The ABA Journal's Question of the Week last week was an interesting one for this former orchestra nerd--we're the lesser known companion to the more common band nerd. Mentioning guitarist and actor Steven van Zandt's protest to cutting of arts education funding and a correlation between those with higher incomes and musical inclination, the Journal asked

Did you take music lessons in school? And if so, how did participation in that garage band, glee club or orchestra influence your career and outlook on life?

The answers (scroll past "related stories" to read them) from lawyers with backgrounds ranging from amateur to professional musician are really great. Some talk about how music keeps them sane while dealing with the pressure of the billable hour, and others tell how the lessons they learned as musicians have been directly useful in the practice of law. This answer cracked me up:

Well, this one time, at Baptist School, we learned that all rock music uses “back-masking” and preaches satanism when played backwards. I didn’t heed their warnings though and I turned into a lawyer!

Music teachers love this kind of article for sharing with principals and parents; I just sent a link to my sister!

(Cross-posted to Novalawcity.)

Keeping up with news relating to Second Life is a near impossible feat, but here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the past week or so:

Lawyers Find Real Revenue in Virtual World
Law.com has a great report on lawyers in Second Life, what they're doing there, what they think of virtual practice, their extra-curricular activities in Second Life, and virtual legal systems.

Go Get a (Virtual) Life
Ira Flatow and company at NPR's Science Friday along with callers discuss Second Life. (thanks for the tip to Second Life Insider)

Online Gamers Become Guinea Pigs
Thanks to Betsy McKenzie at Out of the Jungle for pointing to this Boston Globe article about how scientists are using virtual worlds and MMORPGs to study the spread of infectious disease and how people react to it, altruistically and otherwise.

Cornell to Study Business and Oversight in Second Life
Second Life Insider reports that Cornell business professor Robert J. Bloomfield is offering a 1 to 3 credit course for students to study business and regulatory oversight in SL that clearly has some strong law crossover. As the article points out

Second Life is a fertile ground for studying free market business in an unregulated environment - either because regulations do not exist, or the regulations that do exist for bodies claiming to be banks and stock-exchanges are not observed by proprietors - who may be dismissive or ignorant of the applicability of physical world regulations on their virtual businesses.

Script Me!
Finally, for those of us building in Second Life, Script Me! is an amazing tool developed by a computer science professor. Need a custom script? Fill in the form and there it is. Did I say amazing? I meant AMAZING. For me, scripting is the most challenging part of working in SL--I'm all about taking existing scripts and customizing them. Script Me! is going to make that even easier. Many thanks to JJ Drinkwater, esteemed Librarian of Caledon, for sending this link to the Alliance Second Life Google group.

Check out mental_floss's Law School in a Box. Complete with a 96-page book, Heroes of the Courtroom trading cards, "You Be the Judge" quiz cards, a mini-bar exam (I imagine those studying for real bar exams would think that micro or nano would be a better qualifier), and a diploma "with real Latin words."

It sounds like the perfect gift for either entertaining or annoying (you be the judge!) the just-accepted law student or recent grad in your life.

Tip: June issue of the ABA Journal

Because of the ease of saving transcripts for later analysis, I've suspected they are.

Gene Koo of Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society reports that Charles Nesson, the Harvard professor who taught the first law class in a virtual world, is indeed finding that virtual mock trials are useful for that and another reason:

While for regular communication [Second Life-style] chat can sometimes be frustratingly slow, by artificially throttling communication speed, it also forces the mock attorneys to be far more judicious with their words and sharper with their argumentation. Conveniently, text chat also generates its own easy-to-review transcript.

Read the rest of Koo's report at video vidi visum.

If you're interested in the intersection of legal education and technology, and curious about what it's like to attend an event in Second Life, mark your calendar for Tuesday May 22, 12:30-1:30pm Eastern time.

Gene Koo, fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, will be presenting his research "examining how changing practice needs are affecting what, and how, law schools should teach." He'll be live in Cambridge, but the proceedings will also be broadcast live in Second Life. Presumably, the Second Life broadcast will be at Harvard's Berkman Island (use this link to teleport there if you've got a SL account).

If Koo's talk is anything like a previous legal education event hosted by Harvard, Charles Nesson's (un)Common Knowledge: Legal Education in a Networked World panel, expect a lively back-channel conversation among Second Life attendees. I'm looking forward to it.

(Oh, and yes, it will be webcast as well. But where's the fun in that?)

