idealawg

Colorado Jazz Workshop performance at Dazzle—July, 2011

I took several clips of the CO Jazz Workshop Saturday PM Combo as they played July 26, at Dazzle in Denver. Click to listen.

• Solo by Paul Collyer
• Solo by Edd Nichols
• CO Jazz Workshop Saturday PM Combo
• Solo by Edd Nichols
• Solo by Michelle Wagner
• Solos by Michelle Wagner and Richard Sierzant
• Solo by Richard Sierzant
• Solo by Edd Nichols
• Solo by Rich Forsberg
• Solo by Frank Rabbio
• Solo by Edd Nichols
• Solo by Rich Forsberg
• CO Jazz Workshop Saturday PM Combo
• Solo by Paul Collyer
• Solo by Edd Nichols

"An Inconvenient Truth: The Need to Educate Emotionally Competent Lawyers"

Abstract:

The dominant presumption within legal education, that we can teach students to “think like lawyers” with a nearly singular focus on training the analytical mind, is a fiction based on a 19th Century understanding of the human brain that is inherently flawed. This fiction has spawned an equally faulty premise that still dominates legal education today – that we can train students to be effective lawyers by virtually ignoring students’ emotions and by marginalizing the development of the emotional competencies. These presumptions impose a significant cost on our students and on the legal profession. By marginalizing the importance of emotional competence, we ill-prepare our students to work effectively with the complex interpersonal legal problems they will encounter in the practice of law. As troubling, by dismissing emotions as irrelevant to legal thinking, we ignore that which has true meaning to students – their emotional compass and values. By doing so, we systematically strip students of what is actually meaningful to them as people and ill-prepare them to develop a professional identity that can guide them in their professional careers.

This article describes four basic domains of emotional competency that are demanded by the practice of law and reflects on some of the costs we incur by continuing to marginalize emotional competency training in the law school curriculum. The article concludes by offering suggestions for incorporating emotional competency training into the law school curriculum. These ideas range from relatively minor shifts in emphasis in doctrinal and lawyering skills classes to the addition of courses focused exclusively on developing the emotional competencies that are required skill-sets in modern legal practice.

Click to read the rest of "An Inconvenient Truth: The Need to Educate Emotionally Competent Lawyers" (SSRN).

R.I.P. Jeanne Ames, a pioneer in family mediation

When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was fortunate to meet Jeanne Ames on a number of occasions. She was an integral part of the history of divorce and custody mediation, and cared deeply about the field. I learned of her death when I saw her obituary this evening. Excerpt:

Jeanne T. Ames
February 3, 1926 – July 8, 2011

San Francisco is just a little less bright and has just a little less sparkle. Jeanne Toner Ames was a 4th generation San Franciscan with deep roots in San Francisco history. ...

...

In 2002, Jeanne eloped with Sam Kagel. Sam, a nationally recognized labor arbitrator and mediator, and Jeanne were companions for over 30 years before tying the knot at Sam's Grill, a San Francisco landmark. After a martini, their good friend Judge Isabella Horton Grant married them in booth # 4. Jeanne was 75 and Sam 93. They were the loves of each other's lives.

During her long career in San Francisco, Jeanne was the Director of the Bureau of Family Relations and both a counselor and the Director of Family Court Services. In the 1970's, she set about helping to change how the courts dealt with families enduring the stress of separation and divorce. As always, Jeanne took action. With a nod to Sam, Jeanne recognized that court trials over custody represented a failure of process, and that mediation could help with the transition to better, healthier, new family structures. When then Judge Donald B. King (now Justice, Ret.) took the Domestic Relations bench, they joined forces to make

Why I find some good writing so boring: Nothing's happening! No story, no question answered

Last week a big puzzle was solved. I figured out why reading some perfectly well-crafted writing can be such a nap-inducing chore. And why reading the work of some less-than-skilled writers can be so compelling, so intriguing, so rewarding.

A large clue to my taste in reading was provided by Adair Lara in her book Naked, Drunk, and Writing: Shed Your Inhibitions and Craft a Compelling Memoir or Personal Essay.

Adair wrote:

...Knowing that you will be writing about change helps you choose which of your stories will have meaning for others.

Some life events feel huge, but do not necessarily change you. You and your mother haven’t spoken in six months. You got fired, you got dumped, you got cancer, or you got treated unfairly. These stories affect you deeply, and feel as if they have meaning for that reason. But many upsetting events come up under the heading of Shit Happens. You can lose a lot of time trying to write about them. Practically everybody who gets fired sits down to write a book about it — but what’s the story? Getting fired makes you mad, but that’s not change. The change may be in what happens next: after you were fired, you realize you never meant to spend your life cooped up in an office anyway, and go to Guatemala to rescue street children.

...

If there’s no catharsis, no growth, no change involved, then you’re left with an anecdote — a part of some larger whole — rather than a self-contained essay or story. Like that of most women, my life has been full of hilarious-in-hindsight incidents. But alas, my accordion body, my landfill approach to housekeeping, my bizarre divorce, my cradle-robbing second marriage, my unseemly yearning to become a born-again trust fund baby and the myriad instances in which my slow-to-rehabilitate smart mouth have gotten me into trouble, are just not going to write. Why? Because I’ve happily, gloriously learned nothing from these romps.

