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Civil Procedure: Other Men's Flowers

'I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own.'
Lord Wavell, author of my favorite collection of poetry, takes from Montaigne both the title of his book and the first line of his preface. I feel substantially the same about my preparation materials for civil procedure. Not having had time to outline properly, they're a Frankensteined mess of my notes, existing senate outlines (written by students in past years), practice hypotheticals and model answers from TA sections, my study group's flow-chart (such as was done of it), and the course materials that my professor put up on the web. All this is divided into six main sections and several subsections, capped at the end by printouts of past exams. In theory, I'll absorb all this in the next thirty or so hours, and thus be ready to roll when the real exam, a twenty-four hour take home, falls into my lap.

I feel badly about this, as if I'm cramming and indexing things that I should have absorbed. Unlike my other two exams, I'm not certain I feel a mastery of the black-letter materials, although policy issues are much more fixed in my mind. Still, maybe I shouldn't feel so badly. After civil procedure, the law seems much more like an accretion of habits and traditions than anything rational or ordered. Rather like a bouquet of flowers bound over and over again by other men's thread, until finally you're left with more twine than greenery.

What an ugly image.


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