning, ‘a bacchanalian feast of tepid reasoning’. I frankly thought that she probably would have lost on an evidentiary basis. And if anything that’s the way you should lose. Congress is in the midst of debating an amendment to the civil right’s act that says if you continue to pay someone based on a discriminatory pay decision then every paycheck constitutes a discriminatory act. It’s affectionately called the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007. Obviously the Bush administration has threathened to veto.

I didn’t realise how much of a feminist an egalitarian I was until I wrote this paper. Thinking about the Ledbetter case just had me so riled up because it was so unfair to Ms. Ledbetter to get treated like pish just because she is a woman. But then I shouldn’t expect much. Out here in the upper echelons of education and the rarefied air of reasoning, female law students are ‘fatwa’-ed into wearing skirt suits for interviews and pant suits are proscribed. Funny I didn’t know the location of the female reasoning cells were below their knees. Ridiculous isn’t it. Female law students, forget interviewing in your ‘conservative pumps and pearls’ and move to Afghanistan. At least there they’re not hypocrites and hate you for what you are - a woman!

To hear what Ms. Ledbetter has to say check out  her op-ed yesterday in the Christian Science Monitor

Posted in America, Custom, Law, Law Review, Law firms, Life, Public Policy, Work. No Comments »

I think I just might have the minerals….

July 14, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

In the movie, Snatch ( one of my all time-favourites) the following conversation transpires:

Tommy: I’m the one who’s got the gun, son. It’s you who I think ought to calm down.
[Errol takes a step forward. Tommy cocks the gun and sticks it right in his face]
Tommy: Go ahead. You want to see if I’ve got the minerals?
[Brick-Top's men don't move as Tommy backs out of the slot parlor, then runs after Turkish]

Now it doesn’t take much to discern what exactly Tommy is referring to when he uses the term ‘minerals’ but dear reader, there is a purpose to all of this.

It’s running close to Midnight on a Saturday night and I’m double timing through an affair with a Law Review write-on paper while my lover - Law School and my wife - The job, continuously and contemporaneously battle for my time and affection. I have never worked so hard in my life. Never. Never been pulled in three directions, slept as little, yet I feel no pain. I’m comfortably numb. In fact I’m riding on a slight wave of euphoria and caffeine-induced legal literary coruscation. If I get absolutely nothing out of this write-on process (which I hope shan’t happen), I can unequivocally say this:

” You know what Life? I know now like I knew then I’ve got the minerals! How do you like them gems?”

Posted in Law Review, Law school, Life, Movies, Part-time, Work. 1 Comment »

This is ladies night and feelings right……

July 13, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

So some guy in NY is pursuing a class action against Manhattan nightclubs for unlawful gender discrimination by hosting a “ladies night”. While this isn’t a case I would normally be pursuing there is something to be said for for whether ‘ladies night’ constitutes gender discrimination. Working on a paper on workplace gender discrimination has opened my eyes to the so-called world of gender neutrality. Much of this I think is cultural, from places that won’t let women in to some clubs in some parts of the world where you can’t get in unless you have a date. That’s right they won’t let single men or women in. The fun part about that is that it makes strange bedfellows (no pun intended) of the single men and women that want to get in: If you’re flying solo or are with a bunch of friends and the numbers aren’t even you go trawling the line to see if anyone’s got a spare member of the opposite sex to even out the group. Funny things we nightclub patrons do to go to someplace where they overcharge us for drinks, nuke us with cigarette smoke (well they used to anyway) and tear out our eardrums with excessively loud music.

Oh how I long for those days again!!!

More on the gender discrimination at the NYC nightclubs at http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1184144791036&rss=newswire

Posted in America, Custom, Law, Life. No Comments »

If it makes you happy…

July 5, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

One of my favourite bloggers is in fine form these days and I welcome the rekindling of her relationship with her literary muse. To read more check out Ana at www.rubyredslipper.blogspot.com

The line that resounded with me the most was:

“I came to law school because I wanted to make more money. Instead I learned that it’s not money that makes me happy. And it only cost me thousands upon thousands of dollars to find that out.”

Prose n’est-ce pas?

Moi aussi, Ana. Je ne regrette rien.

(Repos dans la paix, Mme. Edith Piaf)

Posted in Law school, Life. No Comments »

Anno Domini, Anno Lex

June 8, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

Friday has traditionally always been an administrative day for me at work. It’s on Fridays that I get my paper work in order, make sure everything is filed and generally apply the principles of the clean desk philosophy. Part of that ritual involves me tuning to my favourite BBC Radio One on the internet and usually catching Pete Tong’s weekend intro show live from London and letting that play in the background while I sort everything out. Today I started a bit early and have been listening to a brilliant set by Paul Van Dyk, trance DJ extraordinaire, and it made me realise how I’ve had to leave many of the things that I enjoyed doing behind ever since I started law school.

