Listening to conversations and typing stuff.

Emmanuel:
You sound much more interested in what I'm saying than you should. Your conversation pace is well-paced; faster than mine generally, which lends to your sounding more energetic than I do. Your voice has a lot of inflection in it, WHICH IS GOOD. It makes me want to continue listening to you because it sounds like you're actually talking to me (...which you are, but you get the point). Good volume, especially when you are yelling above the Chipotle rabble.

Tim:
I'm used to your oral advocacy sounding very conversational, so you sound like how I'm used to you sounding. You are excited, bordering on school girl, at the beginning when you are making fun of Rhi (and admitting to watching Twilight). Good volume, well-paced, extremely emotive. You cover serious, jest, and sarcasm in quick succession (I suppose this plays to tone and somewhat to pitch). I suppose your pitch range isn't vast, but I don't think that's necessary.

Rhi:
You sound much more cheerful than I'm used to hearing you in oral advocacy settings. The two of you sound like you're hosting a radio show or something, which means you're both clear and entertaining to listen to. Your pacing and pitch is more controlled than Tim and you sound more formal than he. You emote with inflection, as well as volume variation. Good energy all around.

Sara O'Hara:
You do the end-of-the-sentence-curl thing that we talked about in class (I'm pretty sure we all do but I happened to be thinking about it when I listened to yours). Your pace is slow, but easy to follow. You emote more than I'm used to hearing, but you don't seem particularly excited to be talking about school.

Sara Ingram:
The conversation seems a bit tense, but that might be because I now know the background to it. You seem tired and are quieter than Ryan. There are times when your pacing is lilting; it seems that when you're working through a sentence that you hadn't thought of beforehand, you rush through a couple of words, pause, then finish the sentence. Most other times you go on quite steadily. You sounded like you were going through a motion, rather than really conversing (which I suppose you were).

Anne Laure:
I couldn't hear you as well as I could your friend. You were more neutral-sounding than I expected considering the exciting gossip you were discussing. I expected more outrage, but you were very point-of-fact and analytical. You inflected quite energetically when your friend told you you were finished talking and you said "oh very good!"

Jeremy:
You sounded very convincing about liking the nail polish that your girlfriend got. Well done. You have also always been pretty conversational for oral advocacy. You are clear, well-paced, and inflect nicely. I enjoyed how nonchalant you were about recording the conversation without her knowing.

Jenn Goodwillie:
I was very entertained by the beginning of the conversation. ("what...are you...cooking it in?" etc.) [on a side note, as I’m listening through these, I’m increasingly entertained how you can almost hear many of us frantically searching for something to say to fill in the space. Which is sort of not really a conversation anymore.] Back to you. Your pitch tends to pretty much stay the same, even when you ask questions. You get somewhat excited when you are talking about what to put the tofu in. You aren't not energetic, but I don't sense much emotion. You sound tired. (maybe you're bored talking about tofu).

Lauren:
I had to turn my speakers down for you. You are very clear and easy to listen to. You have high energy, sort of in a "I'm talking to someone that I need to sound happy at" way. Maybe I'm projecting, since I always try to sound more chipper when speaking to relatives. Pace, tone, inflection are good all around.

Linda:
You sound exasperated and teacherly particularly at the beginning. Your pacing is controlled and you are very clear. You sound quite interested in the conversation on body parts. You're right; your voice does curl when you're lying.

Blogger hates uploading stuff.

I've sent the sound around. Blogger hates us all.

Volume: I think volume was sufficient, since we managed to maintain audibility over the hordes of Chipotle people. I suppose I seem somewhat soft compared to Emmanuel; he seems to pick up better on the iPhone recording thing. He also had far more exciting things to talk about. We both got loud when a table next to us started yelling. Also, when we started suggesting that we all go sing karaoke. I'm not really sure what else to say. Volume seemed moderately uniform.

Pace: I speed up when I'm agitated. I think Emmanuel and I talk faster in conversation than in oral presentations, but I think that's understandable/normal. We're not trying to get the other to understand complicated legal matters and we're trying to cover broad ranges of topics.

Energy: I am probably only energetic when uttering "I will eat everything!". Since most of what I talk about involves school work, I am somewhat monotonous sounding. I recall propping my head on my hands for most of this conversation. It had been a long day. Emmanuel seems far more energetic than I. Towards the end, we both start giggling a lot; I suppose that injects more energy into the conversation.

Pitch/Tone: As mentioned, I tend toward the monotonous. Even if a sentence starts out in a promising fashion, it tends to flatline toward the end. I sound lower on recording than I feel I sound. Emmanuel has much more variance in pitch and tone. I think it goes hand in hand with his more energetic manner of speaking.

People in airports are boring.

People in airports are either by themselves staring morosely into the distance, or are sitting next to their travel partner whom they are well sick of, and therefore are also staring morosely into the distance (or sometimes staring morosely at each other).

People who talk on phones, when they do make hand gestures, tend to make floppy arm movements that are reminiscent of windshield wipers. It's a gesture that starts on the right, somewhat authoritatively, then just collapses to the left. Repeat.

