I've hesitated to post much about this for fear of seeming too personal, too narcissistic, too self-aggrandizing, and too neurotic. But all of that said, this is something that's been on my mind a lot during the past day, week, month, and I'm going to post it, more for the writing than the reading. So read on only at your peril. This overwhelming question that has been bothering me is where to go to law school.

I was originally going to mix those thoughts and conclusions in passing into a post responding to Heidi Bond (natch), Glorfindel of Gondolin, Sua Sponte, and Waddling Thunder and their not-quite-disagreement over the sanity or insanity of law school ratings and caring about them. But with the latest posts by Tom Smith and Brian Leiter (topic: "why does Yale Law School have such a lock on the prospective law students with the strongest academic credentials?") force me to take the issue head-on if I'm going to blog about it at all.

I, too, would like an answer to the Leiter mystery-- my uneducated suggestion is that Yale's dominance could be due to the no-grades issue (having worked hard to get in, why keep working hard?) but also to a focal point effect. Several professors have suggested to me that one learns more from one's fellow students than anywhere else in law school, and if people smarter than me are going to Yale, then that's a tempting draw. [I asked the admissions director at Yale where people went when they didn't go to Yale-- she said that rougly 80% of Yale admits accept, 10% don't go to law school at all, and the remaining 10% were split about evenly between Harvard, Stanford, and full-ride scholarships at Columbia, UVA, and the like. No mention at all of Chicago.]

And yet, and yet. I've always been something of an opponent of the herd mentality-- often carrying the whole affair far past logical extremes into the land of sheer stubbornness. And the few professors at Chicago Law I've known fairly well are second-to-none. For that matter, so are some of the incoming students I know. For that matter, the no-grades thing, which originally seemed like a big plus to me, is something I have more mixed thoughts about now that I give it closer thought. I would never have imagined of myself that the Chicago style of lots of required core classes and tough grading would be the best place for me to thrive, but it has been. After a quarter (which past readers of this blog may recall) spent at a non-grading institution (roughly speaking), I have even more reason to suspect that grades are good for me.

And yet, and yet. There could clearly be diminshing returns to remaining at the same university for law school that one attended as an undergrad. On the other hand, Professor Epstein argued to me on Friday that that might well be balanced out by the advantage of being in an environment one knows that one loves, and that in any case Law School is such a different ball game from mathematics that the diminishing returns barely have room to set in.

Add to this level of back-and-forth-ing a set of meta-worries. Do I know myself well enough to know of myself what I want out of law school? Does it make any sense to proclaim that one wants to go into academia and that therefore one will go to Chicago? Which of the two choices am I less likely to regret later? Would I regret having made a choice in a way that minimizes expected regret?

It gets worse, of course. I'm told by faculty that people who go to Chicago go because they care about the law, while those who go to Yale often really want to be journalists, novelists, or great thinkers. But . . . but . . . but I want to be a journalist too (witness this blog). And yet law is absolutely fascinating-- probably one of the most fascinating things I've ever devoted much time to studying. [Members of the opposite sex do not count! --ed.] And yet, there's a very limited subset of law that undergraduates really get a chance to get their hands around. We all know (or do we?) that tax won't be as fascinating as free speech, and that corporations are less cool than crime, but then again, maybe not. And there's nothing that says that going to Chicago consigns one to a life of corporate law! (Or that going to Yale prevents it).

Supposedly Yale is full of more "intellectual excitement." And supposedly Chicago is full of more "intellectual rigor." But where do the folks who get excited by rigor go?

The claim, made reassuringly by many people, is that this is the so-called embarrassment of riches, that there are no wrong choices, and so on. That may well be the case, which is part of why I feel so silly about writing this post in the first place. But blogging for me has often been about working out the thoughts that can't work themselves out in my head. There are wrong choices, of course, even when one is choosing among two options of positive utility. As Heidi Bond reminds me (though my inner economist needs no reminding), everything has an opportunity cost.

Coming back to Heidi Bond one more time, she writes:

If you cannot make your own rankings of law schools, based on what you want to get out of law school, you should seriously consider not attending. If you say to yourself "Gee, Chicago lost a point in raw score in the US News survey this year," and you think that Chicago is therefore a less worthy school, you should seriously consider not attending law school.