I am not drawn to reading to the end of a piece when nothing is happening, or when neither I nor the author are learning. My lack of interest applies not only to essays and memoir, but other non-fiction, too—even on complex topics such as neuroscience or spirituality.

People changed and learned in two of the books I have appreciated most over the past few years; both were non-fiction. This pair of books were not filled with the gratuitous, vanilla, see-my-method-works tales that we

Life after law: From homicide prosecutor to yogi

From memory, I would guess that the two most popular roles lawyers I've featured in my Life After Law posts have chosen to pursue have been author and yogi. Today here's another one in the yogi column.

From "Former homicide prosecutor now yoga guru for combat vets" (Orlando Sentinel).

During his 22 years as a Broward County prosecutor, David Frankel tried cases so saturated in mayhem and madness they sounded like horror fiction. The case of the severed head. Death by acid bath. The mutilation of the gurgling prostitute.

But the cases were real.

Outside the courtroom, Frankel struggled to balance the stress of trial work and the suffering of the crime victims he represented by studying Hindu philosophy and practicing theyoga he learned years ago from his grandmother.

Eventually, however, that balance was lost. "I felt I had reached the peak of what I was doing in law, but I didn't sleep well," Frankel said. " It was swallowing me whole. I had to make a change."

Click to read the rest of "Former homicide prosecutor now yoga guru for combat vets."

So you think zombies are just strange characters in some weird books and films?

Then watch this panel on zombies from Comic-Con 2011. The articulate panelists (which include two neuroscientists) talk about current culture, politics, and science.

I recommend starting with this section of the panel video. Then part 1, part 2, and part 4.

Maybe after you watch, you will see why I am a zombie fan. Let me know.

Image credit: Mail Online.

Come hear Marion Downs, who is 97 years old, speak on living

On September 13, in Denver, have lunch and listen to Marion Downs give a talk titled "Shut Up and Live...at Age 97!" Click to read more about her book Shut Up and Live! (You Know How), which is also available at the Denver Public Library.

Here's the announcement of her talk:

YOU ARE INVITED TO A VERY SPECIAL EVENT

THE 13TH COLORADO FEMINIST LUNCHEON  
 in our fourth year

Tuesday, September 13, 2011
 11:30 am-1:30 pm
at the
Burnsley-All Suite Hotel
1000 Grant Street, Denver, Colorado 80203
303-830-1000

GUEST SPEAKER

 MARION  DOWNS

presenting

    SHUT UP AND LIVE…..at Age 97!

Have you ever met a twice widowed woman over age 97 who has a busy, active relationship with a life partner? And, who won the national over 90 tennis championship in 2006? And, who sky-dived on her 90th birthday? And, who first skied at age 50 and finished her first triathlon at age 89?

Well, you have the rare opportunity to meet Marion Downs, who has done all those things and more, at the September 13th Feminist Luncheon!

Marion is the author of Shut Up and Live! She has also published almost 100 articles, co-authored the

 

"Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas"

News release (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute):

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. “In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks.”

The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled “Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities.”

An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not

Well-known bankruptcy lawyer also has meditation ministry

According to a quote in an article at Bloomberg, "Ken Klee is literally a walking legislative history of bankruptcy." The article's author also mentions Klee's "ministry ... that incorporates yoga and other meditation-related practices."

Read more about Klee's ministry at YogaHub. Excerpt:

Ken Klee is a well-known lawyer and teacher who, beginning in 1997, has studied and practiced meditation, prayer, and energy healing techniques and modalities including but not limited to Seven Yoga™, Pranic healing, DNA healing, Theta healing, Norri healing, The Radiance Technique™, Pulsors, Beyonder, Tree of Life Healing, Sedona Method, N.E.T., Xiang Gong, and Crystal layouts.

I have been away from Santa Fe for many years so know nothing about most of the techniques in his list. Looking at that bio taken together with Professor Klee's page at UCLA School of Law, I can say that he sounds like one unusual attorney.

 

In new column by law student, she advises "Entering law school with a sense of competition is a massive strategic error"

Lauren Burdock, soon to enter her second year at Osgoode Hall Law School, will be writing a column for Canadian Lawyer Magazine. In her first contribution, she writes:

If you were to ask 30 different law students why they were pursuing careers in law, you’d likely get 30 different answers. This of course, despite the fact all of our personal statements said we wanted to “save the world.” Yes, some, including myself, do naively hope to leave a lasting impact on the lives of our future clients. Others want to revolutionize business, constitutional, employment, and even tax law! And some among us are pursuing legal careers for the sole purpose of ensuring personal financial security. Regardless of what brings students into the law library for late night study sessions, there is one piece of advice I feel applies to all and that is to cherish and soak up every opportunity for growth and learning.

She also says: