The first ever Environmental Law & Policy Program Conference had lofty aspirations: it sought to populate the environmental agenda of the next presidential administration. Michigan Law Professor David Uhlmann, the program's director, said the conference aimed to discuss ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, develop renewable energy, reduce oil reliance and create a sustainable future for the planet.

Dear Editor,

It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done. That's what Oscar Wilde would say about MLawLive. There was (and continues to be) no central clearinghouse for information on news, events and deadlines at Michigan Law School, and MLawLive has done more to hurt than help that problem. The site suffers from an attempt to integrate various legacy systems, rather than starting anew. It also suffers from a classic problem in design: the "we can do it ourselves" mentality that dismisses the talent and value that is added by people who do graphic and information design for a living. In 1968, Melvin Conway said that organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs that are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. Designers have fought against this unnecessary bureaucracy and hierarchy of design to produce elegant and beautiful systems for years. This isn't something you can do yourself after reading a book on HTML 4.

"MLawLive is essential to student life at the Law School."

"What?! Screw that! No it's not!"

I've grounded this article in the context of the preceding fake argument. MLawLive ("MLL") is the recently developed web-based student portal that has caused a whole lot of griping among students. The questions to be answered are: (1) What is MLaw Live? (2) What is it designed to replace/augment? and (3) Who cares? Points two and three are pretty self-explanatory, so let's focus on point one.

Justice Anthony Kennedy was appointed to the Supreme Court in the same year I arrived in America, and as I listened to him speak on September 12th I realized that we have more in common than I could have imagined. For the last twenty years we have both been on a quest for intellectual enlightenment that has led us to strange and new places. But unlike me Justice Kennedy is now one of the most powerful people in the country. The room in which he was slated to speak, 100 HH, was full well before he was to come on. The last time there was such a buzz around a speaker coming to the Law School was when the notorious Larry Flynt of Hustler fame came last spring. The students came out in full force, with two overflow rooms being utilized to allow everyone to hear the talk.

For second-year law students, OCI-week activities consist mainly of interviews, firm research, and happy hour schmoozefests on the Skadden credit card. This year, though, a number of my 2L classmates spent their OCI free time helping The Generation Project conduct what was quite possibly the first successful front porch campaign since Grover Cleveland.

Kicking It Old School planned to cover a different topic this in this installment (something about prior attempts to persuade the law school community of the wisdom of keeping a shark in the library's lightwell), but when, while researching, we found this in the November 11, 1981 issue of the RG, we changed our plan:

When Fekkak Mamdouh (known to friends and co-workers as Mamdouh) started working at Windows on the World, he had no idea that the tragedy of 9/11 would change his life so dramatically. The restaurant on top of the World Trade Center was, at the turn of the millennium, the highest grossing restaurant in the nation, and one of a very small number of restaurants where workers were members of a union, receiving decent pay and benefits in a service industry notoriously under-compensated and under-protected (only 1% of restaurant workers belong to a union). On 9/11, not only were almost a hundred employees killed, but 300 Windows on the World employees were displaced from a job that had almost no equivalent in terms of pay, benefits, and security. In the following months, over 13,000 restaurant workers were displaced city-wide. A local union leader contacted both Mamdouh and Saru Jayaraman, a graduate of Yale Law School, to help the restaurant workers, beginning with those from Windows on the World where the former owner had refused to rehire many of his old employees. After weeks of demonstrations in front of the new restaurant, the owner rehired many of his old employees. But this was just the beginning. The events following 9/11 gave birth to the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) of New York, and a new era of workers' rights in New York City was born.

When Kroger and Meijer have you down with their industrial, mass produced ho-humness, try exploring some of the local groceries; they have variety, quality, and some great deals if you know where to look.

Shut my mouth and call me Susan - y'all actually sent in questions (relatively) unbidden!

See, the one thing I'm most often asked in regards to this column is whether people actually write in, or if I just make the questions up whenever it suits me. (Actually, that question is probably tied with "do you seriously put this on your resume?", but whatever.) Let's put this one to bed, shall we?