Posted on 12/19/2014 10:12:45 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Future attorneys have an obligation to face violence and sexual assault in a different way than most.
Attorneys belong to a profession that requires many to look squarely at the world's horrors. They prosecute serial killers. They defend accused rapists and child molesters. A lawyer leading a class-action suit might pore over depositions describing harrowing deaths from cancer or children burned up in cars during crashes. Sometimes that will happen even as the attorney's father is dying of cancer, or her kids are the same age as the ones killed in the rear seats above the faulty fuel tanks.
Even a corporate lawyer working for a white-shoe firm never knows what depravity they'll come across in a private email they're reading during document review. Lawyers must think, write and speak with clarity even when faced with such horrors. They must keep their heads while witnessing awful injustices, appearing before hostile judges, or enduring profane outbursts from other attorneys or clients, all while exhausted by a long week of headaches and heartburn. Hence the alarm a growing number of law school professors feel at the trend of students objecting to parts of the curriculum that they find too upsetting.
It isn't that these law faculty object to every request for special understanding. They're happy to postpone an exam for a student whose mother died, to excuse a former POW from a graphic lecture describing torture, or to spare a rape victim with PTSD from participation in a mock trial about a gang rape. What they're worried about isn't a slight uptick in special requests from students who've suffered unusual trauma, but the increasingly common tendency of students to pathologize normal feelings of outrage and offense....
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I thought cougars tended to be Baby Boomers or older Gen X women.
Okay, where’s the “micro-agression” alert?
Lawyers. They remind me of the parasites you find on rabbits in the summer.
Lawyers:People=Ticks:Mammals
“No! I don't wanna”
~Future Lawyers in Onesies of Amerika
Our law school was so dull . . . everybody was much too busy studying to worry about sex. Even those of us who were married at the time . . . .
It was the competition. The law school I went to was very competitive. Every 1st Year coming in had been in the top 10% of their undergrad college graduating class, so they were all used to being at the top. So, the struggle to be the top 10% of the top 10% drove people to extremes.
In addition to that, between 30% to 40% of the 1st Year class was weeded out by the time you got to 2nd Year. Part of that was the stress - people who just couldn’t hack it, people who didn’t want it bad enough. The other part of it was just very hard grading, failing the bottom third of the class just to get them out.
We studied very hard and worked very hard, but we also partied really hard. It was way worse than high school or undergrad in terms of wild parties and craziness. Socially, however, it was like middle school. Our “playground cliques” were our study groups... huge drama fights, people being kicked out, or recruited into other “better” groups, etc. It was insanity.
Middle school immaturity levels with soap opera level bed-hopping and a fraternity rush week level of alcohol intake. People deliberately sabotaging each other mentally and emotionally.
It calmed down a little as 2Ls, and then people starting straightening as 3Ls, but it was still pretty wild.
I’ve always thought I should write a few of the stories out as TV show screen plays. I just don’t think anyone would believe half of it really happened.
The school was pretty competitive, but of course this was a long time ago (the 70s). We had a small group (a/k/a "the Voidoids") that were wild and I guess that's how they handled the pressure. The rest of us just worked. All the time.
They were few in number and they were universally despised. One got caught and left the school - not sure if he was expelled or if he just ran.
We did have one guy who could have given Kingsfield a run for his money. There will be a line at his grave, not to pay respects.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.