The process of learning the law is really not about learning the law. It is about exploring boundaries. It's about pushing limits. It's about learning to see the edges. When legal professionals refer to the ability to "think like a lawyer" it is this ability to which they refer. And in this regard, it really doesn't matter if you're studying in an American Law School, or apprenticing under a barister in China. All legal education has this as the ultimate goal depsite radically different methods.

Learning to see the edges is a difficult task and there isn't really a striaght path to understanding. Many law students resist strongly and washout. Others stick with it, but never quite grasp the finer points of what they are supposed to understand, what they are supposed to take from their legal education. Those that do grasp the finer points of a legal education usually experience an epiphany somewhere along the way.

Mine came in my second semester when a professor told the class that law is made when the improbable occurs. He was talking about the common law, obviously, but that image clicked for me and I suddenly understood just what it was that I was supposed to be looking for, what he was trying to teach me.

I offer this as a morsel for you. What follows is an example of the improbable. An example of law being made right at the boundries. What follows is remarkable for it's novelty.

MIAMI, Nov 19 (Reuters) - A Florida phone sex operator has won a workers' compensation settlement claiming she was injured after regularly masturbating at work, her lawyer said. Attorney Steven Slootsky told Reuters he was not sure whether the Fort Lauderdale woman's claim was the first of its kind, but it certainly was out of the ordinary. Slootsky said his client agreed to a "minimal settlement" earlier this month. He declined to disclose the amount. During the course of her claim for workers' compensation benefits, the now 40-year-old employee of Fort Lauderdale's CFP Enterprises Inc. said she developed carpal tunnel syndrome -- also known as repetitive motion injury -- in both hands from masturbating as many as seven times a day while speaking with callers, said Slootsky, who spoke about the case this week on the condition that his client's name not be revealed. "She was told to do whatever it takes to keep the person on the phone as long as possible," Slootsky said. The woman used one hand to answer the telephone and the other to note customers' names and fetishes and to give herself an orgasm during the verbal exchanges.

I hope some of you, or one of you for that matter, has managed an epiphany, however minor, from this my public service.

Faithfully Yours,

Brian

Posted at 3:14 p.m.

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