Beesquared

Blog

  • Happy Birthday America!

    It’s about 9:00 p.m. on July 4. New York City’s annual fireworks display is slated to start in about 30 minutes. Here in Harlem, the sounds of bottle rockets began about 30 minutes ago.

    I’m at my desk, trying to memorize the Rule in Shelley’s Case, which, funny enough, is a doctrine that we Americans inherited, like much of our law, from England. The rule, which has been abolished in most states, prevents a landowner from creating a so-called remainder in his heirs. (One who is alive, by definition, has no heirs.)

    The rule seems to have originated as an estate-planning tool. It allowed landowners to convey land to their children through property law instead of by inheritance, thereby circumventing taxes owed to the British monarchy.

     

     

     

  • If you will it…

    The test for a duly executed will in New York:

    1. The testator (a person who dies with a will) must be at least 18 years old.
    2. The testator must sign the will either herself or by a proxy who signs in her presence.
    3. The signature must be at the end of the will.
    4. The testator must sign (or acknowledge her earlier signature) in the presence of two witnesses.
    5. The testator must publish the will. That means the testator must communicate to the witnesses that they are witnessing a will and not some other legal document.
    6. The attesting witnesses must sign.
    7. The execution ceremony must be completed in 30 days from the date the first witness signs.

  • Trusts for pets

    In New York, you can set up a trust to provide for the care of your pet that will be valid for the animal’s lifetime. The trust will terminate on the death of the animal or at the end of 21 years, whichever occurs earlier.

    The law allows a human being to be appointed to oversee the assets.

  • Confidential sources

    The Justice Department reportedly is considering whether to compel the testimony of a New York Times reporter about the source for a book he published in 2006 that details a failed CIA operation in Iran.

    In June the Supreme Court declined to review a challenge by the reporter, James Risen, who is seeking to protect the identity of his source. The Obama administration, which has prosecuted leaks aggressively, now has to decide whether to subpoena Risen’s testimony and risk ordering Risen to jail if he, as expected, refuses to comply.

    The Justice Department generally tries to protect the news media by seeking to obtain information from sources other than journalists. Federal law does not protect reporters from having to divulge confidential sources.

    About 36 states have enacted shield laws, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. About half the states that have enacted such laws provide absolute protection. Others shield journalists subject to varied exceptions.

    For example, New York protects professional journalists from having to identify their sources for information that is obtained in confidence and later published or broadcast. The privilege also applies to editors, employers and others who supervise the reporter’s work.

  • Mnemonic

    Powers granted to Congress by the Constitution, courtesy of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas:

    TCCNCCPCC PAWN MOMMA RUN

    Taxes, credit, commerce, naturalization, coinage, counterfeiting, post office, copyright, courts, piracy, Army, war, Navy, militia, money for militia, Washington, D.C., rules, and necessary and proper

  • Countdown: 30 days until the bar exam

    The bar exam, which is administered twice a year during the last weeks of July and February, falls this summer on July 29. Here in New York about 9,800 candidates are expected to sit for the two-day test.

    Between now and then I will attempt to post one item daily that chronicles my countdown. The posts may be brief, excuse the pun. I need to memorize a world of black-letter law.

    To start the counting on a hopeful note, BuzzFeed recently published a list of 14 famous people who failed the bar but turned out fine. They include Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Benjamin Cardozo, who developed the concept of forseeability in tort law and served on the U.S. Supreme Court.

    This candidate takes heart.

  • As Churchill said…

    winston

    “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

    What’s inspiring me as I study for the New York bar exam.

  • Springtime in New York City

    girlsI passed by these girls while walking recently through Sheep Meadow, which is Central Park’s largest lawn without ballfields. The girls were among clusters of people tossing Frisbee and frolicking but what caught my attention was the girls’ taking  turns lifting one another off the ground. “Hey guys, I’m light,” the girl in the white top, in the center above, exclaimed to her friends. That’s something we stop doing at some age — picking each other up (in the literal meaning of that term)  just for the fun of it. I’m not suggesting we start, but watching these girls trying to lift one another and delighting in their playtime delighted me.

