Will Baude   Amy Lamboley   Amanda Butler   Jonathan Baude  Peter Northup   Beth Plocharczyk   Greg Goelzhauser   Heidi Bond   Sudeep Agarwala   Jeremy Reff   Leora Baude

April 21, 2006

Required Courses

Will Baude at 11:36 PM

I go to a law school that, for better or worse, is relatively short on required courses. We have to take torts, contracts, civil procedure (called "procedure") and constitutional law (one semester each), plus criminal law and professional responsibility. Otherwise, the field is ours.

Risk-averse and herd-minded creatures that we are, we naturally have happened upon a set of classes that are considered by the herd to be basically required. Property. Administrative Law. Federal Courts. Federal Income Tax. Business Organizations. Evidence. Etc.

However, when a friend of Crescat recently told me that she was going to defy the code and simply not-take Evidence, I began to wonder how much of this canon was only so much wool over the eyes. Is it really the case that judges, public interest law firms, and other exciting employers will look askance on a transcript that lacks evidence or corporations?

Aren't YLS grads already written off as theoretical pantywaists who know no law? So even if they see a course that purports to be "Evidence" will transcript-skimmers just write it off, assuming it was taught by Professor Very Theoretical or Professor Interdisciplinary and that the student learned everything he knows by reading Evidence in a Nutshell?

Put differently, if I think it's going to be really boring, an I please not-take evidence next fall?


UPDATE: For what it's worth I took (and liked) Admin Law and Property, and am excited about Federal Courts. (Tax was less exciting). Thanks to commenters and emailers.

 Comments (14)

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.crescatsententia.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/3650

The Problems of Translation

Sudeep Agarwala at 09:33 AM

Briefly:

I've been trying to figure out an appropriate way to translate Horace Carm. I.xxxi: "Persicos odi..."

The problem is this: the first line is difficult because of the "persicos":

Persicos odi puer apparatus
By difficult, of course, I mean easy: translitteration is trivial:
I find Persian apparatus odious, boy.
This may not be the best way to think of the line. I argue (perhaps incorrectly) that Persicos is not only indicative of flagrance, extravagance and general over-the-topness, but has a derogatory slant to it, much like calling something "Greek" in the Roman language (or, in many cases, consciously preferring a Greek cognate to a Roman word) often indicated a certain floweriness or effeminate nature.

So how to translate persicos here?

Garçon, I hate this baroque-ish stuff:
Irony of ironies: I use the tone the ode polemicizes against.

Perhaps:

Child, enough of this pansy-ass shit!
But Horace, I think, was a modest stoic, not some proselytizing sailor.

But the translations get worse and worse, sharply cadencing into the clearly politically incorrect. So the question remains: what precisely does Horace mean by this opening phrase, and how best to transmit the sentiment?

Or even more deeply: is it necessarily kosher to translate political incorrectness and racism?

ERRATUM: I'm talking about Odes 1.38, not Odes I.xxxi, as above--many apologies.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.crescatsententia.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/3649