"The Famous Trolley Case"

Our exams begin on December 11 and go through December 18.
In one class, there is no final exam. There's a paper instead. You guessed it...the paper is 100% of the grade.

The paper is due December 7.

No really, this is not me making up excuses for ONCE AGAIN going over a week without blogging. Clearly I would never do such a thing! In fact, how dare you think it?

Yesterday, in Criminal Law (fast shaping up to be my favorite class...who would have guessed it?) Professor Berman posed the following hypos:

The famous "trolley case"
There's a train coming. Five unconscious people lay on the track. You notice a switch that, if pulled, will redirect the train to a spur, sparing the five. One person is asleep on the spur. What do you do?

Now, say a doctor has five patients who need various organ transplants, all about to die. A complete stranger walks by who happens (bizarrely) to be a perfect blood and tissue match for all five. Should the doctor kill the stranger in order to harvest his organs and save the other five?

Were your two answers different?

If they were, why? Can you justify it?

The class discussion wasn't resolved, we're going to finish it on Monday. But this is why I love Criminal Law: because as a Christian, I approach the two hypos above from a gut-reaction that is presumably the Holy Spirit prompting me as to the correct course. We have The Law, spelled out pretty clearly in the 10 Commandments, we have Biblical principles to live by woven through the Bible, and we have the Holy Spirit prompting us. What's beautiful about Christianity, though, is that if you have to argue without using those three authorities, you can. It's a joy to reach Christian conclusions to moral dilemmas by just thinking it through one step at a time. Because it just makes so much sense. Now of course what's illogical is that it is premised on the ideas that self should not be priority and that death is not the greatest evil, and in my experience outside of Christianity it is generally accepted that you should put yourself first and that if you have do something (anything) to prevent your own death it is permissible. Apart from that, though, a joy of Christianity is the sheer logic of it all. That as a system it works within itself completely, no holes, no problems. That as a moral philosophy it has an answer for every possibility without requiring exceptions to the rules.

So this little game for your minds was just to illustrate a tiny bit of what my classes are like. Enjoy...

Art, Souls, Paper and Turkey

"We are right, he said, and the others are wrong. To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand -- that is art."
- James Joyce

A common joke here is how to keep your soul through law school. Well, I'm working on it, and I'm convinced that only by the grace of God it won't be too difficult a task. BUT, I am rather worried about also hanging on to that part of my personality that keeps me a "whole person."

There's a concern, I think, when pursuing such a demanding academic course, to let it suck you entirely away from everything else that once made you "well rounded." To let it obsess you. To be one of "those" people who can only talk about their job -- for GOODNESS' sake! You already live it 40+ hours a week don't you? Do you REALLY want to revisit it over dinner too?
Here's my disclaimer: I certainly want to be the best law student UT ever saw... and to get A's on every exam.... but it's also become vitally important to me to keep reading James Joyce... keep listening to fantastic up-and-comers .... still be able to stop and watch and appreciate a glorious sunset. And THAT is what is so very difficult!!
And I have a feeling even the law firms that might hire me one of these days would like a well-rounded employee. It has its own other perks of random useful skills and background knowledge, and handy cocktail-party-conversation.

Problem: exams are in 20 days. In that time, minus Thanksgiving, I have to synthesize the entire semester's material for each class, because each class has one, and only one exam, that will presumably test what I learned over the entire four months. Why is this a problem? Because I find myself suddenly struck by the blogging muse again...after almost a semester's worth of absence and certainly an inauspicious beginning to my blogging career!

The irony: One of my classes also has one paper. The paper is worth 20% of my grade. The paper is due tomorrow. You'd think I was sick of writing by now.
Or maybe I am hungering for writing something, anything, that's NOT an analysis of caselaw! I do love law school, I love the opportunities and I even get a huge kick out of analyzing caselaw (don't laugh--it's fascinating!). But the soul needs a varied diet too.

So with that, here's my post-Thanksgiving resolution: to blog more regularly, eat my vegetables, and start running again. Oh wait, not the running part!

Happy-Almost-Thanksgiving! Remember the pilgrims!