Since I failed at people watching, I thought I'd briefly discuss what made gestures seem unnatural/unconvincing. This thought had occurred to me already when watching Friends, but over the weekend I got the opportunity to play a video game called "Heavy Rain" that made me think about natural/unnatural movement. The graphics in "Heavy Rain" are very good, and the characters are modelled off of real people, down to facial expressions (in a video on the making of the game, they showed little metal nodules being stuck onto the actor's faces for expression-tracking purposes. It was pretty cool). Yet, everything seemed just a little bit off to me. I had the same impression when I watched Friends: that the movements and the expressions seemed slightly less than convincing.

Even without knowing what the individuals were saying, it seemed like every action was an after thought. There was a split second of disconnect between a thought being expressed, and an arm movement or facial expression being made. Alternatively, when the actions were being made simultaneously with mouth movement, they were repetitive gestures (e.g. arm flapping). I suppose this latter gesture is more "normal", but then after a while it just got kind of annoying.

What does this say about oral advocacy? I'm not sure. I suppose the timing issue might be something to consider going forward as we try to figure out ideal gesturing when we argue (i.e. get gestures to a point where we don't have to think about it); the repetitive gesture is something we've touched on briefly in class already. I guess we have to strike a balance between over-thinking gestures (leading to the disjunct between idea and gesture) and not being in control of our bodies at all (repetitive gestures).

This isn't my real post.

I idly youtubed "Friends" while taking a break from reading. Up popped an episode where (according to the title) Phoebe and Ross were arguing about Evolution.

1. People look kind of funny when you're not paying attention to what they're saying.
2. Phoebe has T-rex arm movements. Seriously.
3. Ross is really boring, even when you can't hear what he's saying.

I'm going to Virginia tomorrow for the weekend, and hope to instead regale you with tales of my airport people-watching. Have a good weekend.

Left and Right brains

I thought this was nicely done.

Discovery!

Apparently, there's a Vindobona Journal of International Commercial Law & Arbitration. I'm sorry if everyone knew this already. I was amused because I thought everything was made up. Oh well.

Ugh.

Alright, Blogger, I've had enough of you.

I'm sort of disappointed that I couldn't upload all the images that create that scene, but hopefully you can get the idea from the two that happened to make it up (I recommend zooming in). The images alternate from watercolour images to images crudely sketched in pen. The "story", if you can call it one, is basic: it's a city in the morning when it's dwellers are waking up. The watercolour images depict the richer part of town, the doctor sleeping in his bed, and getting ready in his bathroom. The sketched portions show an alleyway, and the poor waking up from off of benches. The watercolour/sketch medium comes back several times through the novel, but I think this is one of the few times it has no words. I found it to be very effective in conveying the surface action (i.e. the town waking up; it comes across kind of like an opening scene in a movie), as well as the underlying theme of the wealth gap and the situation of the poor that is prevalent through the book. (This comic is about Jack the Ripper. It's by the same guy that did Watchmen. I highly recommend it!)

There are six pages of this scene, but I could only upload two for some strange reason (and they're not even consecutive). Sorry if you don't get the full effect.

Sigh.

Anybody know how to upload scanned images? Blogger is flipping out a bit on me. I'm sure "Bad Request. Error 400." means something, but not to me.

And now the fun part.

When we were first given this assignment, my mind went straight to Calvin & Hobbes. I quickly realised that the images weren't perfect for figuring out a story narrative, but I'm going to show you two anyway.



and



While neither of them necessarily tell a story, they suggest a lot within their frames. The first one embodies happiness, with a stark juxtaposition against Calvin's parents obvious distress. The second combines my two favourite themes in Calvin and Hobbes comics: snow men and Calvin's imagination/dinosaurs. Like I said, not much of a story. But again, the juxtaposition (of innocent childhood snowman-building and evil T-rex-destroying-city) is what makes Bill Watterson so entertaining, if not as much of a story teller.

I ended up finding some images from the graphic novel "From Hell" that I thought were very effective. I'd like to discuss them as well, but Blogger won't let me upload them in this post, so... NEW POST.

Strong musings.

Here are my disjointed takeaways from Strong's article:

I found the Strong article rather useful in guiding the research we were asked to do for our team oral arguments. I agree that there is barely any instruction on research skills for international arbitration. I would even say that international research is generally not something commonly taught (or I missed out on it somewhere); finding sources for my international law journal work is a lot more difficult for me than finding cases etc. within the United States. I thought it interesting that Strong pointed out the sort of Catch-22 of experience in international arbitration: novices don't know where to look for information, but the places that could tell them where to look for it can't be found if they don't know where to look. While the lends to the secrecy (and mystique!) of this practice as a whole, I suspect it leads to much frustration for new lawyers trying to break into the field. Worse, it might mean that the less experienced will be less able to represent their client. While this is true in most situations, I feel that I was able to find good authority relatively quickly for my first brief, while finding minimal support for international cases seems much more tedious. Finally, I'd wondered what the hierarchy of controlling law was, and I'm glad that she laid it out. To keep in mind:

• International conventions and treaties;
• National laws;
• Arbitral rules;
• Law of the dispute (procedural orders and agreements between the parties);
• Arbitral awards;
• Case law; and
• Scholarly work (treatises, monographs and articles).

