The Bricks » Ricardo J. Bascuas

The position has been filled

Ricardo J. Bascuas — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:24:41 +0000

It was not at all easy, but I found a research assistant. And he’s a genuine Southerner. One thing I learned in law school is that Southerners are the best kind of Americans. I don’t mean all Southerners, of course. What I mean is that a good Southerner is likely to be as good or better than the best of what you will find anywhere else. I was skeptical when I was first told this at the Law School, but it turns out to be the absolute, verifiable truth. What irretrievably persuaded me was being part of a little group invited to the Carolina Cup in ’94 in Camden, South Carolina. A certain Greenberg Traurig shareholder was there, knows what I’m saying, and will vouch for me at least to the extent of acknowledging that a genteel gala of such proportions could never exist in Miami or New York or Los Angeles or even the Midwest without descending into savagery. What makes Southerners particularly well-suited to work as research assistants is: They’re not dramatic, sarcastic, ironic, jaded, or cynical. They don’t laugh at their own jokes. They consider being argumentative rude. They don’t interrupt much. When they get down to business, they call you “sir” (or “ma’am”). They don’t make excuses. They get things done.

Help wanted?

Ricardo J. Bascuas — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:13:28 +0000

I’m considering hiring a new research assistant because the ones I had graduated and got real jobs. In a way, I think it’s wrong not to have one because there’s this pile of money earmarked for one. If I didn’t give that money away to some student, the School would just waste it on some petting-zoo-type-coddling thing that would offend me. So, I sent out an email to my two classes explaining my predicament:

The position does not pay very well. I think it’s like ten bucks an hour. It’s not glamorous either. Some of it is really tedious. You have to be smart and be able to find stuff in the library or in the computer and write cogent syntheses of what you learn. Should you come up with anything brilliant, I will take all the credit for it. You have to be available essentially around-the-clock and not ask too many questions.

If you are interested, send me an email with the subject line “Research Assistance 2010-11” and with your resume attached. If you can’t pull off having the subject line exactly right, then you’re not qualified for the position. I’m not entirely sure that having a research assistant will make things better or easier on the whole. Sometimes they are more trouble than they’re worth. So, if you want to write a little note about why I might hire you—maybe you really need ten bucks an hour or something—feel free to do so, but don’t feel obligated.

We’re leaving money on the table

Ricardo J. Bascuas — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 04:11:33 +0000

A new season premiere is upon us, and no one is filming it. I actually have two performances today. First, I have to impress upon the dozen 3Ls comprising the new JV-FPD squad that nothing in the world is more important than the appeals they will write. Then, in the evening, I have to tell the 140 students in Evidence that the class requires tons of reading and invariably ends with a very long essay examination and that they might be happier if they dropped it for something that has a multiple choice test. (They always mistakenly think I’m exaggerating.) And also that computers are banned. (This has a significant in terrorem effect.)

Really, it’s about time we got this underway. For days, the vast horde of 1Ls has been underfoot looking at once skittish and eager, stepping through our inhumanly long orientation. Walking across the Bricks on Monday where they were all thronged for a free lunch, a colleague said to me, “They look so anxious. I wonder whether they have any idea what they’re getting into.” After the annual welcome-to-UM dinner at the Biltmore on Sunday, one of the new ~~LRW~~ L-Comm instructors remarked, “This is the best-looking law school class I’ve ever seen. Is being attractive part of our admissions criteria?” (Yes. Obviously. This is Miami, not Iowa.) That got me thinking that I can’t believe we don’t already have our own reality show. Actually, there’s enough students and material here for four or five of them.

