It's finally raining. Finally. It felt like a pleasant Spring rain when I left this morning for downtown Oakland on foot with my green raincoat that I had bought in Kyoto and an umbrella. Clouds greyed the skies from horizon to horizon as I walked along the lakeside.
Not much traffic out on a Sunday morning. Not many people in the law library either. I was only going to photocopy the new legislation on diversion programs that Antonio wanted to know about. I just needed to find it.
I had little to go on. I didn't even know what diversion was when he first mentioned it. All he gave me was the name of the person who sponsored the bill, the fact that it was passed very recently, and it has something to do with diversion programs and might affect programs like ManAIive.
I had to learn about diversion and what the current law was. I dug into my memory for where to start legal research. I went to West's Annotated Codes and looked for "diversion". Nothing. I looked for "parole" and "probation". Nothing. Wait, in the assignment, we started in the CalJur's. I went there and looked. Nothing.
Wonderful. I know what I want, I know what I'm looking for, I don't know where it is or how to go about finding it, but I know that it's all in here. Somewhere amidst these volumes and stacks is what I want. All I have to do is walk down the right path, open the right books, and notice the right clues.
I wandered and pondered a bit and flipped through some more possible volumes and topics in the West's. Then something lying on top of a shelf in plain view caught my eye. Some digest of new legislation. I took it to a desk and started flipping through it and bingo! Diversion. Of course, see Penal Codes.
I went back to West's under Penal Codes and there it was. It felt so good finding it; knowing it was definitely there, searching for it, failing, searching more, hitting a bit of luck and finding it. It was satisfying, but not something I want to do for a living.
I still had to find the new legislation that Antonio was seeking. For that I had to ask the librarian. He pointed to the shelves, "The green volumes have everything the legislature just passed."
I searched through the green volumes, figuring out how they were formatted and how I might go about finding the exact legislation I was looking for. I went volume by volume, looking through the tables of contents and indexes, looking for a windfall. Then boom, I found it, confirmed by the name John Burton who sponsored the bill. Maybe I'm not a total loser.
