The More Things Change ...

... The more they stay the same. I move 2,000 miles away, stop working at a very conservative bank and start attending a very liberal school, where I could theoretically form an entirely new identity and join student groups ranging from the Chinese Language Group to Law Students for Reproductive Justice. (OK, maybe I would need to do a bit of studying before attending the Chinese Language Group. Actually, I'd need to do a bit of studying about reproductive justice, too. And I'd probably feel more comfortable speaking in Chinese than conversing about the latter.) Anyway, what do I choose to do? The law school newspaper. The same newspaper I had previously vowed not to read, let alone work for. Now I not only read it, but I design it. You would think I would have learned my lesson by now ...

Now, back to foreign languages. The cases I read sound increasingly foreign to me, which worries me with finals looming just one month away. Take United States v. Peterson, for example: "Hinged on the exigencies of self-preservation, the doctrine of homicidal self-defense emerges from the body of the criminal law as a limited though important exception to the legal outlawry of the arena of self-help in the settlement of potentially fatal personal conflicts."

I think I need to use more words like "outlawry" and "potentially fatal personal conflicts" in my writing ...