On October 29th, 2008, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was awarded the Wallenberg Medal for both his tireless struggle to end apartheid in South Africa and his unyielding crusade to fight injustice worldwide.

Next semester, Michigan Law School is fortunate to have Maurice Possley, one of the most distinguished investigative reporters in the country, co-teaching a class on Innocent Defendants with Professor Sam Gross. Mr. Possley has played a central role in dozens of exonerations of innocent defendants and co-authored at least two major series on courts, prosecutors and police that were extremely influential in spurring criminal justice reform nationwide. Over the years, he has taught nearly a dozen courses as an adjunct professor of journalism at Northwestern University and the University of Montana. His experience has shown him how important it is that students learn to become critical thinkers on matters they may take for granted and learn to better process information that may at times seem counterintuitive.

Elliott Smith committed suicide 5 years ago last month.

I was sitting in my bedroom, procrastinating as usual by stubbornly going through the entirety of my bookmarks in order, desperately wanting to be distracted by something that was not on a syllabus. Elliott Smith's fansite "Sweet Adeline" was not far down the list. Instead of the usual paragraphs of crisply arranged text there was a rambling lower-case post that began with a solemn farewell, "goodbye elliott." What followed was a grief-stricken encomium to a musician who had deeply touched a lot of lives.

When I began law school with the venerable summer-starters of May 2006 (38 days, guys!), I didn't know that a young, dashing defense attorney was also beginning his first adventures in the American legal system.

It struck me as I went to write the column this week that the idea of a technology column was neither well-thought out, nor is it incredibly compelling without some sort of reader input, at least on an occasional basis. Our first installation about backups was largely written in light of the sad realization that a good number of my fellow classmates do not bother to backup their computers, and some are not even familiar with the concept. While this would seem to be to my advantage (my crappy notes at least will always be intact, while your notes will be gone, causing you incredible anxiety at exam time), for some reason I try to be a good member of the stimulating community that is the law school.

It's that time of year again when everyone starts to stay inside, in part to hit the books with finals looming and in part because the weather is getting nasty, cold and gray. Still, too much of anything isn't good for you, and too much time spent locked in the underground law library or cloistered in your own home can make the time spent studying counterproductive.

If you're anything like me, many of you wonder about what people were like before they came to Michigan Law. In addition to ordinary Facebook stalking, you may have even Askjeevesed or Yahoo!ed some of your fellow classmates ("Askjeevesed?" Yes, I'm taking every opportunity I can to verb my nouns. And I don't know about you, but I'm a little concerned about the antitrust implications of a monopoly in the search engine and everything-else-related-to-technology market, so I am doing my bit to promote competition).

So you may've heard about the Rally for Equality held this past weekend (more coverage on that will be in the next issue), and no, we didn't have permits, so you're probably thinking, "worst law students ever." Because clearly, even with the near complete lack of black letter law in the Michigan Law curriculum, permits aren't exactly the sort of apocryphal, atypical legal measure one tends to find on one page in one book buried in the deepest nether regions of the stacks and under the protection of the industry standard seven seals. But honestly, it couldn't be helped - generally permits are obtained weeks, if not months, in advance, and no one really knew the country was going to go all Ted Haggard (pre-sex 'n' meth scandal, natch) come November.

First, find your orange vest and a shotgun . . . several days later, you're ready for plucking. At this point, you'll need a very, very, very large pot of boiling water, an equally large pot of ice water, tweezers, and a lot of patience . . .