Hey guys,

I just got back from NYC. With the flu. This is a pre-emptive apology for if I don't get my post up in time tomorrow. Sorry. Hope everyone else who was sick last week got better.

Ugh, September.

Opening and Closing Statements

Reading these two chapters reminded me of the Garner/Scalia book on oral advocacy that I read last year for LRLW (it's called "Making Your Case", and I highly recommend it). The points made on the importance of the statements, and how to properly execute them, seem logical and straight forward to me, but it is very easy to understand how to present in theory, and much more difficult to execute in practice.

The thing that stood out most to me was keeping the international nature of your tribunal in mind. Footnote 4 was entertainingly cautionary on the potential for confusion when using words or phrases that seem perfectly normal to you, but are hard to understand for your audience. Thus, besides simplifying your argument for the purposes of the opening, in some way language itself must be simplified to reach a level that everyone can understand with relative ease. Naturally, not every situation can be expected ("full and frank" was not something I expected to be uncertain), but it's something to keep in mind. On top of that, I also thought it was interesting that the author noted how mannerisms like looking people in the eye could be taken differently by people from different cultures.

With cultural differences in mind, I wonder if there have been instances of arbitration where, for cultural reasons, female advocates are advised not to represent a case because of their gender (there are still many places in the world that hold strong views on women's places in life).

CISG

This post could have been titled "How I Wish I'd Learned More About Contracts in 1L Year." It appears that, even internationally, the basic elements of contract law are inescapable. Thus, the things that puzzled me in Contracts class, like the whole "meeting of the minds" thing, live on in CISG; it seems to me that if meeting of the minds seemed complicated to me on a domestic level, it could only get worse on an international level. And I think it does.
It makes sense that a contract between parties should be on the terms that both parties believe them to be. Thus, if it can be shown that the two parties intended something entirely contrary to what is written, the written contract should not be abided by. This makes sense, but it's often really hard to piece together from what is written and what has been exchanged verbally the true intentions of both parties. If you add on the extra complications of cultural differences and language barriers, the attempt at interpreting what the contract was actually about gets even more difficult. I'm not sure that there is a better way to go about looking at contracts, but this was the main issue that stuck out at me after reading the chapters for the week.
I also found it interesting that consideration is not required to form a contract under the CISG; recalling vaguely that our Professor emphasised the importance of consideration, it had not really occurred to me that contract formation could occur otherwise. Since it seems, at least domestically, that consideration is an important part of a valid contract, I wonder how often it comes up that the parties incorporate that into their negotiations.

I came away from this week's reading being mostly confused about the laws governing the arbitration process. My understanding so far (which could well be entirely incorrect, since I'm mostly confused) is that there are potentially three separate laws that could apply to one arbitration: the law governing the substantive issues between the parties (e.g. contract law), the law governing the arbitration (e.g. law that sets out whether an issue is arbitratable), and the procedural law of the arbitration. Furthermore, the "seat" of the arbitration, where the rules of arbitration come from (lex arbitri), does not actually have to be the place in which most of the proceedings take place, but the lex arbitri are still what governs. Yet, local laws with regard to matters like evidence taking must still be respected.As a result, it seems unavoidable that some major forum shopping occurs, since forum shopping is a problem in this country with only two systems (state/federal) to contend with.

After reading about the laws governing arbitration, I am surprised that not more strife arises just from a) having the parties decide the governing laws b) having parties, halfway through the arbitration, get really confused as to which law governs what. Although the reading tried to explain the importance if the lex arbitri, I don't entirely understand why there can't be a uniform system of rules that satisfy what the lex arbitri accomplishes. True, different countries will have different interests, but I thought that part of the point of international arbitration was to provide neutral ground. If the country has no interest in the manner at hand, since it is (in theory) neutral, how important could having a country-specific arbitration process be? On matters such as whether you can use another country's procedural law, it seems odd that the international community has not just decided one way or the other.

I started this semester with the understanding that arbitration was meant to be a simpler solution to litigation. I am beginning to rethink that.

First Post.

I found the approach of arbitration as a kind of science quite interesting. I had never viewed communication as being broken down into discrete groups of information processing. While the whole investigation into how arbitrators listen, understand, and make decisions on advocates' cases was useful, it seemed to me that keeping all this information about arbitrators straight would be difficult while in the process of advocating ones case. At the same time, it was useful to recognize that arbitrators seem ultimately human; arbitrators are still the product of their environments and cultures, and knowing what makes them tick and what attitudes they hold seems to be the key to strong advocacy. While this makes sense, I was somewhat discomforted by the feeling that this bordered on manipulation. I got the impression that having the best case or being "right" did not win you any favors; rather, having a good message and selling it well to your arbitrators (by understanding their culture, their biases, their attitudes, etc.) would take you a long way. It seems, then, that teams who can afford the time and money to hold mock arbitrations and investigate the arbitrators tendencies will inevitably have a better impression at the hearing, which does not seem quite fair.