On Never-Complainers, Workaholics, and the Balding-and-Manly
@Kirs but thanks for your perspective! because if one more commenter implies (or, you know, says) that being a big law attorney = your kids hate your absentee workaholic guts . . . well, i don't know what. but i don't like it!
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On Ask a Humanities Grad Student, Part One: Scotch and Lentils
@thebestjasmine As to point four, you're right that it matters a lot less at top top schools, i think rank still matters at almost all schools, except Yale. Harvard has pass/fail, but there's "high pass" and a 500+ students. People calculate their GPA and stuff, just without As and Bs and Cs.. Maybe rank at Harvard only matters for things like clerkships, but it still keeps doors open. /end quibble
I went straight through and everything worked out, but I agree with bestjasmine that it's not a good idea. At the very least, employers increasingly prefer people with work experience, no matter what it is. Plus, working a hard job for the rest of your life starting at 25.
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On Ask a Humanities Grad Student, Part One: Scotch and Lentils
@everybody law school is hard and the legal market is shrinking. But going to law school was absolutely a great decision for me. I do not agree with the blanket "don't go!" statements at all. Here is all I would say:
1) law is a stupidly hierarchical field. Getting a good LSAT score or grades doesn't mean you're smart or will be a good lawyer, getting bad grades/LSAT score doesn't mean you'll be a bad lawyer.
2) but if you're thinking about law school, study as hard as you can for the LSAT. Retake it if you're not satisfied with your score. There absolutely are merit scholarships floating around even at top schools. If you can get in to a top 5 school, you can get a big scholarship at a top 10 school.
3) the rank of your school matters so so much for getting a job. Even people at Harvard end up unemployed, but 90+% get jobs. It gets worse as you go down the scale, at a pretty shocking rate. At my top 10 school, 20-30% graduated without jobs last year. I would advise people to think carefully before going to a school below top 5, and advise reluctance below top 15. Do not go to a lower ranked school if you require financial security.
4) law school is very competitive--your class rank matters a lot. You have to work really hard just to be in the running for good grades, and that's still no guarantee. Luck and random test taking aptitude make a big difference.
5) if you can handle points 1-4 and accept the risks involved--and you actually want to be a lawyer-- go for it! Law school was in some ways the hardest thing I've done in my life, and there are a lot of aspects of legal culture that at stupid (see point 1), but it can still be a great opportunity for some idealistic English majors.
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On Big Day for Marriage
@cuminafterall i think kennedy is on our side! he wrote the opinions in romer and lawrence, at least. i wouldn't count him out anyway.
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On Big Day for Marriage
@H.E. Ladypants yeah! another interesting thing is that the current challenge to DOMA is against the part of the law that defines marriage for purposes of federal law only. they're not going after the part of DOMA that says states do not have to recognize SSM from other states yet.
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On Big Day for Marriage
@blahstudent that is, losing the health care case because the court decides obamacare is irrational could help us win on LGBT rights, because it would make it easier to show that a law is unconstitutionally irrational.
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On Big Day for Marriage
@travelmugs in the long term, i think we are banking on the supreme court holding that sexual orientation is a kind of protected status under the equal protection clause, or on the supreme court beefing up its standards for rationality. right now, for example, it's very hard for laws that discriminate on the basis of race to be constitutional. but laws the discriminate on the basis of non-protected statuses--e.g. how much money you make (the tax code)--are constitutional so long as they are not "irrational."
traditionally, it does not take much for a law to be considered to have a "rational" basis. there was a big case in 1996, romer v. evans, where the court held that a colorado law outlawing anti-discrimination legislation protecting LGBT citizens was irrational. and the health care case, ironically, could help out LGBT americans by beefing up the standard for rationality.
i think it will happen. other law-pinners, feel free to contradict/correct me if i have made any mistakes.
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On Big Day for Marriage
@H.E. Ladypants let me put my nerd pants on: marriages are valid if valid where celebrated and not violative of strong public policy. same-sex marriage is considered to violate strong public policy in some states but not others. (for example, before NY legalized same-sex marriage, i think it recognized same-sex marriages from other states/countries.)
examples of marriages that can violate strong public policies: marriages involving underage spouses (marriages involving 13 y.o.s have been held to violate strong public policies in some states), marriages involving close relatives (but cousins are usually fine--i think the line is somewhere around aunt/nephew or uncle/niece), and polygamous marriages are usually considered to violate strong public policy (but not necessarily for inheritance purposes).
@iceberg i think it's actually a good thing for marriage to be a state-law thing, at least for now. one of the arguments against DOMA right now is that the federal gov't has no business regulating marriage. we have marriage equality in six or seven states now--if we had to wait for the whole country to come around on this issue, we probably wouldn't have it anywhere.
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On On Second Chances
@blahstudent also, there's an equivalent but opposite phenomenon: people who should break up, but stay together because they are in the same place and it's convenient.
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On Never-Complainers, Workaholics, and the Balding-and-Manly
@automaticdoor me too! congrats and YAY