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Hello Employers!

Published September 23rd, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I’ve heard that some interviewers and hirers have started googling candidates. Well, if you’ve googled me, and you’ve figured out that I’m not this guy from Oregon, thank you for your interest, and welcome to my blog! This blog is a personal venture where I post anything I want to say to the world, or maybe just to my friends (with that word construed broadly) and family.

Before you read the rest of this, I want to say something while I have your attention. I care deeply about learning, and then practicing, the law. Time permitting, there is only one question that I plan on asking every interviewer with whom I speak. If you quit tomorrow, what would you miss about the practice of law? If you’re wondering where the question comes from, it comes from Justice Kennedy’s speech at the recent ABA conference in San Francisco. Not even a year of law school has convinced me that the law is anything but a noble profession, and I am committed to practicing it to the best of my ability and with the utmost ethics. I hope you’ll give me the opportunity to do it with you.

And here’s the optional reading: some clarifications, some explanations, and some links.

Some companies don’t care about employee’s blogs and some do. Here are some facts (but not just the facts).

  • I do not nor have I ever published anything on this blog that I have a problem with being attributed to me in any public setting. I understand that my name becomes my firm’s, and am willing to take down posts if our judgment differs.
  • I am not married to this blog. If I like your firm, and think it will be a good place for me to start my legal career, I am more than willing to talk about discontinuing this blog, or altogether taking it down. If I want to work for you, and this blog is your only problem with me, consider it gone.
  • If you’re looking for some of the stuff that I’ve posted here, feel free to check out the following posts:
    • As my resume says, I’m a Yale chess fan, and stay as involved as I can with the club. You can read my most substantive post on Yale chess here.
    • Despite not having lived in DC until this past summer, I’ve been a supporter of DC Voting Rights for a couple of years now. An undergraduate paper I wrote on the subject has been published by DCVote and is available here. I thought that was pretty cool, so I wrote about it in a previous post.
  • A note on the sidebars and other things on the page. The reading list is largely out of date, but the poem is as true today as ever. The bookmarks on the side are my delicious bookmarks. Posting them doesn’t mean I endorse them, it just means I thought they were interesting or wanted to be able to find them easily in the future. If you’re interested in the ones that are about law, you can try http://del.icio.us/scottc229/law, although that list probably won’t be a perfect list.
  • A note on the slogan. Gens Una Sumus is the motto of the World Chess Federation (FIDE, or Fédération Internationale des Echecs). It’s Latin for “We are one people.” (If you know Spanish, think “Somos una gente.”) I believe in the ability of chess and sport to unite people from different geographic, religious, political, ethnic, and linguistic groups. I don’t know if chess should be called a sport (the IOC calls it one), but I’d love to see it in the olympics.
  • I also read some blogs, including some legal ones. Here’s a list of some of my favorites.

If you’d like to let me know that you’ve read this or saw it, please feel free to email me or leave a comment below.

Courses

Published September 23rd, 2007 in Classes. 0 Comments

Just thought I’d let people know what I’m taking now that I’m choosing my own courses.

Copyright:  In looking at my classes, especially given that I’m waiting until Spring to take either Tax or Corps, I wanted to have a solid blackletter law class. Having decided on IP, I had to choose between Copyright with Pam Samuelson, or a broader class with Yochai Benkler (and one more hour of class time per week). After having looked at the syllabus for Benkler’s class, I decided that I was less interested in patents and more interested in trademarks and copyrights, so I decided to take Samuelson’s copyright class. So far I’m quite glad with my decision. The class is interesting, and we’re focusing on cases and controversies as well as statutory framing issues with respect to the Copyright (although I should note the latter is a much more indirect enterprise for us than for Visiting Prof. Samuelson’s Copyright Reform seminar).

