Some of you have probably been wondering why the heading of this blog is “Neal and Kelli” even though Kelli is the only one who ever posts anything on it. Well I have included a picture below to demonstrate that I have in fact been busy working hard in my first year of law school despite rumors or fears to the contrary. This is a picture of me holding a stack of legal outlines, which I have created in the last eight months, that is roughly equal to a full ream of paper (single-spaced, printed on one side of the sheet). Topics range from whether sailors should be punished for cannibalizing a fellow sailor when lost at sea to what court(s) has jurisdiction over your personal injury claim when you are in a car accident in Oklahoma, but you are from New York, the other driver is from Arizona, the car is manufactured in Michigan, and the faulty tire causing the accident was manufactured partially in California and partially in Japan. Needless to say, it has been an interesting year. The good news is that I just completed my last final and the first year is over. While it has been hard work as I expected, it has not been nearly as bad as everyone makes it sound when you first begin. I think that Kelli will probably agree with me when I say that it has not been “a dark time in her life” as Elder Dallin H. Oaks said about his wife during the time that he was in law school. It is a lot like being back in high school because you know or recognize everyone in the school, you attend class during much of the day, you go to your locker between classes to change books, and there is a prom in the early spring. The major differences are that you have to work significantly harder, people are surfing the internet and G-chatting during class instead of passing notes (i.e. tilting the grading curve in my favor), and you don’t do quite as many stupid things as you did when you were younger. The bad news is that even though I am done with finals, I must now begin working on the writing and editing competition to be considered for law journals. While this competition does involve some serious work, one of the most trivial but honestly difficult aspects is trying to determine whether a period has been italicized properly in accordance with the Bluebook rules of legal citation. (Go ahead and have someone switch a couple of the periods on a page of type to italics and print it off to see if you can tell the difference. Then call your lawyer so that he can check your work and show you what a “real” legal education is good for.) Now that I have far fewer cases to read for the summer, I am considering trying to catch up with pop culture by reading Twilight and I might even give in to peer pressure and join Facebook (having the ability to look at masses of pictures of people I don’t really know is one sure way to avoid the possibility of boredom). 