Scientists unplugged

Ricardo J. Bascuas — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:13:30 +0000

The Times just published the latest in its series of articles on whether the constant onslaught of information the modern world throws at us makes us dysfunctional. This one is about five neuroscientists going out into remote Utah for about three days of disconnectedness and debate. By the end, they haven’t reached any real conclusion as to whether the bombardment of data inhibits deep thought, but they are ready to recommend pulling the plug for a while each day. The article mentions a Michigan study that demonstrated that a walk through the city compromises one’s ability to learn more than a walk in the woods. As one of the scientists remarked, “There’s a real mental freedom in knowing no one or nothing can interrupt you.” In other words, he believes there may be a cognitive benefit to doing one thing at a time—without the potential for a call, an email, a text, an IM, or anything else to derail your thoughts. And this has very obvious implications for laptops in Evidence class this Wednesday evening.

Locked and loaded

Ricardo J. Bascuas — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:45:31 +0000

This time of making last-minute preparations and eleventh-hour edits to the syllabi always causes the theme song to The Muppet Show to play on continuous loop in my head. While that’s enough to make anyone mental, I don’t know any other song that really captures the anticipatory mood. Beatriz has done an incredibly efficient job rounding up cases for the clinic and we, enjoying the continued support of Assistant United States Attorney Anne Schultz (JD ’83), are nearly set to field the second team. Last semester, we managed to time all six cases so that the JV-ers could take their cases from initial brief to reply brief. If we are to pull that off again, there’s really not a moment to lose. So, second day of class the group will have its audience with The Hon. Kathleen M. Williams (JD ’82), still the Federal Public Defender for the Southern District of Florida. And, a few days later, Judge Adalberto Jordan (JD ’87) will reprise his special guest role with a behind-the-scenes explanation of how appeals are handled at the court, drawing on his experiences clerking and sitting by designation. That alone is worth the price of tuition.

Consider your rule seconded.

Ricardo J. Bascuas — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 03:07:33 +0000

The Eleventh Circuit invites public comments on proposed amendments to its rules, only one of which is substantive. I learned this from the Southern District of Florida website, which invites public comments about itself. So, let me oblige both courts as publicly as I can.

The one substantive proposal comes to us as Rule 46-11, which specifies that certain supervised law students can appear “on behalf of any indigent person, the United States, or a governmental agency in any civil or criminal case … .” The interesting part is sub-part (3) which pertains to oral argument:

Except, on behalf of the accused, in a direct appeal from a criminal prosecution, an eligible law student may also participate in oral argument, but only in the presence of the supervising attorney of record.

Extraneous commas and awkward phrasing aside, this is a fine rule—and it is the rule under which the FPD-JV team has operated from its inception. There are certain consolations to having been around the sun more than two dozen times and chief among them is that experience matters. And it particularly matters in a defendant’s one and only appeal from his conviction. (No one should take this to mean that civil cases are less important or that it barely ever matters who argues for the government in a criminal appeal. But if anyone comes up with a decent alternative rationalization let me know because I’m drawing a blank.)

Oh, and if you wanted to phrase it correctly, you would do it thusly:

An eligible law student, other than one appearing on behalf of the accused in a direct appeal from a criminal prosecution, may participate in oral argument but only in the presence of the supervising attorney of record.

Of course, this does not make clear whether such things as appeals from supervised-release violations or interlocutory appeals in criminal matters are covered, but neither does the proposed draft, so what more can I do?

And, as for the district court’s website, I think the retro all-Times-New-Roman look is a bold choice. It takes me right back to 1998 when I could browse many similar websites on the CRT monitor of my putty-colored Dell Pentium II running Windows 95.

We’re not the only ones

Ricardo J. Bascuas — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:55:06 +0000

Apparently, the University of Iowa uses the same admissions model we do. Or it’s really fun there. Probably both.

What exactly do you think you’re selling?

