Shaping up for a Busy Semester
Uni has restarted and it’s looking busy again. I was intent on overloading by a subject this semester, but decided against it. The Great Law Clerkship Application Drive has started where all penultimate year law students in the state, like myself, crazily fill out masses of clerkship applications in the hope of willingly signing away their summer holidays for a piece of corporate law action. All the application paperwork is due in by next Friday. Interview offers will be extended during the rest of August for September, which is interview month. I’ve heard stories of people having to attend in excess of 20 clerkship interviews, so in any event, it’ll be busy for all.
I’m taking an elective called Space Law this semester. That’s space as in outer space. A lot of it is to do with international law (which is an aspect of law I’ve had zero exposure to so far, except for the briefest mention of treaties while looking at the External Affairs power in Constitutional Law). Who owns space? The moon? What’s the deal with putting satellites in orbit? The class size is small, which is excellent, and our lecturer is cool. Ok, I’ll admit, he had me as soon as he divided up the class into Vulcans and Klingons for ease of reference. I’m such a geek. He makes the subject seem quite interesting, which is a must given that the weekly lecture goes for 3.5 hours. His background is also fairly interesting. He worked as a lawyer for about 7 years, switched over to Investment Banking, got to work in just about every major commercial city in the world, and retired at the ripe old age of 41. He now teaches and researches international law as a hobby of sorts.
I started my internship at the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre. Met up with the centre director for an hour, still don’t know what’s going on yet (we’re still waiting for the other intern, Ada, to get back from overseas), but the work they do looks interesting and quite exciting! One of the big events being arranged is an intellectual property conference in November looking at open source (like GNU licensing) and open content (such as the Creative Commons licence you see popping up on blogs everywhere). Have to keep a weekly reflective log of what I’ve done there, so I might as well post it on this site too, as the semester progresses.
The UNSW Law Journal is going to launch three issues by the end of the year. One issue’s ready to go, but it’s going to get hectic to get the remaining two out the door. Ok, enough law.
This Saturday looks like fun. You know The Amazing Race? The Co-op Charity Society at uni has organised a competition based on that idea, to run just within Sydney. They didn’t give many details about what to expect on the day, but there’s going to be over 30 teams of two running around Sydney trying to get challenges completed. There’s a public transport only restriction in place. There’s also a ban on walkie-talkies, but presumably mobile phones are allowed. If time permits, I’ll be sending updates here during the day via my mobile.
I have the opportunity to buy a new 40 gig iPod for under $500. It’s a bargain I think I’m going to have to take up…
10:03pm (GMT +10.00) 
