20 June 2005

GfG

I sat around working on multiple appeals over the weekend. It's time consuming and I have started to do it at the local law school library so there's no one to distract me. The advantage of working at the University of Richmond law library is that I'm not an alumnus so no one knows me. I can work in peace and have all the major publications at my fingertips. However, it is humorous sometimes. As I walked out of the building on Saturday there were two students standing there and they both eyed me warily before one turned to the other and asked suspiciously "Who's that?" (because, as we all know, law schools worldwide suffer from industrial espionage). And later that same day I didn't know the law library closed at 5 p.m. so I'm sitting there in a corner happily typing away and suddenly the lights go out. I suspect that if I hadn't gotten up and left immediately - before the kid at the front desk could leave with his girlfriend - I would probably have been locked in; so much for reshelving the books.

I used to go back and spend the weekend at W&L when I had to write a bunch of appeals. It was a great way to get away to the mountains. As well, the law library was open 24 hours and I could spend all sorts of time getting the appeals written; I remember this being highly touted when I was there: "Anyone can come in and use our law library at any time." However, the last time I tried that W&L had placed student-only pass keys on the doors. I couldn't get in except during regular hours which made it not worthwhile to take the 2 hour trip. So now I think the students at UR Law are going to be seeing me more often.

In the end, I got one nearly finished. The only thing which bothered me was that I had a case printed out in my trial folder which had two pertinent paragraphs. There wasn't much more to it; in the end I found better citations and didn't even use the case. However, on the front of the case I had written in BIG letters "GfG." I have no idea what "GfG" means but apparently three months ago I thought it was pretty important because I scrawled it twice at the top of the first page. The decision involved collateral estoppel in a criminal case. For the life of me, I cannot remember what "GfG" means and it's been bugging me ever since I looked at the file Saturday morning. And it's still bugging me . . .

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good for the Goose, Good for the Gander?

Ken Lammers said...

Anon - Wow. You must be a time traveler or mind reader or something. That's exactly what it meant. All the cases I was looking at to support my position were ones which had supported a prosecutor's position. I scribbled GfG GfG to remind myself of that when I went to argue before the trial judge (not that it did any good).