Summer sessions for an evening law student are particularly onerous. With copious reading and a paucity of time, many of my classmates find ourselves in a real life ‘24′ constantly chasing the horological dragon. So how do we manage to get it all done and have some semblance of our pre-law identity back? Ridiculous amounts of discipline.

To paraphrase what my Torts professor said, if there’s anything you’ll get out of law school it’ll be the self-discipline.  Discipline is a bitter pill to swallow for someone like myself that has been such a big procrastinator I would put off procrastinating (and consequently get things done). So what words of wisdom do I have for my fellow Lex-addicts?

Carrot & whip: When you’ve done what you were supposed to do, let your hair down, let yourself go get a drink with friends, spend time with loved ones -whatever makes you happy. Now here’s the hard part. When you don’t get your reading or outlining in, you’ve got to learn to setup consequences that you’re not thrilled with. Like foregoing leisure time or giving up a weekend outing. Hard, yes. Almost bi-polar schizophrenic, probably. Effective, absolutely.

Posted in Evening student, Law school, Life, Part-time, UH Law. No Comments »

A new class, a new beginning? Perhaps the beginning of the end

June 1, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

Being in law school and taking breaks from it is like suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder. When you’re going through the stress stimuli, the world’s quite often a blur and you’re bursting with responses and reactions and you’re so overwhelmed that you don’t say much. When it’s over because you’re so overwhelmed you often don’t know where to begin. That’s why I’ve been silent for the past few weeks. Savouring my time away from law school, discovering that I still had friends that were willing to speak with me after many moons of neglect and just the ability to not spend much time in front of my laptop has kept me from blogging. Now that the summer semester is upon us however, it’s back to the old ways.

This summer features Property Law with a visiting professor from Chapman School of Law, Donald Kochan , who not only has a website going, but some degree of progressive pedagogical thought, enough to be willing to have a mid semester practice exam, reviews thereafter and even posting old exams online. I hear the rumblings in the cobwebbed halls of legal academia already.

Property Law is my crash course into the world of economics. Having been a tech-geek for far too long, I’m glad I decided to pursue law because I would have never been exposed to much of the thinking, literary linkage or historical lessons that the study of law affords me. I mean where else can you have pithy wisdom from ancient Roman tomes such as Juntinan legal thought right next to the equally potent maxim of “Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers”.

 To all the prospective law students out there, the study of law is not what you thought it was going to be. Not that it’s bad in any sense, it’s just that you’re not learning what you see on TV. You don’t really learn to cross-examine a hostile witness in anything but perhaps trial advocacy or by being part of the mock trial team. Two things that most law students don’t ever delve into. You don’t go to law school to learn the state of the law or what the law is on the books currently (well not really). You’re in law school to learn why the law is the way it is and perhaps if you’re lucky, how to apply it.

Law professors have this nasty habit of trundling to death the tired phrase : “you’re in law school to learn how to think like a lawyer”. If you want to know how to do that, just read this. (hat tip to Gilman for that one). That’s right, the study of law is really just playing one very long game of “What if?”.

I think I’ve just become a jaded second year law student.

Posted in Blogging, Donald Kochan, Evening student, Law, Law school, Life, Property Law, UH Law, University of Houston. No Comments »

Overheard in a coffe-shop

May 5, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

The saturday night before a big final means I’m either at home languishing between the pages of my text books or am somewhere like Cafe Artiste languishing between the pages of my text book. The interesting thing about Cafe Artiste is that every once in a while I’ll hear something over the background noise and here’s what I heard tonight: 

Gay man telling female friend: “I came out to my parents over breakfast. My Mom was pouring us all coffee. ‘Mom’, I said,  ‘I like my coffee like I like my women……..I don’t like coffee…‘ “

Posted in America, Family, Humor, Life. No Comments »

Overheard on MSNBC

April 19, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

Anchor to correspondent in Baghdad: “So what was the reaction to the Virginia Tech massacre over there?”

Correspondent: “Well it didn’t really get much coverage over here. We just had over 200 people die in different car bombings around the city in the past 24 hours”

Moral of the story: Life wherever it is being lost, is precious and the loss of one life over another because of geographical/national/religious etc. criteria is still someone that doesn’t get to see another day.

Posted in Life, Media, War. No Comments »

Shaw says so

April 5, 2007 — Shannon Quadros

After going through the mental ping-pong last night of deciding what class to take and whether it will ruin me forever (I can be dramatic on Wednesdays - what can I say?), I’ve settled on Administrative Law. Whether I get the class at all is an entirely different story and all will be revealed today at 3pm when I can log into the system and register.

Some sliver of hope came in courtesy of my dear friend MsSifr who quoted George Bernard Shaw this morning. I’m going to co-opt what she said he said.

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.”

I suddenly feel like channelling Mark Anthony in his eulogy for Caesar and say “And Brown Boy was an honourable man“

Posted in Life, Literature. No Comments »
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