Why Law School is Amazing (or, "I get to study America's favorite TrimSpa spokesperson for hours and hours- what are you doing with your day?)

Through a series of gross miscalculations on my part, I find myself in a moot court competition this quarter. Though this is, technically, a sought-after position that I find myself in, I am not particularly enthused, mostly because I have to write a brief. Any lawyers in the audience would probably start scratching their heads here, as brief-writing is one of the main tasks of lawyerdom. For non-lawyers, however, my aversion to brief-writing should be easy to understand. Briefs are long, dense, often boring, long, exhaustive, exhausting, overwrought (and did I mention long?) written arguments about a case that are presented to a court. Writing them involves lots and lots and lots of research on Westlaw. (Hey, maybe I'll finally earn enough Westlaw bonus points to buy those ipod speakers!) By far the worst part of writing a brief, however, is the Table of Authorities, which is the brief's version of a bibliography. It goes at the front of the document, and it requires all of this really formalistic formatting, and you have to mention EVERY SINGLE PAGE on which you mention a case or a rule or a statue. THIS IS A TOTAL PAIN IN THE ASS. Every time you edit the content of your brief, you have to check again and make sure that the citation that had been on page 8 hasn't slipped over to page 9, and if it has, you have to change your table of authorities. It's a big huge annoying carmels stuck in your teeth kind of pain. Anyway, so I'm not so hip to brief writing. That is, I wasn't. Until I received the topic of this brief. For this year's moot court, the board has chosen to have us argue the real, pertinent, timely, and totally non-pretend case of (drumroll please....): Anna Nicole Smith trying to get a ton of money from the estate of her ancient dear departed husband who was 89 when she married him at 26 v. Son of aforementioned dear departed husband who is still smarting a little over the fact that his stepmother is young enough to be his granddaughter and has decided that the best way to seek revenge is to (I am not making this language up) declare world war III on her. I've been assigned to argue the Anna Nicole side of this, which as I read the cases seems like a pretty good side to be on. Sonny boy is a class-A nitwit, having shredded key discovery, plotted with the lawyers to prevent her from getting any money, and generally told anyone who would listen that he doesn't care if it's illegal, that tramp isn't getting a penny of his $2 billion inheritance. This is not a terrific way to ingratiate yourself to a court. Since Anna Nicole Smith is always good for some trainwreck paparazzi photos, I was really hoping there'd be visuals attached to these cases. So far, no luck. In fact, so far the case seems to be about a largely boring question of jurisdiction and the probate exception. It's all okay, though, because when people ask me what I'm working on, I get to say "Anna Nicole Smith, obviously." I NEVER got to say stuff like that when I was teaching.