I spent Monday at William & Mary Law. It was a great trip. William & Mary is literally right next door to Colonial Williamburg in the southeastern part of Virginia. It’s about 150 miles from where I am now - a couple of hours down I-95 to Richmond and then east on I-64 to Williamsburg. Depending on the traffic around DC and Richmond, about 2.5-3 hours of driving. I drove down Sunday afternoon and stayed overnight, since I needed to be at the law school at 9AM on Monday. I left early so I could get there when it was still light out and do the drive over to the law school so I’d know where I needed to go. The upside was that I didn’t have to watch the Washington Suckskins embarrass themselves again.

There were four of us for the tour on Monday. Two were clearly undergrads there with their parents. One was an active duty Army Special Forces guy on a break between deployments and doing law-school investigations for when he gets out in 2 years; he’s been in 8 years, so he’s probably early 30s. I was clearly the oldest. And the only one who wore a suit & tie. I felt overdressed. But it’s better to be overdressed than underdressed for stuff like this, in my opinion.

The tour was done by a 3rd year student. It was interesting to get a student’s perspective on the school. She was fairly candid. One thing I’ve noticed is the extent to which all the applications require you to disclose information about past academic & legal “indiscretions”, and the amount of space dedicated to school’s honor codes. She made a point about it on the tour. When I did my undergrad, cheating was incredibly rare, and while people got put on academic probation for crappy grades, there was very little that one could have considered an “honor code” issue. Seems like it’s become quite prevalent in the last couple of decades. Any of you who’ve been in school more recently than me have any thoughts on this? Is it the ease of access through the InterWebs? A cultural thing?

We sat in on a first year Civil Procedures class. I noticed that only about half the students were using laptops to take notes; the rest were doing it the old fashioned way with pen and paper. When I did my MBA a few years ago, we all had laptops - it was a requirement. I kinda figured it would be this way everywhere these days. From my experience, having a web-connected PC in class can be a huge distraction; a lot of people browse the web, play online poker, etc (yes, I did, during Accounting). This professor used a modest form of the Socratic Method in between reviewing specific rules - kind of a Paper Chase-lite. My conception of law school was formed by the Paper Chase movie and TV series a long time ago; I live in fear of Prof. Kingsfield smile

Then I had an interview with one of the admissions deans. Hard to tell how that went. My scores are right in the middle of the bands from William & Mary’s 2008 admissions season. We talked about a lot of the other stuff that goes into admissions - my background and professional experience, desired course of study, diversity of the student population, etc. He told me that I put a lot more thought into where I wanted to go and why - making sure the program and culture fit for me - than a lot of younger students do; they concentrate more on ranking and prestige and don’t necessarily do the work to make sure the school is a good fit.

I finished up my day with meetings with staff of the two research centers that made William & Mary really stand out for me - the Center for Legal & Court Technology and the Institute for Bill of Rights Law. I got a sense that what I did - reaching out to these centers to learn about them and meet with them during the application process - was fairly uncommon. I was pretty thrilled with both of them; I’d love to work with either or both. I learned that the CLCT is actually directly involved in the Military Commissions work - they helped set up the courtrooms & technology facilities, and do training for the legal and administrative staff on both sides. They are strictly neutral - any question asked by one side and answered by CLCT is disclosed to the other side. The see their role as facilitators, not participants. Needless to say, given that The VO started from common ground the three of us found with the DTA & MCA debates last year, this piqued my interest.

In addition to their research and the symposia they put on, the IBRL has a student division that works with school districts in the Hampton Roads area to teach about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I’m pretty sure I’d get involved with this, as well as competing to get on the staff of the Bill of Rights Journal, one of the journals published by the law school student body.

All in all, this trip confirmed for me that William & Mary is my top choice; if I don’t get in, I’ll be pretty upset. The school is a really good fit for me, academically and culturally. Good programs in both technology & IP law as well as Constitutional Law, and the opportunity to decide to pursue a joint degree with a a Master of Public Policy at the main university (W&M lets you apply for their dual-degree programs during your first year of law, rather than deciding on both up front as many schools do). The size and culture are comparable to Washington University where I did my undergrad, and appeals to me for the same reasons - medium sized school with enough diversity to let you explore, but small enough to not be “just a number”. It’s a bit more rural than WashU (which is right on the outskirts of St. Louis), but I prefer the suburbs anyhow. Housing & logistics might be a pain, depending on my wife’s employment situation. It’s close enough to make weekend visits (driving or taking Amtrak) reasonable, but that would hopefully be temporary. We’d almost certainly want to keep our house here even if we rent down there - most likely my career will have me back up in the DC area, and by the time I’m done with law school, there will be a Metro stop about 3/4 of a mile from my house, making getting downtown all that much more convenient.

Hurry up and wait. Gah.

On an unrelated note, I observed something interesting about VA’s upcoming gubernatorial race between the GOP candidate, Bob McDonnell, and the Democratic candidate, Creigh Deeds:

  • Around where I am, you see a good mix of campaign signs. It varies by neighborhood, I think. Inside the beltway and outside the beltway, around the parts of Fairfax, Arlington and Loudon counties I routinely drive in, I’m not sure you could make a prediction based on the signs.
  • Around Richmond (the state capitol), I saw nothing but Bob McDonnell signs. Not a single Creigh Deeds sign. Now, this was only around the outskirts of the city, taking the I-295 bypass from I-95 to I-64, but it was clearly in the GOP’s favor
  • Around Williamsburg, both around the University and the touristy areas (Colonial Williamsburg, Busch Gardens, roads off to Jamestown, etc), it was solidly Creigh Deeds territory. I saw one solitary corner with Bob McDonnell signs, but everything else I saw in the area was for Deeds

I have no idea what that means. Most polls seem to have McDonnell with an 8-10% lead with Deeds only dominating polls in Northern VA. I’ll be interested in seeing how county-by-county polling turns out and if there’s any correlation to my unscientific campaign-sign-density analysis on my drive.