Month: September 2018

It’s a Good Time to be a Lawyer

/ Brendan McKinnon / Leave a comment

I am pleased to host a guest blog today from Jason Giannetti, a 2003 graduate of Boston College Law School.

I have been an immigration attorney in Massachusetts for fifteen years and I’ve never been as proud to be one as I am now.

Let’s face it, in American popular opinion, lawyers are not exactly considered super heroes.  In fact, in films such as The Incredibles, lawyers are the anti-superhero.  It is due to them and their litigation and lobbying that the “supers” have to renounce their superpowers to be like all the rest of us.  In the 1993 film Philadelphia, though attorney Joe Miller (played by Denzel Washington) turns out to be the hero of the film, Andy, his client (played by Tom Hanks), asks, “Joe, what do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean?”  The answer: “A good start.”

Be that as it may, America is one of the most litigious nations on the planet.  Perhaps Americans have low regard for lawyers because they are such “a necessary evil” in the eyes of most.  The only profession with lower regard is politician and, as we all know, many of those politicians are themselves lawyers.

However, I think that besides hemming in people’s exercise of strength (Incredibles) and creating bureaucratic and structural obstacles to swift justice (Philadelphia), the real source of America’s collective ire with attorneys is that they seem to disregard the truth: they are mercenary warriors, defending whatever position (right or wrong, truthful or not) that pays the bills.  The most egregious example of this to date is Rudy Giuliani’s statement, “Truth is not truth.”

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3 of My Favorite Places in Boston to Get Books (not the law ones)

/ Alex Bou-Rhodes / 1 Comment

Contrary to popular belief, you can make a decent amount of time to pleasure read in law school. During 1L, a stereotypically time-crunched period, I saw my reading productivity sky rocket. It was a way to reclaim some sort of agency over the knowledge I was consuming. In the beginning of the first semester I read two of Woodward’s Nixon books (All the President’s Men, which left me yearning to know the ending, told in The Final Days), and over the course of winter I finished a trilogy of sorts that addresses the white, conservative discomfit with America’s direction (White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, which offers a macro, historical perspective, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which takes a more personal look at Louisiana in particular, and, of course, Hillbilly Elegy, micro, personal perspective).

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Schools and Family Separations in Massachusetts

/ Brianna Marshall / Leave a comment

I am pleased to host a guest blog today from Meg Ziegler, a 2L at Boston College Law School.

The outrage over the separation of migrant children from their families at our border is necessary and should be unrelenting. But family separations are happening in Massachusetts, too, and one root cause is that schools unnecessarily (or inappropriately) involve the Department of Children and Families (DCF) and the courts in the lives of children and their families for school-based issues.

This occurs in a number of ways. If a student is deemed a “Habitual School Offender” or a “Habitual Truant,” schools can file a Child Requiring Assistance (CRA) with the juvenile court. Once a CRA is filed, the school and family attend a preliminary hearing and may potentially have to attend a bench trial, a conference, and/or a disposition hearing. At a disposition hearing, the court may ultimately remove the child from his/her/their family and place the child in DCF custody.

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