Combine in the following formula: [Column A] [Column B] of [Column C] [Column D]

Column A
Academic
Alternative
Analytical
Behavioral
Biotechnological
Community
Comparative
Complex

Constitutional
Current
Democratic
Empirical
Environmental
Financial
Governmental
Industrial
International
Local
Methodical
Multicultural
Regulatory
Remedial
Statutory
Transnational

Column B
Advocacy
Analysis
Arbitration
Authority
Conflicts
Discrimination
Diversity
Economics
Governance
Interactions
Jurisprudence
Justice
Litigation
Markets
Methods
Perspectives
Planning
Regulation
Speech
Taxation
Tensions
Thought

Column C
Antitrust
Bankruptcy
Business
Civil
Commercial
Common
Constitutional
Copyright
Corporate
Criminal
Employment
Entertainment
Evidence
Family
Federal
Internet
Islamic
Japanese
Patent
Pension
Securities
Tax
Telecommunications
Tort

Column D
Law

Yesterday, I went to Borders with Carey. While browsing through the books, we found a couple of home planning/architecture/floor plan kind of books.

Now, I'm a floor-plan kind of girl. I used to draw floor plans when I was a girl. Admittedly, they were things like floor plan of castle, where you had the little slits in the floor with the notation "boiling tar here." Nonetheless, I like looking through floor plans of houses. My parents thought about building their own home one day, and they had a couple of books of floor plans that I loved to take down and look at.

My favorite house when I was a kid was the largest floor plan in the whole darned book. It was a monstrous house, made of brick. There were three stories. A stair case that branched going up to two separate wings. The best part was that there were six bedrooms. Since the leading edge of my seven-child family had gone away to school, six bedrooms was just enough that--there--that room. Right there, that small room at the end of the hall. That room was mine. And I didn't have to share it with anyone.

Leafing through this floor-plan book ("1001 great floor plans" or something like that), I came to a realization. These houses were all too big. They all had formal dining rooms. One of them, in fact, had more rooms than I'd ever heard of. There was, of course, the formal dining room. And a great room. And a breakfast room. And a media room. And the guest suite, with bedroom, sitting room, changing area, and bathroom.

Good heavens. Who needs all that space?

If I were designing a house for me, I'd design a little room for me to do work in. Ideally, it'd be at the corner of a house, so there'd be windows on all sides. There would be bookshelves completely lining the inner walls up until the point where I couldn't reach any higher; then there'd be cabinet drawers that I could pull out so I could file old things I don't need to my packrat's heart delight. There'd be a comfortable place to sit--which for me, means something I can curl up on, because right now I do all my work on my bed. I sit at my desk to pay bills and post on my blog All of this would fit in a space about 5 x 10.

I don't want an island kitchen. I don't want three stories. I don't want a three car garage, most especially not--gag me--the three car garage with the optional golf cart room. I want a small house with beautiful touches and a garden and a large dog and a chicken coop. I want tomatoes in summer. I want land, lots of land, for walks and rambles. I want my neighbors to be somewhat distant, and I want their houses not to look all alike.

Basically, I want what Amanda Butler wants. Except I want a T1 line.

Will's reference to the ethics of patient-physician sex reminded me of how lacking the AMA guideline is on the subject. It pretty clearly states that you aren't supposed to initiate sexual relationships with existing patients (or former patients if those relationships could be exploitative) but it doesn't give you any help on the subject of romantic relationships initiated prior to medical ones. In fact, it fails to distinguish romantic relationships that eventually include medical treatment from (ethically problematic) medical relationships that become romantic:

Sexual contact that occurs concurrent with the physician-patient relationship constitutes sexual misconduct.

In general, I think it's a good rule for doctors to avoid sex with their patients. However, I don't find it unethical for one's lover to be one's doctor and am bewildered as to why the AMA did not address this issue in the guideline. Part of my incredulity at the inflexibility of the ethical guideline stems from the fact that I think it's quite common (and acceptable) for physicians to treat their spouses.

For instance, if someone has strep throat and his wife is a GP, I don't see an ethical dilemma in the wife diagnosing and treating her husband's infection. It seems the most logical thing to do when considering matters of convenience and finance. And practicality is not the only reason it should be acceptable for doctors to treat their lovers. It should be ethically permissible because that is what people in love do. They take care of each other to the best of their abilities. Physicians just have a license to do more medical procedures when providing that care. I think it would be unethical for a physician to not treat his lover (providing his lover so desires) when she is ill and in need of care.

At the very least, the AMA should explicitly state that it is not unethical to treat long-standing romantic interests that do not arise from the patient-physician relationship rather than make the blanket statement that all sex with current patients is misconduct.

Now I'm not advocating that people necessarily rely on their MD lovers for medical care --just that MDs not be ethically precluded from providing care to them. Taking care of those you love is part of the joy of being a physician and a lot of the joy of being in love. These ends are not incompatible.

Fine, so the last time I attacked David Brooks's completely unfootnoted ideas of how America is, Will oh-so-helpfully replied that I am not within David Brooks's target audience, and certainly not within his sense of the word "we."

