LuminousVoid

Recently, a former roommate introduced me to someone seeking to apply to law school with a plan to focus on tech issues. They wanted some guidance with how to choose their school, and were asking me since I had a tech focus in school. I’m excerpting the answer I sent below. They were mostly curious about GW, but also were curious about general issues having to do with school.

Note: this is not to address the VERY important question of “should I go to law school?” I think the answer to that is the same as “do I want to radically alter my life?”

GW has a heavy focus on IP. It’s basically what they’re famous for, and for IP they’re usually ranked #1 or #2, along with Berkeley. At least it looked that way in 02 when I was applying. GW also hosts the AIPLA journal — thats basically the student run journal of the industry group of IP lawyers.

Besides IP, GW has profs doing privacy and computer crimes work. Also others that teach things like cyberlaw and e-commerce. There are lots of small little seminars on IP — I took a course in multinational IP taught by a former director of the patent office and former register of copyrights. These guys were teaching treaties that they helped to negotiate. I don’t think I could have gotten this anywhere else.

If you’re going to compare curricula, this is the stage you should do it: the more detail thats offered, the broader the knowledge of that faculty. Be careful to get a few semesters worth of course listings, so you find out how much is actually offered on one semester.

As for finding a law school, I have some basic pieces of advice. I don’t know how to rank schools according to these considerations, but you should be able to do some research and find out.

If you’re going into non-profit work, like policy etc…, a main consideration is cost. Getting into a lower ranked school that gives you a break on tuition is going to make your career much easier. You’ll have to work hard to shine and stand out, but its an important consideration.

One thing that I found helped a lot when trying to ’shine’ in that public interest world was the experience I got. Public interest is highly competitive, but its a different sort of competition than straight up being a lawyer in a law firm. Being in DC allows you to volunteer and do internships for credit with loads of national organizations. They’re really happy to have people during the school year, nobody is competing for the spots, and when it comes time to look for summer or other work having that on your resume helps a lot. I interned at the AAAS and CDT, as well as EPIC, where I ended up working after graduation. The bay area and NYC would probably have similar opportunities, but I don’t know about other places.

Short of that, the other possibility is looking at legal clinics. I do know that both Stanford and Berkeley have internet/tech clinics. GW didn’t have that, but, like i said, DC had an alphabet soup of acronyms you could work with, not to mention Congress / the Government.

I’ve recently gotten back from my trip to Switzerland. In short, it’s a fascinating, well run, and incredibly expensive country. My trip took me to Geneva, where I hung out with an international crowd of NGO folks. Then I joined a friend of mine in the Bernese Oberland — Alpine villages, basically. She works for Untours, a travel company that rents out apartments in European countries — the idea is that then the traveller is going off the touristy path. Since she was there on work she offered me a stay at one of the apartments. Lastly, I went and spent a few days in Zurich — not so international as Geneva, but quite wealthy and hip. For me one of the highlights was having a beer at the Cabaret Voltaire, site of the begginings of the Dada movement.

Transit throughout Switzerland was tightly integrated. In general trains had arrivals and departures 4-5 minutes after each other, minimizing layovers. Local bus departures from train stations were timed for a few minutes after major trains arrived. Fares were under two systems: either a conductor came by and checked your ticket, or you were riding a bus or other vehicle where you were responsible for validating the ticket yourself. Its this last system thats the topic of this post.

In Zurich, the latter system was noted with signs warning passengers that they faced a fine of 80 CHF if they they were caught without a ticket — tickets were about 3-4 CHF. Travellers were alerted to the system with a multi-lingual sign: German, French, Italian and English. Here is the German Part of the sign:

So the System is called some sort of “self-control.” Fair enough — you get your ticket on your own and validate it on your own and most of the time you never see a conductor — those come by every once in a while making random inspections. The 4 times I rode that train I saw one inspector.
But the hilarious thing is the logo: Thats an eye! They’re watching you. Its a reminder of the Panopticon — you’ll behave because you don’t know if you’re being watched. Its also wonderfully Orwellian: the system is called “self-control,” right next to the reminder that youre being watched. And this is all in the town that brought us Dada.
To be fair, the English translation they provided was called “Penalty Fare Area.” The idea being that here you faced a penalty fare for not having a valid ticket.