By Kathleen Pearson

So you made it through law school finals and headed home for the holidays.  Congratulations!  The only problem now is that your CSO (and everyone else for that matter) keeps telling you that you need to “network.”  Whether you have a job lined up or not, that word keeps buzzing around like an annoying gnat.  Don’t they know you are wiped out and the mere thought of having to do something else is going to send you right over to the edge?? 

“Networking” has become one of those insidious corporate buzz words that seems to be the panacea of all problems anyone might ever face. Because it has an official name, it seems unattainable by anyone that is not a perfect conversationalist or social butterfly. The word itself now seems filled with an undercurrent of wanting to get something from the other person – i.e. a job.  That’s a lot of pressure for both you and the other person!

Relax.  The holidays should not be filled with even more pressure and tasks.  It should be about having fun, reconnecting with old friends and family, and making new connections with interesting people.  Instead of focusing on networking, focus on connecting.

Just in case you have forgotten, here is a quick reminder of how to connect with others and have fun over the holidays:

1. Go to a holiday party with friends and family. 
2. Talk about your experiences in law school with friends and family
3. Ask your friends and family what they have been up to
4. Meet new people at the party and ask them about their interests
5. Tell the new people about yourself and your interests
6. Promise to keep in touch with the people you just talked to!

By James Bowden

The Occupy Wall Street movement looks like it is waning, or at least hibernating for the winter. In New York, Zuccoti Park has been cleared out. The Occupy LA, Occupy Philadelphia, and Occupy Oakland encampments are gone. But if the movement is in retreat, no one told the Occupy Nashville folks camping out on Legislative Plaza, right outside my office doors. Winter is settling in, and over the last week we’ve had torrential rains and freezing temperatures, but they are still out there every morning when I get to work. Occupy Nashville is holding tight to their spot on Legislative Plaza after several interesting legal twists and turns. Their tenacity may make them a unique outfit within their movement.

Tents sprang up at the foot of the Tennessee State Capital early in October. Later that month, reports of all sorts of not-entirely-legal-or-appropriate behavior led Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam to impose a curfew on Legislative Plaza from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. The curfew was announced the afternoon of October 27^th. The Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) arrested protesters early in the morning of October 28^th for violating the curfew.

I think it is an understatement to say that it didn’t go so well for the Governor and the THP. A Magistrate Judge first refused to hear the charges against the protesters on the grounds that the protesters were not given sufficient notice of the curfew, and released them for lack of probable cause. The THP tried to arrest protesters again at about midnight on October 28^th; this time, Metro Night Court Judge Tom Nelson issued an epic benchslap – unable to identify any legal authority for the curfew, he again found no probable cause for their arrest and ordered all arrested protesters released. Release on a finding of no probable cause at arraignment is a very, very rare occurrence. Two in a row? Probably a record. To add insult to injury, the THP was called out for a less-than-covert attempt at infiltrating the encampment. Soon after the arrests, U.S. District Court Judge Aleta Trauger issued an injunction against enforcement of the curfew. A decision isn’t expected until February at the earliest, but I expect it to be well read and well reported when it arrives.

So, the Occupy Nashville protesters are still there. I went down and walked around Legislative Plaza after work for a few minutes last night. It is a surprisingly well organized little encampment, with a mess tent, a first aid tent, a front office, and even a “social media” tent. The protesters are perfectly friendly, and happy to talk to anyone who will listen. I hope they stay warm and safe, have happy holidays, and are ready for their hearing next year.

By James Bowden

The United States’ political system is controlled by two major political parties, one generally politically liberal and one generally politically conservative. That is the way we think of the political policy-making process: the left and the right fight for enactment of their policies and, ever so rarely, compromise. Query: what if the actual conflict implicit in the U.S. political and policy-making process wasn’t the conflict between right or left, or rural versus urban, or racial, or any of the main dichotomies that we use to try to make sense of policy making. Here’s the surprise: the main conflict is really generational. Presented in customary bullet-point format for your perusal:

