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Coming Soon...

Keep a look out for a 3-day special "Bracket-Buster" special which will give you a unique insight on who to pick in order to win this year's pool!

Tourney Time vs. Attorney Time(?)

I'm going to start today's post by wishing all of you mathemagicians out there a happy Pi day.  This is perennially one of my favorite holidays, mostly in anticipation of it's celebration in the year 2015926 when my Dilbert tearaway calendar will read 3/14/15926 and I can really pop bottles.  

Unfortunately, Pi day is not the main focus of this post.  The real topic will hopefully be a little more interesting as it has to do with the phenomenon sports fans around the world refer to as March Madness.  While it could be argued that Pi day is the unofficial kick-off to March Madness because it usually falls around Championship week, I have to show some discipline and stray from the topic.  So, with a heavy heart, I want to turn your attention to a comparison that may have eluded you for your entire life to this point: NCAA March Madness compared/contrasted to Law School.  Now, I know what you're saying and you're wrong; there are similarities, you just have to look in the right places and that's why you've turned here, to me, an expert in setting aside actual responsibilities in order to shed light on subjects you never really cared about.  So, without further ado, let's start the show! 

Now, I could go on for pages with similarities but I've decided, because I have a social life, to limit myself to just a few of the major ones which you'll find below.

The tournament is often called the "second season" in college basketball, a name I have bestowed upon "finals" in law school.  You see, I like to consider myself the equivalent of a tournament "darkhorse" or "underdog."  So what if I didn't win all the games in the regular season?  (Editor's note: we all know I like to use analogies in my writing.  For instance, "winning games"="reading torts/crim/Con/property" and "regular season"="first 2/3 of the semester".  These will continue throughout the post so keep a lookout.  Anyway, sorry for the interruption - time to contiune...)  The beauty of college basketball - and it's distant cousin: legal education - is that it's not necessarily about consistency.  Some teams will eek their way into the Big Dance thanks to an incredible series of fortunate breaks - this is more analogous to having your rich uncle call to get you into the school, not anything you've done once you're there.  Regardless, the underdogs almost ALWAYS rely on some sort of ridiculous prayer of a shot at the end of regulation against a higher-seeded team in order to advance - that's the story of my legal education: underperforming for 39 minutes, 56 seconds, then pulling it out in the end.  

Law school has the same categories as the tournament when it comes to performing.  Aside from the aforementioned (sorry, Craig Smith) "underdog", there are, of course, those teams/students who are commonly referred to as "favorites", "frontrunners", or in law school, "gunners."  Gunners may end up winning March Madness with their talent, depth, and actual understanding of the issues on exams but plenty of assholes have won NCAA championships and gone on to do very little as professionals, and vice versa.  Really, would you rather be Christian Laettner with his incredible college basketball pedigree, excellent education, and 2 NCAA Championships or Kobe Bryant with no formal education since high school, 3 NBA Championships, and a $21 million contract with the Lakers?  Seriously, right?  With all due respect to gunners, I'd rather struggle through the regular season, doing just enough to get by and then amp it up in the last month in time to make the Elite 8.  This way, the "scouts" (BigLaw) notice my positives without having to pay attention to my bad performances, also known as cold calls.

Finally, regardless of what happens, two things are always true: good coaching/teaching usually prevails and there will be upsets.  If I learned anything from my first round of finals - most notably, Civ Pro - these would have been the two lessons.  No doubt I had a very well thought of professor - akin to Tommy Amaker - but despite all of the credentials and charisma, there was just a general lack of experience at the highest level and together, we fell short.  Compare this to a coach...errr...professor in the same division - Civ Pro - who has over 100 years of experience on the subject, an extensive collection of well-worn denim, and who literally wrote the book; this legal genius would no doubt be compared to a Coach K or Roy-boy Williams and always gets the best performances from her students.  Every once in a while an underdog TEAM advances deeper than expected but you rarely see a terrible coach/professor produce the proteges of the highest caliber.  

The other lesson is that regardless of who you are or how good you think you are, you will face an upset sometime during March Madness.  Think about it like this: the average law student faces 6 instances of the March Madness equivalent (since I like to consider myself "above average", I hope to have a couple extra...).  That's roughly 24 "games" where you could possibly be upset.  Even the mighty fall in the tournament on a yearly basis and, to be honest, no one is shocked the next day because, hell, that's just the nature of the tournament.  Well, it's the same for law school and that's why no one was shocked when a certain blogger missed 7 consecutive lay-ups down the stretch against Team Civ Pro and pulled the B-.  There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule - a legal "dream team" if you will, comprised of 9 players recruited from some of the best teams around the country.