  • Call Me Maybe

    The Times reported recently on a mission by Sarah Maguire, a 26-year-old yoga instructor who drove 30 miles to Covina, California from her home in Los Angeles to confront a thief who stole her iPhone.

    Maguire, who located the phone via the Find My iPhone app on her computer, tracked the phone to a house on a quiet residential street. She knocked on the door. A large man, about 30, answered. “I think you have my iPhone,” she told him. The man produced Maguire’s phone and a second one that belonged to her roommate but not before denying he had taken them and closing the blinds in the living room, a gesture that creeped out Maguire. “When I told my mom what I did, she thought I was crazy,” Maguire recalled.

    More people are following Maguire’s lead and resorting to self-help to get their phones back, according to the Times. Not suprisingly, law enforcement personnel advise against the practice. “It’s just a phone — it’s not worth losing your life over,” Commander Andrew Smith, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, told the paper.

    In my case the decision not to track down my missing iPhone was easy. That’s because my phone turned up in Algiers, where it last appeared on April 20, according to an email I received in April from Apple. In the Alergerian capital’s southeastern suburbs, along a highway that parallels the Mediterranean, the phone signaled its location.

    I last held the phone, a black iPhone 5, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Paris. My partner and I had used the device to take photos from the back seat of a taxi that drove us from a hotel near the Palais de Congrés that we had checked out of to one in the Marais district. Shortly after entering our room we realized that somewhere along the way we had lost not just my phone but my partner’s iPhone too.

    Calls to the taxi company, our former hotel and the organizers of a conference that my partner had attended produced no information about the devices’ whereabouts. That’s when I activated Find My iPhone.

    The service turned up nothing. In the months since my partner and I have wondered occasionally what had become of the phones, which seemed to vanish like some pocket-size version of Malaysia Airlines Flight 730. Thus the email that arrived in April startled me. “Allah inoub kho was found near Inter Ouartier Route Algiers at 4:02 a.m.,” read the message. “Your iPhone’s last reported location will be available for 24 hours.”

    Screen Shot 2014-05-12 at 7.50.47 PM

    On its journey from the French capital the phone seems to have received a new name, which translates loosely as “Allah is the greatest.” That’s all the information I have. The phone hasn’t checked in with Apple since then.

    We live in world where, thanks to technology, our phones can ping us from anywhere. We can view maps that will pinpoint street corners and outposts where we’ve never set foot. Yet the technology confirms what we already knew intuitively. Our phone is somewhere else, just not where we happen to be.

    Phones may be capable of being tracked, but that doesn’t make them less likely to be stolen. More than 3.1 million smartphones were stolen last year, nearly double the number swiped in 2012, according to Consumer Reports. Many of the phones lifted end up overseas where a market for them thrives, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon told Consumers.

    Though many owners use Find My iPhone and other apps to block their phones, the barriers provide little protection in the black market. An investigation by the BBC this spring found at least eight shops in London that trade in stolen smartphones. All the phones that trafickers described to the BBC had blocking. Thieves defeat the blocking by changing the phones’ International Mobile Station Equipment Identity, or IMEI, a number that is stamped in the battery compartments of most smartphones.

    All the phones used had ‘find-my-phone’ style blocks activated, and in theory their IMEI numbers mean they are not useable once reported stolen.

    But Grant Roughley, of Essential Forensics, demonstrated to the BBC how simple it was to get around such features – using only a laptop.

    He was able to give a device a new IMEI number – effectively changing the phone’s fingerprint – meaning it could be used as normal.

    And restoring the phone’s default software removes “find-my-phone” protection.

    Mr Roughley said: “Just a few mouse clicks and the phone is turned from a paperweight back to a useable device again. A phone stolen this morning could be back on the streets by this afternoon, packaged up as a second hand legitimate phone.”

    Wireless carriers have said that starting in the middle of next year, smartphones sold in the U.S. will have a feature that enables users to erase the data in their phone remotely. However, even if the service works as billed it won’t address the problem of phones that leave the U.S. and become reactiviated abroad by carriers that don’t participate in the system, Consumers notes.

