My Daily Docket: Snippets of News at U of L Law

A gigantic gelcap of generic DayQuil is the only thing keeping me vertical this morning, so I'm going to try a stream of consciousness blog post with a few items that are floating around in my congested 3L head.

• Bar exam news: some of last year's graduates from U of L Law attended a swearing in ceremony on Friday, following their successful results from the July exam. According to unofficial sources, Louisville posted another year of excellent pass rates. Roughly 91 percent of first-time takers cleared the bar. 
• Student loans: Obama's proposed "pay as you earn" program for educational loans should be front-page news for any current or prospective law student. My debt from U of L will be around $60,000 even after a scholarship and a discount for in-state tuition. That's a lot of coin. But even without Obama's proposal, I am grateful I stayed here instead of going to Indiana or Washington & Lee, two other schools where I was accepted. Both would have meant student loans at least twice as large. 
• Howard Fineman: the well-known political writer for the Huffington Post is visiting campus this week, partly due to his status as a U of L Law grad. He worked several years as a reporter at The Courier-Journal, my former employer, and I'm mulling over questions that I might ask him when I pick him up at the airport this afternoon. The obvious one: with so many journalists fleeing newspapers to pursue law degrees, are you glad you went the other direction?
• The annual Decedents' Ball (see promotional poster from previous year's event, above right) for law students is this Friday. Also, Lawlapalooza (featured in last week's post, below) is tomorrow. 
• I'm working at a will clinic for low-income residents on Thursday, hoping to finish out my required thirty hours of volunteer service before I graduate. Every single hour has been worth it. 
• There are only six class sessions remaining in the semester for most of my courses, and it's incredibly difficult to focus on them when 1) graduation is that much closer, 2) you are fixated on providing legal services to actual clients at an actual law firm with hundreds of thousands of actual dollars on the line, and 3) your head is still full of generic DayQuil. But focus I must. Until next time...