Not a bang, a whimper

My career as a law student ended yesterday.

Oh no! What will I rename my blog? Quasi in REM is barely funny, even when you're in your first year, learning about the history behind the term "personal jurisdiction (in personam)" and where US law took a sharp turn away from English law. It's one of the very first things we learn, it's a primary rule, often a basic requirement for the chess game we play.

Latin Lovers might appreciate the humor that my last exam had to do with real estate.

Why? Because if you take the words apart, an in rem lawsuit is one that usually concerns real estate. Quasi in rem is a real, live term; it means settling the relationship between an individual person and a piece of property. Just plain old in rem means settling the relationship between a piece of property and everybody in the world who might have some sort of interest in that property: ownership, occupancy, etc. Quasi in rem was where American law, and our first year in law school took off. Coming full circle, real estate lawsuits, both quasi and plain, are often just in rem actions. People versus their relationship to things.

When I started out, I liked the play on words between the latin word rem [thing] and r. e. m. - the rapid eye movement sector of sleep when you dream, and quasi as vaguely meaning half or partial. It evoked dreams of being a lawyer, barely sleeping, being half asleep (and the history, ever the history). It seemed a likely 3 word summation of this whole law-skool endeavor.

The actual end to all of this has been more anti-climactic than I ever imagined. The real estate exam was a take-home exercise capped at 4000 words with no time limit. I wrote just over 2000. I don't understand how anyone could have written that much and maintained substance. Ah well. Brevity, the soul of wit, not law.

In the end it was just me and the lady in the registrar's office, as I signed the exam back in, half an hour before deadline. Only the liberty of e-mail submission would have made this less exciting, less conclusory, less solitary.

Such a contrast to the finale of timed exams I had as a first year student. Then, we all filed out of the classroom at the same time, heaving a collective breath of relief to have been tested and survived - together. Afterward, we all went to a bar and got wrecked (to different degrees, of course, some of us were always commuters.) - together.

I'm done now, waiting at the equivalent of a back-woods train station in Eastern Europe, waiting for a connection to take me to a more exciting location. I need to do some house cleaning, relief work after Hurricane Exam-Time as it were. I have other life obligations to attend to: the DMV, vacuuming, the dry cleaners, doctor's appointments. Normal life with nauseatingly high debt and abominable job prospects. I go back to being a normal person now, I just need to keep telling myself that this is just a way station.