Photo by Monocle.

Today's New York Times opinion section includes an editorial about Law Day that begins with a history of the day, and ends with a resounding rebuke of the Bush administration:

In keeping with tradition, President Bush has issued a proclamation inviting Americans today to "celebrate the Constitution and the laws that protect our rights and liberties." It rings more than a little hollow, though, as he continues to trample on civil liberties in the war on terror, and stands by an attorney general who has politicized the Justice Department to a shocking degree.

The less committed a president is to the law, the more need there is for Law Day, which makes it a holiday whose time has come.

For more material about Law Day, check out the Law Day section of the ABA website.

For a summary of the Josh Wolf mock trial in Second Life, including links to a great video produced by a German juror, trial transcript, and analysis by some of the participants, visit Virtually Blind.

The analysis by the prosecuting team in the course wiki is quite interesting, and includes sections of the trial transcript. It ends with their notes about the importance of presentation, and carefully outfitting their avatars to look like both professionals AND experienced Second Life users, so they wouldn’t be judged by the jury as newbies.

A poem, in honor of the last day of National Poetry Month:

Adjudicated quarrels of mankind,
Brown row on row!--how well these lawyers bind
Their records of dead sin,--as if they feared
The hate might spill and their long shelves be smeared
With slime of human souls,--brown row on row
Span on Philistine span, a greasy show
Of lust and lies and cruelty, dried grime
Streaked from the finger of the beggar,
Time.

--Archibald MacLeish,
"A Library of Law" from Tower of Ivory 46 (1917)
(found in The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations)

Hey, I never promised it would be uplifting!

A variety of news from the virtual world:

• Sculptable prims

Linden Lab is introducing a new feature called sculpted prims. Unlike the current prims, their shapes are determined by the texture applied to them. This development promises more natural looking objects in SL with fewer prims needed to create detailed items with curves. However, it appears that some skill in 3D modeling may be required to create the textures for these prims, which means not everyone will be able to take direct advantage of the feature--we'll be paying vendors.

Still, those model apples and bananas at the link look good enough to eat.

• Fix It, Already

Speaking of Second Life developments, News.com reports on an open letter to Linden Lab from many Second life users requesting that they work on fixes to many of the existing problems--inventory loss, teleport failures, grid stability, and a number of others--before implementing new features.

I'm skeptical about online petitions, but Anne Idler, who has lost major pieces of inventory and come out of a teleport with her hair attached to her behind more times than she cares to count, has signed on.

• Fizzy's Second Life

Fizzy Soderburg is the avatar being used by Seattle University law professor Elizabeth Townsend Gard's first year property class to explore "the connection of modern property to virtual property." Groups of students take turns taking Fizzy on adventures in Second Life, then report back with a screencast. Screencasts posted so far include issues like adverse possession; landlord-tenant issues; real estate and chattel; and marriage, divorce, and kids. Pretty cool!

• International Spaceflight Museum expansion

Finally, Eloise Pasteur reports that the International Spaceflight Museum, my favorite non-library exhibit in Second Life, is expanding with the creation of Spaceport Beta, featuring models of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Model, the space shuttle, and NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building.

I wonder if the VAB will include clouds, which are said to sometimes form in the real VAB? The week-long grand opening festivities begin May 5. Visit the ISM website for more details.

SEAALL Keynote
Public Legal Information: Picture's from Life's Other Side
Friday April 13, 2007

Speaker: Tom Bruce, Research Associate and Director, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

Notes:
[in these notes, LII is short for legal information institutes in general, as opposed to the Cornell Legal Information Institute]

LIIs are preoccupied with statutes and regulations as opposed to law schools, which are obsessed with cases

LIIs do what 19th-century public libraries were supposed to do

showed picture of Metadata license plate, owned by a Cornell librarian

Google as slot machine

problems of educating the public about legal information - there is more focus on public medical info than public legal info

law reviews: "moribund societies for the perfection of footnotes"

web 2.0 issues: balance of authority and participation

Thoughts:
Once again, a presentation where I listened in the moment at the expense of taking extensive notes. I was also interested in Bruce's use of FreeMind (I think) mind-mapping software, which was also used in his and Lori Martin's Institute presentation. A different experience than watching a PowerPoint presentation. In some ways almost MORE distracting, because it was intriguing to see the concepts all mapped out and organized. Much more interesting than PowerPoint, though less flashy, and sometimes difficult to read the text.