Trolls

I'm starting a paper on internet trolls. Thank you South Park for letting me know this is a problem in our larger culture that people care about, and not just me in my head.

Here's what I've got so far in ways of thought process:

While  “Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority” indisputably, a troll is not any anonymous critic on the internet striving to save themselves from a tyrannous government.

To whit: the first amendment protects the Ku Klux Klan member for his speech -- be it in published or unpublished, written or oral -- but not from the actions he may take based on those words.  

The difference between the speech of a critic and the “speech” of a troll is that the critic is using the forum of the internet to anonymously criticize something. They are a part of a larger conversation. 

The troll is acting out in order to specifically get a negative reaction out of the receiver of that “speech”. It is not in an attempt to start a conversation with the larger culture, it is to create some feeling of power in themselves by reducing another person’s ego. Often trolls do this repeatedly to the same person. If this were physical life, we would call it harassment. 

Remedies would likely include injunctions and damages. But internet trolls claim freedom of speech. Not only does this let them get away with it in the short term, but it besmirches this sacred American right in the long term. 

I hope some trolls will get on my comments and give me something to quote. 

SOL

Lawyers love a good acronym. Like any profession with jargon, it just starts washing through you. Over the last three years one of my favorite semantic delights has been finding out that other legalese users make up the same sorts of short hand for terms of art as I do. When I’m typing notes for 5 hours straight (backup career as stenographer) I automatically shorten Probable Cause to PCause Supreme Court of the United States to SCOTUS, etc. And then I realized loads of other ppl are shortening the same things in the same ways.

As fascinating as that may be for Linguist Me, or Neurologist Me, or Sociologist Me, what it really is best for is Comedian Me.

I was minding my own business, reading a legal blog, trying to figure out why so many acts that get passed have 180 day limitations. Seriously, it's like a nervous tick. Why 180 days? It's also the federally mandated number of days in a school year.  I want to know where this comes from, and why. It's so arbitrary seeming. Is it week days? working days? Is that how many days Ben Franklin could hold onto a bender? I didn't learn, last night, the answer to this quandry. 

Instead, what I noticed – how great! – is that everyone else shortens Statute of Limitations to SOL in their notes and heads -- just like me.

A Statute of Limitations is the time limit put on the ability for plaintiffs (complainers) to make claims for a particular cause of action (the thing they’re complaining about). I was reading about the Lily Ledbetter Act, which extends the length of time a person may complain about inequal pay for equal work. Like all the nervous tick acts, it had been 180 days, then a SCOTUS case shortened that time period, and then this 2009 Act held the limit back to 180 days. IE. whoever finds out they've been short shrifted pay for arbitrary reasons has 180 days to file their complaint for the last received inequal paycheck. 

That is, there is a 180 day Statute of Limitations (SOL) on making your complaint about this particular injustice.

Reasoning for this is to a) make sure the offending party doesn’t live unjustly in fear their whole lives for possibly a small slight, and b) incentivize complainers to be prompt – the US Courts are full of bitchin and if you got the gall stones, you better have the gumption to carry that full term.

Which reasoning, luckily, also means there’s a pleasant scale for how long SOLs are in accordance to the injustice committed. EG. Inequal pay has this particularly short one, tax evasion has 6 years to be found out, and terrorism has no SOL.

Meaning, the worse a thing you do to another human being, the more Shit Outta Luck you are in being safe from the law.  

First Day of the Last of the Law School Life

My Facebook wall this week is studded with the emotional shout outs of my student colleagues confronting their last year of law school.

It's an odd series of sensations, which seem to encapsulate a microcosm of the whole first semester. Big difference is that I'm now inflicting them upon myself rather than experiencing them as reactions against a series of professors and Bar Review dates....

It's reassuring that both my friends from University of Baltimore and my friends from American University express the same series of emotions...

Jubilant.
Such hard! So Pride! Very Work! Wow!

Terrified. 
 Did those credits transfer? Will I graduate?? Who will hire me??? LOANS???? but, seriously, I have to do this again?


























Exhausted. 
Day 1: super excited, hugging all my friends and repeating "how was your summer" with more cheer than leader in conversation. Day 2: Like dust is in my veins, all over again. Like "summer" were just a figment of imagination.












Zen.
Tend the mind garden; tend the knowledge trees; what's reaped will bloom.











As well as a healthy patina of disbelief that any of the above is true.....