North Maple Rag

I've spent most of the afternoon trying to complete the first draft of the brief I have due for Lawyering next Monday. It's been sort of fun . . . Actually, I'll go so far as to say it's been a lot of fun. I love this kind of writing. I'm not sure it's my favorite kind, but it's definitely comfortable. It reminds me a lot of the writing I did for my Senate job. At least, I'm finding that it has a lot of the same challenges. How can I keep the writing interesting while staying within a rather formal format? How do I bolster my credibility, sincerity and persuasiveness in that format? When is humor appropriate? When is effective? What is the best way of playing on the reader's emotion without sounding schmaltzy? When does humor or emotion detract from the legal argument? Also, at my job, I had to break down and write persuasively about Congressional action (or inaction), so writing the section of my brief about the Congressional intent behind the Indian Child Welfare Act feels like home.

I just retooled my preliminary statement and I think I've maybe gone a bit overboard. I believe it, but I'm not sure I would if I was an unbiased reader. Maybe I need to think about that credibility question a little longer. To be fair, it's not all happiness and sunshine here in brief-writing land. I'm having a hard time finding a way to discuss the importance of the supremacy clause without sounding patronizing and there's this public policy argument that I've been tinkering with too long. I can't decide if it's really cool and something no one else will argue or really stupid and just an excuse for me to research the stuff I enjoy.

In class today, we discussed our upcoming oral arguments. There's an uneven number of people in our section, so I volunteered to do the oral arguments twice. I'm kind of nervous about it, but that's really the point: my public speaking skills are getting too rusty. It's not that I was ever fantastic speaker, but I was relaxed. Last spring, I had to give a brief speech at a Hill event and I was nervous for several days leading up to it. I hate, hate, hate that feeling. So, I'm doing the argument thing twice. Hopefully, I'll be especially good on the second shot.

All in all, I'm probably spending too much time on this project, we're not even graded on it. But, I managed to get by with the bare minimum on the last few projects, so I think this just evens things out. Also, by my estimates, I'll likely get bored with it tomorrow and focus my attention elsewhere.