    Some members of Congress agree. In February, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation that would require phones to have a so-called “kill switch” that would enable the owner to erase the device’s data remotely, render the phone inoperable and prevent the phone from being reprogrammed or reactivated without an authorization from its owner.

    “Under the requirements of the bill, if the kill switch is activated, there is nothing for international carriers to do because they won’t be able to turn the device back on,” Serrano told Consumers. A similar measure pending in the California Assembly would go a step further by requiring that smartphones sold in the state be sold with the kill switch turned on so that consumers won’t have to do anything to secure their devices.

    In the meantime, Allah inoub kho belongs to someone else. My latest phone is a robin’s-egg blue iPhone 5C, which I like very much. Both my former phone and I have moved on.

  • On taking notes

    In an article recently for The New Yorker, the writer John McPhee describes some of his experiences over the course of more than 50 years of interviewing people, including Special Agent Ronald Rawalt, a mineralogist from the FBI whose work in Mexico solved the murder of an American drug agent there; the actor Richard Burton, who “interviewed himself,” according to McPhee; and Alan Hume, M.D., a surgeon in Maine who “talked clearly, rapidly, volubly, and technically.”

    McPhee has some advice for anyone who makes a living that involves recording what other people say. “Whatever you do, don’t rely on memory,” he writes. “Don’t imagine that you will be able to remember in the evening what people said during the day.” Good point, in my experience, as limited as it may be compared with McPhee’s. Even when I’m not on deadline, I make it a practice to read my notes the same day I’ve interviewed someone, as a way to reflect on what he or she told me, to identify gaps in my understanding and to decipher the scrawl that I tend to produce when I’m scribbling.

    Lots of people take notes but journalists may be the only ones for whom writing down what other people tell us is the work itself. In December I met Bohlale Ratefane, a woman who works the lost luggage counter for South African Airways at Johannesburg’s Tambo airport. Ratefane wrote notes to herself in a black notebook with a worn cover while juggling both a BlackBerry and a smartphone. She wrote in the notebook seemingly at random, back and forth among the pages, but the system must have made sense to her because she found the entry she needed every time. She worked the notebooks and phones to perfection in pursuit of her prey, which included suitcases and passports that had become separated from their owners.

    Recently I came across a story that I wrote two autumns go, during a football game between Columbia and Dartmouth that I had gone to cover for a class at journalism school. The draft had been piled among a series of notes that I’ve carried with me since then as I’ve traveled from New York City to South Africa and back.

    About midway through the fourth quarter on that Saturday in October, I wandered over to the Big Green’s side of the stands, where I met Elliott Olshansky. I had sought out Olshansky because he and a cluster of fans cheered for Dartmouth on nearly every play. As it happened, Olshansky graduated from Dartmouth in 2004 and aspired to be a writer and an entrepreneur. “I’m in this weird limbo between where I am and where I want to be,” he told me.

    I liked his comment and used it in my first draft of the story. My professor also liked the comment but suggested that I discard it nonetheless. “It doesn’t really advance your central point,” he wrote in tracked changes through the middle of the paragraph. My professor was right about the quote. The story was tighter without it.

    Still, I’m glad I’ve preserved that first draft of the story long enough to read Olshansky’s comment anew. That’s because the in-between state that Olshansky described himself as occupying has become a home of sorts to me. I’ve recently returned to New York from South Africa to work on a project that combines my training in law and journalism. But I also look forward in August to returning to South Africa, where there are stories that I want to report and write, and where my partner lives and works.

    When I met Olshansky he had recently published an e-book about the rules of dating from a guy’s perspective. “Guy-lit,” according to Olshansky, who also was pursuing an MBA at Fordham. Aspiring entrepreneur and writer – that was where Olshansky stood as we parted on that sunny afternoon, when I did not yet realize his observation might one day resonate with me.

    Writing in my notebook what Olshansky said and discovering the quote anew 18 months later underscores for me another reason one writes things down in the first place. Mostly we take notes to remember, but the notes that we take also help us to see things in new ways. Our drafts may be a means to an end, but they become a part of us too.