Ok, well, as I sit here, UNC was just "upset" by Florida State in the ACC tournament and, as predicted, Psycho-T retarded his way to underachieving, all of which corroborates my theory that anything can happen in March.  Maybe he and the Tar-fails will be able to make things a little more interesting in the Big Dance, but hopefully not.  Anywho, it's now time to go watch Duke ride the rollercoaster so I'll leave you with one last thought that just came to mind before I go.  There is one major difference between life at VULS this year and the NCAA tournament.   In the history of the 64/65 team NCAA tournament, a #1 seeded team has never fallen to a 16 seed.  The same cannot be said this year in the hallowed walls of Vandy.

A Call to Arms - Why should Gunners have all the fun?

So the inaugural post is up and the reviews streaming in via gChat are encouraging for several reasons.  First, people like the style and general idea of Let the Curve Do the Work ("LTCDTW").  Second, if people are chatting with me, they're not paying attention and that's the entire point - we're all just letting go and letting the curve work its magic.

Now that the word is out there, LTCDTW is recruiting the brightest and best to contribute.  The more people who write, the more shit you have to look at and the less you have to pay attention.  Like many of the corporate law firms many of us yearn to work for one day - and unlike those virile undergrads we now admire so much - this blog has standards.  Listed below are many of the attributes the most desirable candidates will possess.

• You have read all of espn.com and stumbled across semi-nude golfers or the latest word on cricket.
• You can identify many of you "friends" by their tanlines, thanks to Facebook.
• You've found pirate ships in the Gulf of Aden via Google Earth.
• You read other, less interesting blogs.
• You have the capacity to write a hilarious, yet possibly convincing cover letter.
• You have a B average.

Though there will be some aberrations, if you nodded your head to any of these, your professor probably saw you and will undoubtedly call on you soon so make eye contact now to let him/her know you're paying attention...all clear?...like I was saying, if you've done one of those you're qualified; if you meet all of them, you're me and we should get together to start a Utopian community.

In all seriousness, if you're interested in contributing, send me a writing sample that could feasibly go on the blog right away and, if it's good, I'll add you as an author.  Come on, people, let's do the damn thing.

Statement of Purpose

If you're a first year law student at VULS and paid attention at any point during Regulatory State, this blog isn't for you...no, I'm just joshin', keep reading - we all know that any statue worth reading has a clear and concise Statement of Purpose.  Now I can predict what you're thinking right now and you're correct, there is no such thing as a "statute worth reading" but hopefully you possess a mind like mine that allows you to substitute words like "statute" and "blog" pretty liberally.  If you've been so blessed, you've now changed my original sentence to read "...any blog worth reading has a...Statement of Purpose" and by-golly, you'd be correct.  So as to not make you wait with baited breath any longer, I present to you, my fellow scholars, the Statement of Purpose to letthecurvedothework.blogspot.com:

This is the blog that students around the country - nay, around the Universe - will look to as a source of entertainment in their 8 am Corporations class or their 3-hour Administrative Law seminar or, on the lonely Tuesday afternoon, when the possibly-homeless gentleman sipping a Pabst Blue Ribbon at the Corner Pub won't stop arguing the merits of Spam versus Chicken of the Sea.  The articles - always hilarious, often poorly written, occasionally offensive, and sometimes possessing a tidbit of redeeming intellectual value - will be posted by individuals not unlike you or me:

• Intelligent enough to be in law school
• Disciplined enough to have made it to class
• Apathetic enough to disregard the heated debate going on between that girl who looks like Gollum and the guy whose age is the subject of several over/under bets
• Savvy enough to be interested in: mindless rants, cool links, funny pictures, interesting tidbits, hairbrain schemes, zany anecdotes, and more mindless, cool, funny, interesting, hairbrain, zany links...

Together, we will amass a website that will serve two noble purposes integral to any legal education.  First, this site WILL keep you entertained.  Maybe not all of it and maybe not all the time, but there should always be something that will at least be able to distract you long enough that there's a gaping whole in the Word document entitled "Torts - Class 23 - 3/12/09".  This leads to the second purpose which is to let the fabled Law School Curve do its job.  Let's be honest, we worked plenty hard for at least the last 10 years getting to where we are right now.  And let's take this to the next extreme which is, we'll all be working hard for the next 30 years of our life, trying to support a family and various destructive habits.  With that in mind, shouldn't we have a brief, 3-year hiatus where we can kick our feet up on the desk, let someone else do the talking, and learn about something far more valuable than the fictional idea of "mens rea" - e.g. Somali Pirates - from a source far more reliable than a "professor" with "respected degrees" - e.g. Wikipedia.  

Just a few quick rules to get us started...

1. Tell your friends - that's the point.
2. Don't start gossip about people in your school.  It seems to be a common misconception but this is not middle school and you are not Serena van der Woodsen and I am not Lonely Boy (in reality, I'm Chuck Bass).  Keep it civil people.  That said, celebs and professional athletes are fair game.
3. Write something.  I've never blogged before but I know that I can allow people to become correspondents to the blog.  If you're good, you're hired...for no money...to do my bidding.  Sound familiar?  That's because this is a great preparation for your Summer Internship with Judge Judy.

Alright, that's it for now.  Let the games begin.