Scott Caplan’s blog

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 The reading list is largely out of date, but the poem is as true today as ever.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.
• Law.com
• Export Law Blog
• Concurring Opinions
• The Situationist (a group blog partly written by my Torts prof)
• Election Law Blog
• blackprof.com
• Legal History Blog
• AdamsDrafting
• The Party of the First Part podcast
• and I’m a recent convert to Above the Law, although I’ve learned not to read the comments.

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.

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).