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BarBri's over

Next step, bar exam. I'm running into an unexpected impediment to studying, though: this *!@#$$%^ dog next door to our townhouse, that starts barking incessantly every morning around 7:30 and won't shut up. Wow, it's annoying - and really hard to shut out. Earplugs aren't helping at all. In the neighborhood we're in, I'm not really inclined to try knocking on the neighbor's door, either. During my first summer in D.C., I once had to take a final exam with jackhammers going on the roof above us in the classroom building at GWU, but even that wasn't too bad since a steadier sound like that can kind of fade into the background. But not barking. I may have to retreat to a library or Panera someplace.

The last few days of class went well enough. The lecturer for Texas wills, trusts, guardianships, community property and family law (he did all of them!) was pretty good, although he never explained who the "Hobie Gates" of his hypotheticals was. (He said it would come to us in a revelation someday.) One thing that struck me during family law, as it did during the Florida segments a few years ago and would with any other state too, is how sad it really can be. Aside from the much more brief body of law dealing with marriage or adoption, the bulk of this law deals with divorce and its related subjects (spousal maintenance, child support, child custody, etc.). Once you get divorced and especially if you have kids, the government thereafter gets to be involved in your life indefinitely, weighing the "best interests of the child" standard, making social services visits, dividing time between parents, evaluating parenting skills, sometimes terminating parental rights, withholding money from paychecks, and holding hearings upon various life events (new spouse, new kids, new cohabitations, underemployment) to adjust the withholdings. And throughout, the kids get shuffled back and forth between houses ("between two worlds," as Elizabeth Marquardt puts it). The lecturer said you can always tell when it's visitation weekend in Texas (first, third, and fifth weekends of the month I believe), because the Southwest terminals are full of kids travelling solo. How sad is that? No matter how common divorce may be overall, it's still a tragedy for most of the individual kids who have to go through it. (Not to mention the 1/3 of American kids who are born out of marriage in the first place, who get the often tougher situation right from the beginning!)

Full post as published by Irish Law on February 15, 2008 (boomark / email).