I was thinking today about the lawyers we've had here on the board over the years (and still have).
I think I would've liked studying law. I don't know that I would've liked being a lawyer, but just learning the finer points of it and discussing it in an academic environment, I mean.
I used to work a job for a number of years that required a lot of knowledge of oil and gas law (as pertains to the state of Texas, anyway) and probate law. It was there that I learned to wade through court cases, though in my case it was mostly divorce proceedings and probate decrees....anything that affected how real property title could pass from one entity to another. There were a lot of people in that business who went to law school and became lawyers, I think aiming to go in-house with oil companies, maybe. Sometimes though, they would just get law degrees to get them, and they kept working the same jobs. I never understood that...I thought if you took the trouble and expense to put yourself through law school, you surely would not want to keep working the job we were doing, although it did tend to afford them some more interesting roles.
Sometimes I would meet young lawyers who were just starting out, working for crews just like mine. Again, I didn't understand, why in the world do my job instead of practicing law somewhere? They told me it was because the legal profession around the cities they were from (a lot from San Antonio, as I recall) was saturated and they were doing this until they were able to get a real "lawyer job."
One of my coworkers went to law school and I remember when he passed the bar. He brought either a copy or a sample copy to the office one day and we were interested to see the oil and gas section, and if we could answer the questions. There was only like 5 questions, but written answers, no multiple choice or anything like that, but I knew all the answers. Our crew chief came out and wanted to know what we were looking at, we told him we were trying to see if we could pass the O&G portion of the bar, so he took a look at the questions, nodded, and said we better be able to, and he'd probably fire anybody who couldn't answer those (he wasn't serious).
Anyway, I've idly wondered if there are any good primers, particularly on things like constitutional law. Not necessarily legal textbooks, but information compiled for a layperson who wants to get solid on the basics beyond what they teach you (or not, anymore) in Civics class. I asked one friend of mine, but she didn't have much of an answer. I know you can google books, but I'd much rather have had the recommendation of someone I know and knew exactly what I was looking for.
All that to say, as much as I like to argue with people, maybe I missed my calling as a trial lawyer.