First Amendment Law: This year HLS cut Conlaw into two classes, First Amendment and Separation of Powers/Federalism/Fourteenth Amendment. I plan on taking both, but my main conflict this semester was between the transactional clinic and taking a Conlaw class with Charles Fried. My summer boss convinced me rather quickly of the inanity of even considering the clinic. I should thank him for that some time soon, because Professor Fried is not only engaged by the material, he’s engaging, and probes the cases in novel ways. In particular, I enjoy when he points out the importance of looking at cases in a different way when your goal is to win the case than when your goal is to understand the role free speech should play in a free society.

Comparative Constitutional Law: I originally was leaning towards Professor Nesson’s Trials in Second Life class, and I enjoyed the first class with Prof. Nesson, but once I did the reading for Comparative Conlaw’s first week and realized that one of the two had to go, Second Life was going to have to be resurrected. I like thinking about legal issues that relate to self-reference (which is only natural for any law student fan of Raymond Smullyan), and judicial review along with constitution-writing provide an abundance of them.

International Trade Law: Before this summer, I hadn’t heard of Trade Law. After looking at the firm pages for our outhouse lawyers, I realized that was the practice area I was in this summer! Then I watched the movie Black Gold, which made me actually start thinking about the more international-law aspects of International Trade, as opposed to the domestic law I was working with over the summer (Export Controls and FCPA mostly). When I saw the course on the syllabus with a former WTO panelist as prof (Visiting Professor Seung-Wha Chang), it quickly moved to the top of my  bidlist.

I unfortunately won’t be continuing German this semester because I felt the on-campus interviewing and then fly-out week would make it too difficult, but I plan on cross-registering again for Dab in the Spring (if I get departmental permission).

I’m quitting facebook, Part III

Published August 8th, 2007 in Friends & Family. 5 Comments

This post details some of the steps I have to take both before and after the actual deletion of my account. They are in the order I thought of them while writing this post.

  1. Not all my friends that I would like to read this blog. I’d doubt if three of ‘em do. So I’m going to link to Part I of this three-part post on facebook itself. However, rather than put it in a note, I’m going to put it in a group for a few reasons.
    • It will be searchable on facebook. That way, when somebody searches for “Scott Caplan” on facebook, in addition to finding other Scott Caplans there, they will find a group titled “Scott Caplan is quitting facebook” that will point them to this post. In an ideal world, people could just google me (after all, I am result #2 on a Google search for my name), but I don’t think people will think of that for a while. By the way, if you’re reading this and your name is Scott Caplan, you should check this page out.
    • I like the comparison to those obnoxious “Hey, I lost my phone number” groups. For a good protest group, see here.
    • A note loses its feed audience after its posted. A group gets advertised every time somebody joins it. Hint: if you’ve read this far, and you’re on facebook, join it! You don’t have to quit facebook in order to let your friends (some of which are probably also my friends) know that I’m quitting facebook.
  2. Hand over groups of which I’m an administrator to friends who are staying on the closed network.
  3. Copy down all the contact information I want to keep. Note: if you want mine, you should write it down now. Once I delete my account, you’ll have to email me. In the long run, I want to set up a private page that’s password-protected/openID-enabled for my contact info, but that won’t be for a while I’m guessing.
  4. Get openID working on this blog. I don’t know if I want to abolish the anonymous commenting. In the meantime, though very few people comment. Indeed, most of the commenters here are spambots, and deleting their “comments” is a bit of a pain. I don’t think it exists yet (probably because facebook doesn’t let you play around with their headers), but it would be an awesome app and/or improvement to facebook if you could use your facebook profile page as an openID…
  5. I will yank the plug on my account some time before classes start on September 5th.
  6. Actively search for ways to make the open social web a reality, and continue to participate in the revolution conversation.

I’m quitting facebook, Part II

Published August 8th, 2007 in Friends & Family. 1 Comment

As promised, this post has some comments about the discussion started by this post on Wired. If you haven’t yet read it, go read it now. The comments I have to make about it are three-fold: first, what I think it’s not suggesting; second, two of the complaints I have about the post; and third, some thoughts on how its vision could become a reality.

