Posted on 12/17/2014 5:06:21 AM PST by servo1969
When students at Columbia and other law schools around the country demanded that exams be postponed because they were traumatized by the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, we and many others responded with ridicule. In today’s National Law Journal, a third-year law student at Harvard named William Desmond says that we got it all wrong: the request for extra time for exams was a sign of the students’ strength. For entertainment value, you should read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:
[O]pponents of exam extensions have declared that to grant these requests would be a disservice to the students. Law students, they argue, must learn how to engage critically with the law in the face of intense adversity. Drawing comparisons to events surrounding the Civil Rights Movement and other times of intense turmoil, these opponents portray today’s law students as coddled millennials using traumatic events as an excuse for their inability to focus on a three-hour exam. In essence, law students are being told to grow up and learn how to focus amidst stress and anxiety—like “real” lawyers must do.
Yes, that sums it up pretty well.
Speaking as one of those law students, I can say that this response is misguided: Our request for exam extensions is not being made from a position of weakness, but rather from one of strength and critical awareness.
Although over the last few weeks many law students have experienced moments of total despair, minutes of inconsolable tears and hours of utter confusion…
Total despair? Inconsolable tears? Seriously?
many of these same students have also spent days in action—days of protesting, of organizing meetings, of drafting emails and letters, and of starting conversations long overdue. We have been synthesizing decades of police interactions, dissecting problems centuries old, and exposing the hypocrisy of silence.
Just let that last one sink in for a moment.
The hesitancy to recognize the validity of these psychic effects demonstrates that, in addition to conversations on race, gender and class, our nation is starving for a genuine discussion about mental health.
If I took seriously the claim that law students are suffering “total despair” and shedding “inconsolable tears” over the Brown and Garner cases, then yes, I would say it is time for a discussion about mental health.
Where some commentators see weakness or sensitivity, perhaps they should instead see strength—the strength to know when our cups of endurance have run over and when the time for patience has ended. Perhaps they should instead see courage—the courage to look our peers in the eyes and uncomfortably ask them to bear these burdens of racism and classism that we have together inherited from generations past.
This guy is a really bad writer. He is supposed to be on the Law Review, too. Must be true what they say about declining educational standards.
Our focus and critical thinking are at an all-time peak while the importance of our textbooks is at a low. It is not that law students are incapable of handling their exams. It is that we are unwilling to remove ourselves, even for a few days, from this national conversation.
No, really, you can take a few days off. The rest of us can get along without you.
For most of us, we know that if we get lower grades this semester, this cost will have been worth the importance and privilege of joining a national movement to fundamentally reform this country’s approach to law enforcement and criminal justice. But just because we are willing to pay this price does not mean we should have to.
This is the great thing about law students. If you peel away the endless BS about social justice, you eventually come to their core concern: grades. Because grades lead to jobs.
Our requests for exam extensions are requests for our faculties and administrations to recognize that this movement is our legal education—that when we march, when we advocate, when we demand accountability and action we are employing the analytical skills and legal knowledge that we have learned in our law school classrooms far more than we would be if we responded to a hypothetical exam prompt.
Protesting is better than studying! This is the conclusion:
Each year as classes of law students enter and exit our nation’s legal institutions we are told the same thing: You are the future of the law. Well, the future is now.
Huh. Kid must be a Redskins fan. But that’s not enough to redeem his hopelessly pompous and silly op-ed.
And yet lawyers can’t even begin to comprehend why they’re held in less high esteem than used car salesmen.
Columbia is the home of “professors” cloward and piven.
whining for special privileges like a true RAT!!!
This kid found a way to make lawyers look even worse.
He's not in any way a self-absorbed, condescending, egocentric, elitist little a--hole with an exaggerated sense of self-importance, is he?
LOL
A future MSNBC host in the making ...
“...self-absorbed, condescending, egocentric, elitist little a—hole with an exaggerated sense of self-importance...”
The functional definition of a Liberal
...just as I stand to inherit gobs of cash from my grandparents and parents and must bear the burden of surviving on my trustfund until that day comes.
You forgot the raging sense of entitlement.
Maybe they should have spent days in studying.
I’m concerned that his “analytical skills” and “legal knowledge” acquired in his “legal education” seems to be ignoring the facts and evidence presented in the case.
many of these same students have also spent days in action—days of protesting, of organizing meetings, of drafting emails and letters,
__________________________________________
yes well...
Remember back a few years ago when the moslems had their million moslem march in Washington DC ???
Well after that weekend some black students at UTC (U of Tennessee, Chattanooga) demanded to have their professors provide them with all the work for the previous days from Wednesday through Friday and that they not be penalized for not attending class...
They had just taken off Wednesday morning for Washington to attend the MMM without bothering to inform their professors that they would not be in class Wed-Friday...
They thought they were entitled..it would have been the funniest thing if weren’t so appalling and in-your-face..
Yes you guessed it, the university backed down and all classwork or exams were given to those black students while any other students who also for any reason skipped class those days went without and lost points...
This went on for days and I really thought the university would stick to its rules...
But no, some people are more equal than others...
throw logical thinking out the door. The subjective comes before the objective. Columbia and Harvard Gradaute Lawyers to the Judges - Our client has suffered emotional harm by being arressted for commiting rape and murder, the victime whom was killed would not allow our clients the privilege of taking what they thought was their right as afforded by former President Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder.
Judge let see President Obama and Eric Holder are now doing life in federal prison in Leavenworth. As an attorney I am requesting that the clients be given a different attorney(s). Also that the respective states disbar all Harvard and Columbia Law School Graduates.
Bailiff escort this piece of trash attorney out the door, when you get to the exterior door pick him up by the seat of the pants and back of his Armani suit and throw him out.
Perhaps "was" is more accurate, but the skewee is a 3rd year at HLS, not Columbia.
Maybe the bozos at Columbia started it, and the AA types at Harvard climbed aboard the further declining standards express.
The closest I can find some agreement with him is "utter confusion", but on why America has sunk to letting certifiable inmates run the asylum, not that some thug chose the wrong day to attack a cop.
(The Garner case is a bit more complicated, but still involved resisting arrest, even if it was on a relatively minor, "political-economic" charge.)
What's the difference between a dead lawyer in the road, and a dead skunk?
There are skid marks in front of the dead skunk...
I'll bet right after he wrote this impassioned plea/screed for social justice (excuse me, I have to wipe the tears from my eyes), he joined up with some buddies at a kegger and hoisted a few regaling his fellow future ambulance chasers about the scam he foisted on the college admin.
Many years ago I saw an episode of People’s Court (it was before cable; give me a break) where a middle aged black lady was suing her minister. Her club had rented the church bus for an outing. The bus broke down, ruining her plans.
The minister refused to refund her rental fee, so she sued. The judge asked her about an additional claim for a couple of hundred bucks.
In her best Aunt Esther voice, she said, “I was so upset I had to go away for the weekend.” The claim was for her costs in going to a nearby resort.
She would be much too old by now to be in law school. Maybe these “students” are her kids?
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