7 Law-Related Internships

Whether you intern at home, or move to another city, getting work experience for the summer can be great fun. Here are 7 of thousands of law-related internships you can pursue in 2011:

1. Independent Diplomat Internship
2. Public Policy Internship
3. Protect Asylum Seekers Internship
4. Labor and Housing Internship
5. Marketing and Communications Internship
6. Research Assistant
7. GLBT Rights Internship

Disney Characters Explain Copyright

Why can a professor copy an article for class, but copying an mp3 is illegal? Did Weird Al Yankovich need Chamillionaire‘s permission to record “White and Nerdy“? The law guiding these situations is a part of copyright law which makes some unauthorized uses legal. Here is it explained, by Disney* characters:

*Disney is famously problematic when it comes to copyright.

5 Lawyer Graphs

These are all from the indomitable GraphJam.

 

Crimes in Lawrence, KS by year (1999 - 2006), Many Eyes

see more Funny Graphs

see more Funny Graphs

3 Pittsburgh Non-Profits with Law-Related Missions

Volunteering and interning can be great ways to watch practicing attorneys in action, determine in which field you would like to work, and do real good for real people who need your skills. Here are three places where you can start volunteering next semester:

• Confere Inservitus: human trafficking / out-reach, blogging, start-up work.
• Planned Parenthood of Western PA: sexual health, women’s rights, reproductive rights / escorting, filing, outreach.
• Pittsburgh Filmakers: art, film, copyright / display creation, outreach, writing, teaching.

Got suggestions? Type ‘em into that there comments box.

Google Talks About the Challenges of Maintaining Copyright Online

The scale of content production online is astounding: 1 trillion links, more than a day of video uploaded every hour, all of it copyrighted. If you were copyright queen3 for a day, how would you regulate the internet?

Quick Source for Logic Puzzles/Pain

Unless you’ve been blessed by the LSAT gods, you probably find the logic puzzels on the test a bit of a trial. Designing corsages with 4 types of flowers and a very picky client is tough enough for a florist–it’s ugly for a poor wanna-be law student trying to get through the morning.

I wish I could bless you and let you through the test without doing any work–but until I get said powers, here are some practice logic games to get started on.

Lawyers and Vote Fraud

Being a lawyer is more than a day job–it is a qualification for a wide range of other public-service-related jobs. For example, being an election observer.

“The Bootcamp of Universities”

Right before his excellent presentation last week, alumnus Fred Crawford spoke with me briefly about how he explains graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a major in Humanities.

Mr Crawford said Carnegie Mellon was the “bootcamp of universities” and that CMU is rigorous enough in any discipline to prepare graduates for their next steps. For more on Mr Crawford’s talk, please see Ema’s insightful post.

Photo by mikeyexists, from flickr, licensed under Creative Commons

5 Law Blogs You Should Know

by inju on flickr, licensed through Creative Commons.

Here at the CMU Pre-Law society we don’t endorse particularly law schools, application strategies, or LSAT prep companies–but we do like to give you the occasional cultural resource. Not all lawyers read these, and you probably won’t enjoy all of them, but here are 5 law blogs we think you should know about:

1. The Volokh Conspiracy. The facts: written by law professors. The problem: badly formatted and dense at times. The fun: extreme law geekiery.
2. Balkinization. The facts: hosted by a Constitutional Law professor at Yale. The problem: if you’re not interested in torture and erudite comments, this might be too much. The fun: amazing cross-posts.
3. Groklaw. The facts: written by journalists interested in Free and Open Source Software. The problem: if you don’t know what FOSS is, you might get confused here. The fun: dramatic writing about intellectual property minutiae.
4. SCOTUSblog. The facts: the Supreme Court of the United States and nothing but. The problem: much of the court’s docket may not be to everyone’s taste. The fun: when the cases are to my taste.
5. Above the Law. The facts: written by folks with law degrees. The problem: if SCOTUSblog is your speed, this gossip-hub will give you whip-lash. The fun: it’s the Desperate Housewives of New Jersey of legal blogs.

Did I miss someone you love? Leave a complain in the comments.

A Tale of Two Trends

Two legally-minded friends showed me these opposing graphs from law blog Balkinization:

I knew times were tough when Duke started paying its unemployed graduates for public interest work to boost their numbers, this was still shocking. While the bottom graph is of “legal employees,” not all of whom have or need law degrees, they generally tell a very sad story. Personally, it makes me question one more time if I am completely prepared for the financial and emotional costs of law school, and committed to the profession as a whole.

What did these make you feel?