But then Brooks went and wrote Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia, and I can't help but think that once again, he just doesn't get it. He wrote [well, he wrote other things I disagreed with, too, but to be concise]:

What sort of longing causes people to pick up and head out for the horizon? Why do people uproot their families from California, New York, Ohio and elsewhere and move into new developments in Arizona or Nevada or North Carolina[1], imagining their kids at high schools that haven't even been built yet, picturing themselves with new friends they haven't yet met, fantasizing about touch-football games on lawns that haven't been seeded? Millions of people every year leap out into the void, heading out to communities that don't exist, to office parks that are not yet finished, to places where everything is new. This mysterious longing is the root of the great dispersal.

But since David Brooks apparently doesn't care about (or for) the likes of me, I'll quote from an older (well, dead) elite white male who became a professor at Yale in 1950 and retired there to emeritus status in 1973: "because when you don't like it where you are you always go west. We have always gone west."

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age.[2] Or it is just where you go.
. . . . . . . . .
For after the dream there is no reason why you should not go back and face the fact which you have fled from (even if the fact seems to be that you have, by digging up the truth about the past, handed over Anne Stanton to Willie Stark), for any place to which you may flee will now be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as well go back, after all, to the place where you belong, for nothing was your fault or anybody's fault, for the things are always as they are. And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two very great truths. First, you cannot lose what you never had. Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after all.

If you believe the dream you dream when you go there.
- Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men, Ch. 7

Part of the dream of the West, of the horizon, is that it's different. The land itself is part of that. Virginia's Blue Ridge mountains are calm and pretty, and because of that they'll never have grandeur of the ones out west, where if you slip too much, you're a goner. Not in Wisconsin, not in West Virginia, not in Florida, not anywhere east of the Mississippi can you find these shots of standing on the top of the world [ok, enough with the photos, until that happy future August day when I take some of myself standing there. But back on point...].

Take a tour of a Frank Lloyd Wright home and you'll hear about his desire to build buildings that harmonize with the landscape. There's hardly enough land around the Robie House to judge if it worked there, but it certainly succeeds better than the eye-offending shoeboxes of Best Buy, Bed Bath & Beyond, and the like. Ideally, those things would belong in the abandoned missile silos, not out despoiling the view. Throw them into a place like Fairfax County, Virginia, which is already condemned to be dominated by the things built on top of the land, and you haven't changed much; throw them in the midst of an amazing view like those in the article's photos of Idaho and Nevada, and the result is depressing.

I'm a college student: I sympathize with the desire for cheap towels of better quality than the ones you get in a Motel 6. But it's not the old-field pines that are encroaching today. Instead it's the new housing developments and McMansions where there are no trees left worth speaking of. Maybe they'll look ok in another thirty years. But until then, I want to either live somewhere where the neighborhood trees are tall (as is the one towering outside the window of my second-floor apartment) or I want there to be places to escape to where there just are no neighborhoods, only trees. I want to go some place where cell phones just don't work [but I've got my broad band internet access]. God help us if there's never a West to go to. Where will we go when we want to flee, when we want to be reassured that all of America isn't like the place that we currently find ourselves hating?

* * *
[1]: North Carolina is hardly new; it's the Old North State. Ohio and California are both more of "horizon" places, if one judges by when states were admitted to the union, a rather traditional way of going about things.

[2]: [Is it too early to start dreaming about becoming a prof emerita at UC Boulder?]

This is a reminder that the Nathan Hale Foreign Policy Society will have another meeting Today, in our usual spot-- the Cosi on Michigan Avenue across from the Art Institute, and at the usual time-- 7:00 P.M. [Note: Several group members have suggested this time is impossible or inconvenient for them. There's certainly no reason it need be set in stone, so please drop me a note with thoughts on other times that do or don't work very well for you, and we will see what we can do.]

Our topic will be the impact of the media on foreign policy. Amanda Butler has arranged the readings, which are available here.

In a few hours, it will be 4:04 on 04/04/04. This sort of thing happens a decent amount of the time (12 times a century), but it's still nifty.

UPDATE: I see Heidi Bond has beaten me to the punch, but since she cheated with her time stamp, in a few hours it will look as if I had beaten her.

UPDATE the Second: The clever Ms. Bond has stashed her post backwards to the other 4:04 on 04/04/04. Curses. Of course, since she's just copying my post from back before Letters of Marque even existed. . .

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board, and the press has already begun. If you're in Chicago, Professor Hutchinson will be speaking on it at lunch on Thursday. The Washington Post Magazine features articles and a photo gallery; the paper has a piece on the slow steps Methodists and other denominations are taking in hiring minority pastors for white churches.

But most importantly for me, a settlement agreement has been signed in the "nation's longest running active school desegregation case" (so say the defendant's lawyers). That's Davis et. al. v. East Baton Rouge Parish School Board. There are a few more hurdles to pass, mostly just a four year wait-and-see period. At the end, the EBRP School System will be declared unitary. It's not; that's the problem.

