“Whoever a werewolf imprints on can’t be harmed. It’s their most absolute law.” ― Edward Cullen in Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 1
The stress of law school finals can humble even the most confident students. It distills months of study, outlining, and class participation into one exam to determine your mastery of the material. It all comes down to a few hours in a classroom. It’s daunting, overwhelming, and, even at times, exhilarating.
Getting through finals involves more than just frantically typing through a CREAC or bubbling a scantron. Days of review and practice ahead of time can make or break you when the lights come on. Those days feel long, isolating, and arduous. In short, it’s a grind. Last semester, I looked for ways to make the experience as novel and exciting as possible. The answer I found (admittedly not for everyone) involved hanging out with some old pals from the silver screen.
I will say now that this may not work for everyone and if any of my professors (current or former) are reading, I hope you can appreciate that this comes from a good place. When I found myself in the throes of working through yet another draft of my outline, I needed a boost of adrenaline to power through the cold and unforgiving nights of December in Boston. Moreover, watching (arguably) bad movies helped me think through Civ Pro, Torts, and Contracts. They made me laugh, think, and, most importantly, feel like hey, if Stephanie Meyer can get rich writing Twilight, maybe there’s hope for me too.
When I rewatched Twilight (I won’t say how many times I have watched it), I wondered if any due process protections existed to guard against abuses of power by the Voltari. From what we see, it does not seem so. This group of unelected officials arrives on the scene ready to summarily execute the entire Cullen clan based on the word of one witness (who was mistaken) who says Edward and Bella created a vampiric child (shoutout half-human Renesme). On the other side of the aisle, when Jacob imprints on good old Renesme a.k.a. Nessy, we learn that the werewolves have laws that cannot be contravened, seemingly under any circumstance. The imprinting process creates a contractual obligation demanding specific performance, even if Jacob must turn against his tribe to do so.
Harry Potter also had me thinking about contract law. In the Goblet of Fire, Harry is forced to participate in the Triwizard tournament, despite being underaged, because he supposedly signed a magical contract. We find out later that the signature is a forgery, and our hero had to risk life and limb in the worst version of field day that I could imagine because the wizarding world is not friendly to bending the laws of specific performance either. Talk about an unconscionable decision. In the Order of The Phoenix, Harry uses magic while underage and in front of a muggle, seemingly a strict liability offense that should automatically lead to his expulsion from Hogwarts. But not, as Dumbledore presents a necessity defense to the Ministry of Magic’s judiciary branch, seemingly composed of a large panel of judges representing a magical politburo, who then makes an exception in the case of self-defense.
I could go on and on. Would the events of Star Wars occur if an intergalactic version of the UCC existed? Instead of a battle between the dark and light sides of the force, the trade war that began the events of all nine movies may have been averted with clearer contract laws. In Pirates of the Caribbean, I pondered over the seeming incongruity of people devoted to piracy respecting the legal invocation of a parley. You get the picture.
My point is that it made the experience of finals less of an endurance game, and something that I could have (some) fun getting through. Law school can make every little thing, every decision, every minute of the day, feel massively consequential. Even more so during finals, when the pressure ratchets up for us all. That makes it even more important to find ways to make it, dare I say it, a little more enjoyable. Studying the law can be heavy. The subject matter is both dense and, at times, emotionally draining. Levity can help. There are no medals for suffering more than all your classmates. If you want to perform to your best, finding ways to make concepts you’ve thought through time and time again feel a little novel helps when the going gets toughest.
Not everyone will turn to movies from their (age admission incoming) teen years to work through the finals grind. Reading books, watching TV, cooking, listening to music, and many other non-law school activities work too. The point is to get your mind off the pressure in whatever way works for you. A friend of mine told me about a quote from Bill Murray (it may be apocryphal) that essentially boils down to this: what don’t you do better when you’re relaxed? I think about it a lot.
Watching goofy movies with callow movie stars relaxes me. Bella and Edward’s torturous romantic journey, with that wild interloper Jacob, will always bring some belly laughs. Anakin Skywalker lamenting the evils of sand is the type of thing that makes even a curmudgeonly law student smile. Harry, Ron, and Hermoine hunting Horcruxes using clues in children’s books and golden snitches makes navigating the Erie Doctrine or joint and several liability a little more tolerable.
Everyone has their recipe, and this one works for me. The main thing is finding ways to remember that life and law school do not need to dominate every waking second of your life, even during finals. Study hard, parse your notes and outlines, re-read your cases, and work through those hypos, the work needs to happen. But also, make some time to laugh, goof off, and enjoy yourself. If you do, I bet the performance you hope for on these exams will come to pass.
Ian Hurley is a first-year student at BC Law. Contact him at hurleyia@bc.edu.
BC Law: Impact 