Ricardo J. Bascuas — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:44:34 +0000

It used to be, way back when, that one could do Westlaw research without ever taking one’s hands off the keyboard. For this you used a software program called Westmate, now defunct. In its earliest forms, it was entirely text-based with no little flags and other graphic distractions. Westmate’s UI allowed me to focus on work with an intensity so fervent that I could actually feel individual hairs falling off my head. It had what is called a command line. And there you just pounded orders at the computer. Want to search federal cases? Bang out “db allfeds” and hit enter as hard you can. Want to skip to the fourteenth case in your search result? “r14” and slam enter. Go to the next search term? “t” Bang! Want to perform the same search in state courts? “s db allstates” and enter. Terry v. Ohio? “fi 392us1” without even bothering with the spaces. Then they got rid of Westmate and replaced it with the ridiculous website that we now have to use that has no command line but rather at least three different boxes which I am forever confusing. The screen is polluted with columns and drop-down menus and buttons that have to be clicked so that I constantly have to stop thinking about what I’m researching, switch from keyboard to mouse, read the screen to figure out what to do next, and point and click a zillion times. It’s a traveshamockery made by people with no love for either research or design.

And now they’ve made it worse. There’s this new thing called Westlaw Next, which I have been trying to make work for me for the last few days. You can see just how horrible it is from the way they market it—not as a serious tool but as some comforting, coddling, mystical creation. I mean, what is going on with that woman in the picture? The new product has even more buttons to point and click at and more drop-down menus and more colors and gigantic fonts plus dozens of tabs, the new UI fetish. It’s a mess, in short. The goal of it seems to be to throw as many documents containing your search terms at you at once—cases, briefs, statutes, articles, whatever, as if you could read all that. And it ranks them in order of purported “relevance,” which as far as I can tell is just arbitrary.

I don’t know whether Lexis is any better. Some people swear by it; I just never got into it. From what I can tell, it involves lots of tabs and pointing and clicking as well.

There’s obviously a business opportunity here for anyone who wants to make a research platform that does not pander and overwhelm. Maybe these guys will pull it off.

Another incoming wave

Ricardo J. Bascuas — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 22:40:31 +0000

It’s official. We’re expecting about 480 incoming 1Ls, give or take. The Legal Communication and Research Skills program has added two additional faculty members (and finally got profiles of all them up on the web). As I said before, it’s a pretty impressive group. There are going to be five sections of first years and there’s been some rearranging for that. And I have 140 upper-level students in Evidence, which is going to require some adjustments in the course. For one thing, I’ll probably have to banish computers (again) because that many people clickety-clacking is enough to make anyone mental. And the Powers That Be changed the academic calendar. We now have a fall break right in the middle of October, which requires some modification of the syllabus.

So, I spent the morning in contemplative isolation with a legal pad thinking about and preparing for all these changes in the large class and also thinking about ways to improve the clinic. (I also thought a lot about whether an iPad would be better or worse than my Ampad Dual Pad.) And I did all this work on the Bay in the shadow of the skyscrapers where D.O.M. and Beatriz and the other worker-people were quietly toiling, unaware of the inspiration they were providing me and, in turn, tomorrow’s lawyers.

Teeing up Season Two

Ricardo J. Bascuas — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:07:23 +0000

We’re gearing up to start the new fall season, so Beatriz and I are picking cases for the new class to work on. So far, the crew from Season One is doing every bit as well as expected, having received four affirmances already. The one we received today is a published opinion, so that’s a little bit special.

Reviewing the district court filings in one case we may pick up, I read that “the defendant had two family members amongst the approximately twenty-five aliens.” Wherefore dost thou writeth like that? I’ve noticed that preposition getting more and more use lately and it needs to stop. Last semester, I even asked one of the crim pro sections about it and they blamed it on Saturday Night Live or something. Honestly, I don’t really remember what they said but it had to do with television. What’s next? Betwixt?

And since I have been downtown this week to see Beatriz and been reminded that she is just one of many stressed-out worker people in the skyscrapers, let me share this alternative career path I just heard about that you will wish you had thought of. A colleague’s friends started this business that makes custom playlists for retail shops and the like. That’s right. They set the mood for stores with music as well as video images and even scents. And they get money for this. I’m not sure how the scent thing works because that link is broken but it sounds fascinating.