• The Wealth Gap. Forget the 1% versus the 99%. Even the fact that the top 1% of wage earners own more of the nation’s financial wealth than the bottom 50%, or that in 2007 the top 1% of all income earners in the U.S. made 23.5% of all income, more than the entire bottom 50%. The starkest statistic is the difference between the change in wealth of the old and the new generations over the past several decades. Since 1984, older people have seen a 42% increase in their net wealth while their younger counterparts have experienced a 68% decrease. I sure hope they aren’t planning to take it all with them. 
• Debt and Taxes. For the past decade, tax increases have been the most-hated villain in Washington. Really, it goes back further than that. Since 1986, maximum marginal tax rates have been historically low, particularly compared to what the Greatest Generation paid. Over the same period, the U.S. debt has increased seven fold. The average baby boomer was between 22 and 40 in 1986; their prime income earning years have overlapped with an uninterrupted period of historically low taxation, over which period public debt exploded. Now the baby boomers are cashing out – the first of the baby boomers became eligible for Medicare and Social Security in 2011. They are retiring, and won’t be paying in anymore. Guess who picks up the tab by default? 
• The Fiscal Battle. We saw a battle over raising the debt ceiling this summer, and are facing sequestration if the “supercommittee” that resulted from the compromise fails to agree on cuts to federal spending in excess of $1 trillion. What is on the chopping block? The big losers are defense (which is a large employer of younger workers), education (which is supposed to provide the younger generation with opportunities), and spending on programs designed to reduce unemployment (which, as discussed below, effects the younger generation inordinately). What are the sacred cows? The spending items that are bringing the committee to loggerheads are entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare (which benefit the older generation effectively exclusively) and the possibility of raising taxes (which, as discussed above, has the effect of benefiting the older generation). 
• The Cost of Success. The saying goes that there are two kinds of good debt – debt the incurrence of which produces a positive net change in wealth. One is a mortgage and the other is student debt. The saying is getting pretty difficult to stand behind these days. Grad PLUS loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy and guaranteed by the most credit-worthy institution in the world – the full faith and credit of the United States of America. They carry an interest rate of 8.5%. The interest rate on the last car I bought was 7.1%. That means that in 2007 a non-dischargeable, absolutely guaranteed debt carried an interest rate 140 basis points higher that a dischargeable loan secured by a depreciating asset which was likely underwater the moment it rolled off the car lot. Since then, it has gotten worse – most interest rates have dipped over the past few years, but student loan rates are fixed. A person’s cost of capital for a fancy new car is lower than for an education, and the average indebtedness of a law school grad is $100,000, which buys a pretty fancy car. Or two. Or three. That is insanity. 
• The Tyranny of High Expectations. Just like every generation [allegedly] works to pass a better world on to their children, each generation is expected to make good use of the benefits they receive from the generation that went before them. I never thought I would do this, but I am going to paraphrase Cracked.com: members of the young generation were told they needed to go to school and work hard so they didn’t have to flip burgers. Now that the younger generation has gone to school and worked hard, the economy is feeble, the impact of unemployment inordinately falls on them (young adults age 20-24 have an unemployment rate of 14% compared to 9% for the population overall and 7% for people over 55), and they are being criticized as entitled for … you guessed it: not wanting to flip burgers.

By  James Bowden

Pop Quiz: does a hotel blatantly oppress an individual or a group’s right to freedom of speech by canceling a contract with an anti-Islamic organization seeking to hold a conference on the basis that it may cause interruptions to the hotel’s business? 

a)       No.

b)       Yes

c)       Both A and B

d)       Wait, what? 

If you went to law school and you answered B or C, you should probably seek a refund of your tuition money. Fact: private persons cannot violate the First Amendment guaranty of freedom of speech. The restriction only applies to state actors. But thank you for playing.

By James Bowden

Fellow blogger and occupant of the lawyerly Nirvana that is in-house counselhood Mark Herrmann recently wrote a blog post carried by Above The Law noting, in essence: (i) young attorneys don’t have great attention to detail and fail to sweat the small stuff, and (ii) more experienced attorneys obsess over details and are bothered by younger attorneys’ failure to do so, because they have all been driven insane. It is probably a fair criticism, though one that I think begs a response, in bullet-points (because I’ve been told that in-house people love bullet points):