What I Think Scott Gilbertson is Not Suggesting

Contrary to what some of the initial commenters thought, I don’t think the post wants people to be sharing every photo of themselves, or all the contact info they dump on facebook, with the whole world. Rather, I read the post as hoping for a way to allow expression of what two peoples’ relationship to each other is without the need for a community like facebook. As an example, a friend of mine (say Vlad) logs into this blog with an openID authentication; this site recognizes he’s allowed to see my latest post about a mutual acquaintance of ours, and shows it to him. In the end, any software platform supporting openID authentication allows us to share this information, even facebook, provided of course, that facebook chooses to implement it.

Currently, however, there are at least two parts of this that don’t work on facebook. First, I can’t see anything on facebook without having an account, no matter what open standards or protocols I’m using. Second, I have a limited ability to differentiate among my friends, so that wheat I show to Vlad I may have to show to our mutual acquaintance.

There are in turn two criticisms of this thinking. First, there are some things facebook does that aren’t currently supported in my model. For example, group memberships are not recognizable globally. Secondly, in the example I gave, it was this blog that recognized Vlad and my friendship. What we need is for the friendship to be globally recognizable so that Matt’s blog can recognize that Vlad and I are friends with each other (as well as with him) and display our comments accordingly.

Second, if I really want to stratify things that much, why not just use email? There are many different answers to this, but it should be clear that if people wanted to maintain and use so many separate email lists, facebook wouldn’t exist.

Two Complaints About the Post

There are two things, and they’re both straightforward. First, I need to register with Wired in order to post a comment. That’s right. The people who are talking about opening up the spread of information, data, and media, require you to register before you take part in “their” conversations.

Second, on this page detailing how you can “Replace Facebook Using Open Social Tools,” they note that you can set up your own button to allow friends to call you on Skype of all things. And I would edit the page, but that too requires registration with Wired. Oh well.

Some Thoughts on the Missing Steps

I don’t know that much about the specifics here, but I generally tend to think that openID could be enhanced to do the trick. You can find some more thoughts from this blog post, which at least seems to be written by people who know what they’re talking about.

For part III, see here.

I’m quitting facebook, Part I

Published August 7th, 2007 in Friends & Family. 3 Comments

Like any good Ivy-leaguer, I have a facebook account. I am about to delete it, because I no longer approve of facebook. This post explains why I’m deleting my account, and the next one will have my comments on the recent post in Wired, and the last one will explain what I plan to do before and after the actual deletion.

Given the confusion that some of my friends have had with the concept, let me first clarify some of the reasons that are not behind my decision to delete my account.

  1. I am not opposed to the News Feed. Far from it. I like the News Feed. And I’m glad that facebook finally has RSS feeds that work with the status updates and notifications. For a while I used the status one, but that didn’t work very well.
  2. I don’t have a problem with the applications being launched on facebook. Some of them are good; some of them are bad. All in all, I think it’s a great thing for facebook that they’ve let people use their own imaginations to do cool stuff with facebook.
  3. I’m not worried about my privacy online. Everything I put online I choose to put online. I send emails and letters to friends without worrying how my thoughts could be used against me. I see no difference in putting up pictures and comments. If I did, I wouldn’t have this blog.
  4. I have no problem with the fact that anybody can join, or that networks are defined so loosely. In fact, I think they should have done that a long time ago. My membership in this group is really just tongue-in-cheek.

So why am I quitting facebook? The simplest answer is I don’t like telephone network effects, and I think their presence on an internet governed by open standards should be minimized if not eliminated. If I have a friend who, for whatever reason, chooses to use MySpace, I should be able to label myself as his friend without joining MySpace, whether I choose to be a member of another social networking site or not. The same applies to facebook.

In short, I’m quitting facebook because I wish they’d take the direction they’re going in farther. I’ve been thinking this for a while now, but the aforementioned post in Wired convinced me that the time is now. Go read it now, before you read anything else I write.

