veiled4allah

random notes about school

Grades came out for spring quarter. I got a 4.0 grade point average. I've gotten a 4.0 in all of my classes but one; in that class the highest grade the instructor gave was about a 3.6, which I got. Summer quarter starts on Monday. I'll be taking Principles of Microeconomics and doing my internship. With the class, commute time, and the internship, I'll busy pretty much full-time Monday through Thursday so posting to the blog will probably be relatively light on those days. I went to purchase my textbooks today only to discover that the student services building had closed at 1 p.m. What on earth possessed them to close so early the Friday before classes start? I wasn't the only frustrated student gaping at the locked-up building. However, the building will be open for four hours tomorrow so I'm going to try again to get my books, inshallah. Economics isn't a class I need to take for my paralegal certificate, but I've taken all of those and I need to have a full-time credit load for my financial aid, so I decided to take economics. It's a subject I don't know a lot about and feel that I ought to, so that I can better understand what's going on.

free at last

At least for the moment. I completed the last of my final exams today and am done with spring quarter. Summer quarter starts on June 23 so I have about a week and a half off then it's back to the grind :p

end of quarter crush

Sorry for the relatively light posting the last couple of days. I have now finished writing up a 14-page term paper and compeleted a take-home final exam for one of my classes. I still have three final exams next week, but inshallah I should have a bit more time to devote to posting to the blog.

fun at the library

One of the things I've come to love about being a college student is that I have unlimited free access on campus to Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. Academic Universe is a stripped-down version of Lexis. It doesn't have all the fancy features that Lexis does, but it does give me access to all the cases, which is what's most important. I spent several hours between classes today researching a particular question of how American courts have dealt with Muslim family law. The fruit of my efforts is a new series of posts at The Niqabi Paralegal about Muslim marriage contracts and the dower. While I was at it, I also found some interesting law journal articles written by Muslims dealing with such topics as whether imams (Muslim prayer leaders) should have a clergy-pentitent privilege and how Muslims and other religious people can work as public defenders. I love research. That's why I'm going into the legal field.

back to school

Spring quarter started today and I had three of the four classes that I've signed up for. These are Legal Investigation, Civil Rights Law, and Torts. The Legal Investigation class sounds like it'll be very interesting. The instructor is the head of the investigation division of the Seattle public defender's office. Civil Rights should be a very timely class. We're getting started by looking at freedom of expression. The first reading assignment dealt largely with the question of dissent during times of war and national crisis. Timely indeed. And torts is a field I've wanted to learn more about. Tomorrow I have Civil Rights Law again plus my fourth class, Ethics.

in other news

Grades for winter quarter are out. I'm pleased to report that my GPA for the quarter was 3.83. I got 4.0 in two classes and 3.5 in the tough Legal Writing class (on most assignments, 3.5 was about the highest grade he gave!) I'm on spring break this week and the new quarter will start next week. I won't have as much time to blog then but hopefully will be able to keep getting up one or two good posts a day, inshallah. Thank you to everybody who's visiting and commenting. That's what makes blogging worthwhile. I know we won't always agree but I hope that we can each learn something from the other. :)

winter quarter nears an end

Today was the last day of classes for winter quarter for me. I turned in my last assignment and now just have two finals, which will be next week. It's been a very long day, not because I had a lot to do, but for the opposite reason. All my classes have been getting out early, sometimes a lot early, but I have to remain on campus for my next class, and have a lot of spare time to fill. I'm just glad it's over and that soon I'll be at home and can be :sleeping: It was kind of funny in my last class because we were all dead tired, even the instructor. We were doing a review for the final and these long silences kept falling in which everybody was trying to think what to move to next. LOL.

almost through with winter quarter

It's been a pretty busy week. I had a paper and a term project due this week. Al-hamdulillah, both are done and turned in now. The quarter is coming to an end. Just one more week of classes and then finals week. Right now it looks like I'm getting a 4.0 in Introduction to Law and Civil Procedures II, and about a 3.3 in Legal Writing (I posted about this class before, the instructor is a very tough grader). I will be so glad when this quarter is over. My schedule has just been grueling. Next quarter, it looks to be much better, inshallah.

day in court (as the audience)

Today I went to the county courthouse to observe part of a trial for a class assignment. I got to see the beginning of the plaintiff's case for a legal malpractice suit. It turned out to be quite interesting in a way. The plaintiff is the president of a company which, more than ten years ago, started a lawsuit against another company that he felt was trying to run him out of business. Since then he has gone through at least half a dozen law firms, half of which he ended up suing because he feels that they broke their contracts with him. The case I watched is merely the latest in this long series of disputes. The plaintiff himself was called to the stand as the first witness and I watched part of his testimony. The attorney did a pretty good job of trying to present his client in a good light, I thought. He knows that the jury is likely to think the plaintiff is a serial litigator and he worked hard to try and counteract this impression. I'd have to hear the defense's case to have a better idea what the truth is, of course. The attorney also did a good job of inviting the plaintiff to explain the litigation process to the jury. I knew what it was about - but I wouldn't have before taking my paralegal classes. All in all, it was quite interesting and I had a good time.

$700 for college

I got great news today. The college's Worker Retraining Fund will be paying my tuition for spring quarter! That's a $700 value. It sounds like they may have money available for summer quarter too, inshallah.

I also registered for my spring quarter classes today. Worker Retraining people get to register a day before general registration opens, so I was finally able to get into all of the classes I wanted, al-hamdulillah. The classes I'll be taking next quarter are:

• Ethics


• Torts


• Civil Rights Law


• Legal Investigation

:invasion: