On Exams and Race
I just got home from my first exam of the semester. It was... yeah. It was a very challenging exam and I did my best. It's always interesting being at the law school during exam time. You get to watch the entire 1L class running around frantically before their first ever law school exam. It's cute... when you forget that you were there once too. You get to watch normally healthy people eat diets of Pepsi, candy bars, and Subway for two weeks straight. You get to watch all of this excitement. Prof. Dimino had this nice quote on PrawfsBlawg recently...
Meanwhile in Washington DC, the Supreme Court heard oral argument today in the two grade school race-based assignment programs. I managed to find a TV with C-SPAN this morning, so I caught the replay of the oral argument audio while I tried to study. My thoughts echo those of Lyle Denniston over at SCOTUS. Justice Kennedy seemed fairly hostile to the programs, reiterating his Equal Protection views in this area. I think that this will be one of the cases that the addition of Alito (and subtraction of O'Connor) will be important. I also think that Kennedy will get assigned the opinion. Roberts will want him to write it as an insurance policy. That will keep all five votes and hold the majority.
I'm sure that there will be a lot of analysis about this in the next day or two. I'll keep my eyes peeled for anything really interesting. I'm going to go relax. I've earned it today.
Students are frantically trying to absorb a semester's worth of information, and professors are frantically trying to come up with an appropriately diabolical fact pattern that will test in a single question each element of a course that fills 1500 casebook pages. Temperatures dropped about 35 degrees in a few hours. Yes, December is upon us.It's the most wonderful time of the year.
Meanwhile in Washington DC, the Supreme Court heard oral argument today in the two grade school race-based assignment programs. I managed to find a TV with C-SPAN this morning, so I caught the replay of the oral argument audio while I tried to study. My thoughts echo those of Lyle Denniston over at SCOTUS. Justice Kennedy seemed fairly hostile to the programs, reiterating his Equal Protection views in this area. I think that this will be one of the cases that the addition of Alito (and subtraction of O'Connor) will be important. I also think that Kennedy will get assigned the opinion. Roberts will want him to write it as an insurance policy. That will keep all five votes and hold the majority.
I'm sure that there will be a lot of analysis about this in the next day or two. I'll keep my eyes peeled for anything really interesting. I'm going to go relax. I've earned it today.