And once you’ve done so, you can read Part II here.

BBC Curse Words [contains adult language]

Published August 1st, 2007 in Uncategorized and Links. 0 Comments

I came across this list of words the BBC doesn’t want people saying. There are more than seven.

I was rather surprised to see how high on the list “nigger” is for the BBC, since, well, American TV seems to have no problem with it. During one of the breaks during college I happened to catch an airing of Blazing Saddles on A&E. Glad to see one of my favorite movies on TV, I decided to stay up and watch it. After all, I was on break.

I soon changed my mind, though, not because I was tired, but because they were taking out all the good parts (i.e., the swearing). And Blazing Saddles simply does not work “cleaned up.” You might as well just air a version without sound.

There was one scene in particular, though, that struck me. In the actual movie, when the new sheriff greets an elderly woman, she doesn’t want any of his kindness: “Up yours, nigger!” she tells him.

On the other hand, in A&E’s cleaned-up-even-though-it-was-on-late-at-night version, grandma couldn’t dare say anything so vulgar: “Shut up, nigger!” was what came out of the sweet old lady’s mouth.
“Nigger” is ranked 11 on the list (1 is the most offensive), while “piss off” comes in at 12; “up yours” doesn’t appear.

In Loving Memory of a Legend: Burt Kaufman

Published July 8th, 2007 in Friends & Family, New Categories, Math Education and IMACS. 1 Comment

Burt Kaufman passed away yesterday. I had the privilege of being taught mathematics and computer science by Mr. Kaufman and of studying under the IMACS curriculum for ten years. In the course of those ten years, he enriched my mind and my life, as he did for countless students, parents and fellow teachers throughout his storied and successful career.

Burt Kaufman appreciation

A very quick post

Published March 31st, 2007 in Uncategorized and Soapbox. 0 Comments

There’s other more important things that I’d like to post about, but this caught my eye when I was reading a link from The Forward. Maybe it’s me, but isn’t this logo just disturbing?

Link: Republican Jewish Coalition.

Welcome to the Read/Write Web!

Published January 2nd, 2007 in Friends & Family, Links, New Categories and Welcome. 0 Comments

My friend Alex Lee just started a blog. He of course did this after having witnessed the enormous success of this one…..

Since I imagine that many of my friends will be starting blogs at unspecified times in the future, I’m also making this a new category.

I’m a liar.

Published December 28th, 2006 in Snobbishness, Friends & Family, Chess and Yale Chess. 0 Comments

Yeah, so I said I’d be writing some more stuff in the near future. I lied. And don’t think that because now I’m writing that all of a sudden I’m going to keep my promise. There’s one very simple reason for this: exams. I have my first law school exams on January 5, 8 and 10. In the meantime, there are a few things I will post now.

Yale chess is at the Pan-ams with two teams. Last night our A team beat Dartmouth 3.5 to 0.5 and this morning we just beat Miami-Dade’s A team 3 to 1. All I can say is I’m giddy as a schoolboy. And I’m excited about our B team because two of the three freshmen on the trip are on it!

Also, for those in the respective areas that I’ve forgotten to tell: I’ll be in New York for new year’s then back to Boston for finals. During the intercession (apparently the official name of the break between 1L finals and the start of second semester classes), I’ll be in France (Tours, one hour from Paris by train) and Germany (Cologne and Munich).
Finally, snobby latin is no longer monthly and no longer Latin. Hopefully the next poster (TBD) will be a bit more punctual than Vlad (not that I’m in a position to complain given my aforementioned tardiness). In the meantime, even though Oid’ ho theleis, logous theleis, I’m afraid I won’t be able to deliver much more for a while.

Merry belated Christmas and Happy New Year!

PS. Here are the games from the win against Miami-Dade. You can play them out on an on-line board at monroi.com/wdc/.

Loyalty Oath

Though wagging his tail,
Dan barked, "Throw the traitor in jail!"
So to soothe the bulldog,
I insist I won't blog, but


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