If you want a school system in Baton Rouge that doesn't look severely out of whack, you must discriminate on either the basis of race or on the basis of some proxy that looks a whole lot like race. This violates the Brown v. Board II requirement for school systems to create attendance rules such as "are necessary and proper to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases." The school system run by the Catholic Archdiocease is alone one-third the size of the public school system. It's white flight (there are other private schools, and there are majority black private schools, but overall, that's how the numbers break down).

The city is slightly more black than white; the parish is about 55% white and most of the rest are black. But the school system is 70% black. If you ran a strict neighborhood schools program for attendance districts, you'd create racially identifiable schools (not that you could... no new school has been built on a new site since 1966, so there are plently of recently built subdivisions without anything remotely close to a neighborhood school).

So what on earth is unitary? Shouldn't there be some sense within it that you don't think there's something funny going on when you see the graduates of Capitol High (public) standing next to graduates Broadmoor (public), or of St. Joseph's or Episcopal High (private)? "Unitary" was defined in Green v. County School Board (1968), a case arising out of New Kent Cty, Virginia, where a "freedom of choice" system and no patterns of residential segregation still gave rise to a de facto segregated system. Only, no white student chose to apply for a majority-to-minority transfer, and only 15% of the black students did. The opinion doesn't help much in figuring out what "unitary" is. New Kent County fails the "quack like a duck" test, so the Court didn't need to get any more precise. And then,

The obligation of the district courts, as it always has been, is to assess the effectiveness of a proposed plan in achieving desegregation. There is no universal answer to complex problems of desegregation; there is obviously no one plan that will do the job in every case. The matter must be assessed in light of the circumstances present and the options available in each instance. It is incumbent upon the school board to establish that its proposed plan promises meaningful and immediate progress toward disestablishing state-imposed segregation. It is incumbent upon the district court to weigh that claim in light of the facts at hand and in light of any alternatives which may be shown as feasible and more promising in their effectiveness. Where the court finds the board to be acting in good faith and the proposed plan to have real prospects for dismantling the state-imposed dual system "at the earliest practicable date," then the plan may be said to provide effective relief. Of course, the availability to the board of other more promising courses of action may indicate a lack of good faith; and at the least it places a heavy burden upon the board to explain its preference for an apparently less effective method. Moreover, whatever plan is adopted will require evaluation in practice, and the court should retain jurisdiction until it is clear that state-imposed segregation has been completely removed. See No. 805, Raney v. Board of Education, post, at 449.

The East Baton Rouge Parish School System is, by this point in time, acting in good faith to dismantle state-imposed segregation. But how much does that count for, if you've got a society that wants to re-establish it? The school district was struggling with the problem that, once a school becomes more than a certain (floating) percentage black, a lot of parents don't want to send their kids there, so those families flee to the private schools or the neighboring parishes like Ascension. People voluntarily chosing will sometimes chose against integration, so what's the problem with allowing the school systems to discriminate on the basis of race in order to combat these trends? Those kinds of programs — m-to-m transfers, admitting entering classes in magnet schools as 50% black, 50% non-black, some busings — become much more constitutionally suspect if they're not protected by a Brown court order. As they disappear, it's likely that the schools will be come more racially identifiable than they were when the court order acknowledging unitary status was granted. Just look at the Chicago public schools, which have been declared in compliance. Was this the dream of Brown?

One of the nice things about a laptop computer is that it enables one to read the Sunday paper without ever having to get up and buy or collect it. It bears:

Ombudsman Daniel Okrent takes responses from readers about what the policy should be on "corrections" for Op-Ed columnists. It's hard to know if the opinion-split among the readers printed is representative of an opinion-split among readers generally. But at least parody gets results, after a fashion.

In his continuing quest to be unfathomable, The Ethicist rules that it's generally okay for doctors to date former patients, or for gamblers to consult NBA players for their advice about NCAA games. I don't think I disagree on either score, but the fact that I don't disagree with anything in The Ethicist's column this week is pretty odd. (And as always I feel obligated to remind everybody about Jacob Levy's excellent piece-- "The Ethicist who isn't.")

An article on Kerry's search for a running mate that is most notable for the author's refusal to let go of hopes for a Kerry-McCain ticket, despite McCain's insistence to the contrary.

A long story about medical technology that's used to help people forget terrible things. Despite the fact that The President's Council on Bioethics doesn't like it, I tentatively agree, at least for myself. But then, the demons I've had to face down have been extremely minor, so who am I to say? Coincidentally(?), the Times also runs a semi-review by A.O.Scott about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (Which was fabulous, Ed Cohn not withstanding, (but so was Shakespeare in Love).)

I've just discovered an old Slashdot post by Heidi Bond proving that girls are work. No kidding.

UPDATE: P.S. Don't forget about daylight savings time.