I started my continuing legal education (CLE) courses Monday. They are necessary to stay in good standing with the bar.
Why did I do this? I'm retired. On the same day I started I turned down another court-appointed case. Last week I turned down a retention. I haven't taken any new cases in over two years. I am really, most sincerely retired.
So why? I wavered and vacillated all of 2022. Do I, don't I? Week before last I had a conversation with myself and the conversation ended with, "I'm not going to re-certify." I then got a funny feeling in my chest, not a panic, nor a near-panic, but the feeling you get when something bad happens. The feeling was that this was the end, that my life was over, that I was dead but still alive. I ran this feeling by my son, who I use to interpret the meaning of these hard-to-interpret feelings. "It only costs me $99 I said," of the online courses. "How long does the certification last?," he asked. "Five years." "So you'd be 72"..."Hmm, I'd do it dad. You never know." That decided it and I ordered the tapes.
I got up Monday morning and like Schopenhauer put on my scholar's garb and sat down for the first lecture. I was peeved to discover that in the last five years the bar had doubled the length of the lectures--but with no additional credit. I needed 33 credits, in the past those corresponded pretty closely to the number of hours involved in watching the lectures. Now it was double that. Peeved.
I started watching and listening to the first lecture, on Immigration Law, and had an epiphany: I like the law. I may not want to practice it anymore but I still liked thinking like a lawyer. The lecture reminded me of what I loved about the law: its intellectual rigor, the brain-benders, the mental heavy-lifting required to see a distinction between your case and adverse precedent and then to make a cogent, sometimes persuasive, argument from it. The two lecturers were Pennsylvanians, one a graduate of Temple Law, as am I, and I wrote them and the course a positive review. So I finished one and I had enjoyed it. Got a measly 2 credits for 90 minutes of watching/listening but okay.
Next in the queue was Animal Law. What? Since when? TWO HOURS on animal law. Only 2.5 credits. I started watching. I was embarrassed for the legal profession that there was such a thing as Animal Law and exasperated that there was a section of the bar, started at the prompting of this lecturer, on Animal Law, and that she had leveraged this absurd niche into a teaching gig at a Florida law school. "I had a client who got a greyhound from a rescue shelter. Another dog was on a porch but unleashed and tore after my client's greyhound and mauled it. My client drove his dog to the emergency veterinary hospital, his car was soaked in the greyhound's blood, and unfortunately the greyhound died. The question was: What were my client's damages? Animals are considered property, chattel, so you can't get pain and suffering so what was the value of a dog rescued from a shelter and the damage to the car from the greyhound's blood and the hospital bills?"
"Another big part of my practice is animal custody cases. I have a case where a boyfriend and girlfriend broke up and the question was who gets the dog who they adopted as a couple." Ma'am, did you go to law school to handle dog custody cases? Hit pause. I couldn't take anymore of it without a long break. Gave that course a poor review.
So I don't miss the parts of the legal profession that are just mind-numbing and embarrassing.
