So, I crapped out as a semifinalist. My semifinal competitor was quite good, and I'm sure either she or my friend who was around think my storming out, muttering about the judges, had more to do with losing than it had.

What I would like is for judges to understand the issue that we're supposed to be addressing, and not to sit there during the arguments -- and afterward in the critique -- and accuse me of not answering their questions when I was answering their questions, but was simply doing so as it related to the law at hand. One judge insisted I refused to answer his question about race proportionality of felons because I related directly to the language of the statute.

But he insisted on asking, because he simply hadn't bothered to understand the law that we were arguing. And it aggravates me that I spent hours sitting around the school in my suit on a sunny Saturday after spending hours researching my novel approach (which also fooled my judges, who suggested I didn't have a proper understanding of the Fifteenth Amendment, despite taking my approach from Chemerinsky) to the problem, only to sit in oral arguments trying to make a point about he legal issue in question that the judge can't get because he clearly didn't understand what the issue was we were arguing.

So that's why I stormed off in a huff. Not because I lost, but because I wasted so much time with off-target judges that I had no chance to actually argue my side of the issue.

Our problem statement was very clear on what we were to address: is § 1973 of the Voting Rights Act constitutional as applied to the made-up felon disenfranchisement statute we were considering. That's what we were told to stick to. Apparently the judges didn't get (or ignored) the memo.

Let me know if you want to borrow my Civio (tm) desk to you can brush up on this constitutional law stuff. It's in under the ethernet cables in my top drawer next to the sporks.

To my judges next year.

After my first time trotting out the Fifteenth Amendment, I seriously considered going and printing it and the case history (and KeyCite and Shepard's output) to take to the next argument.

As it turned out, it wouldn't have mattered. The semifinal judges weren't the least bit interested in arguments about the legal issues, Fifteenth Amendment or otherwise. They were much more obsessed by how they should properly weigh the statistics that my client had brought forth at the trial level.

Unfortunately, they seem to have had the mistaken impression that they were deciding the issue, forgetting the the Supreme Court wasn't going to be a decider of fact. Unfortunately, they took my redirections and insistence at sticking to the problem at hand as a refusal to answer their moronic, way off-topic questions. It was making me furious, especially after they hauled me back in for the critique only to tell me I hadn't answered their questions. I most certainly had, just not in a way they understood, because they clearly didn't understand their roles.

So, maybe sets of those cards for them.