Legal Commentary

Thank you to everyone at PrawfsBlawg for allowing me this month of public musing.  I once again leave humbled by the creative and time demands of regular posting and with deep respect for those who do it not only more frequently but with far greater panache.  I've made it through this month by the skin of my teeth, having overcome a computer meltdown (I end this month with a different computer than when I began it) and a sleep-depriving case of childhood croup (although, thankfully, no cell phones in the loo).

I'll leave with a few thoughts about law school gifts.  As I'm sure others have experienced, upon learning that you are a law professor, people frequently presume a far wider range of expertise than most of us can reasonably claim.  Usually this results in a request to offer a legal opinion on a knotty issue of substantive law on an unfamiliar subject in a jurisdication in which you are not admitted based on a recitation of facts that resembles a game of telephone (my friend says her uncle's friend who is an attorney told her...).  But it also invites more mundane questions.  

For example, I'm periodically asked to suggest a gift for a friend's friend/cousin/nephew/friend-of-a-friend who has recently been accepted to/graduated from law school.  My stock reply is to suggest Black's Law Dictionary as the perfect addition to any law student or newly-admitted attorney's bookshelf.  I've begun to sense, however, that this suggestion, always uninspired, is now not even particularly practical for a generation of e-students who would probably Google, IM a classmate, post on TWEN, and check on-line legal databases before going to the herculean effort of taking a book off the shelf.

So I would be curious to know if others have more inspired and/or practical suggestions about the perfect gift for the newly admitted or newly graduated law student?  (One caveat . . . I have a niggling feeling this might have been written about before on Prawfs and if that is the case, please accept my apologies.  I did run a quick search through the archives but came up only with a highly entertaining post about the perfect gift for law professors -- a Buddha water drawing board.)