After my last exam, I took my usual walk home down Commonwealth Avenue, past Boston College’s main campus toward the quiet rows of Evergreen Cemetery. Winter had settled in, that strange season in Boston when night seems to arrive by three in the afternoon. The air had turned sharp, the kind of cold that still surprises a Floridian like myself, no matter how many winters I spend here. Out of the corner of my eye, a tall stone building caught the light of the moon and stood illuminated in the distance. I recognized it as Boston College’s McMullen Museum.
Continue readingAuthor: Staniel Brutis
What’s With All The Latin? A Retracing of Our Legal Language
Prior to law school, I had been forewarned that to be a fluent reader of American case law, you must be a bilingual speaker of both English and Legalese. Despite this warning, I still found myself stumbling upon foreign words that stood nobly out amongst the rest of familiar modern English. These strange, yet dignified terms derived from the classical language of Latin. Latin was the principal language of the Holy Roman Empire and served as the foundation of its legal, administrative, and scholarly traditions.
Continue readingTrick or Treat! Halloween’s Age-Old Contract
Dressing up as an iconic character from a coveted television show, film, or book is a cherished tradition of the internationally celebrated holiday, Halloween. This day brings excitement and joy to not just children, but to grown up law students as well. Halloween has its roots in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (a Gaelic word pronounced “SAH-win”), a pagan religious celebration to welcome the harvest at the end of summer, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. The pagan holiday gained its notoriety in the Catholic religious tradition when, in the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor saints. Over time, All Saints Day came to incorporate some of the traditions of Samhain. From this, the evening before All Saints Day became known as All Hallows Eve, and later, Halloween.
Continue readingDifferentiating Depression and Despair: A Guide for Law Students
Struggling with mental health can be overwhelming, especially when trying to face it alone. One of the greatest challenges is simply understanding what we are feeling. Mental health is complex. Emotions do not arrive classified and labeled for our interpretation. It isn’t always clear whether we are exhausted, stressed, depressed, or experiencing something existential like despair. This uncertainty makes it all the more important to draw distinctions. Not every form of suffering is the same. Naming what we experience can provide clarity and direction for how to respond. In the realm of law, learning to name what we’re experiencing, whether it’s stress, burnout, or something deeper, can be as vital as identifying the right issue in a fact pattern.
Continue readingHoly Selfishness & The Gift-Giving Virtue: A Cycle of Overcoming
“All wish to possess great knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price.”
– Juvenal
- HOLY SELFISHNESS
In this article, I offer a perspective aimed at advancing the individual student while uplifting the collective student body. I accomplish this by advocating for the simple act of sharing knowledge. The principles used within this article derive from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Continue readingExploring the Possibility of Being Wrong: A Method to Loving Thy Peer
ACKNOWLEDGING HUMANITY’S FALLIBILITY
Within the legal realm, doubt about the possibility of being wrong is not merely a practical concern but an ontological one. Reasonable doubt, a foundational concept in criminal trials, reflects the level of skepticism a trier of fact must maintain before rendering a guilty verdict. At its core, the principle acknowledges humanity’s fallibility, the recognition that our judgments are, by nature, imperfect. We, as humans, are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and the balance between the two is often shaped by individual perception. In recognition of this fallibility, the legal system embeds procedural safeguards such as appellate review, immigration bond redetermination, and the writ of habeas corpus, all designed to guard against our innate capacity for error.
Continue readingConfronting Anxiety As A Law Student: An Existential Approach
I. INTRODUCTION
As a law student, I am confident that we are all familiar with anxiety, an invisible entity that has psychological and physiological effects upon the individual in whom it arises. It causes us to experience fear and trembling in moments where opportunity and possibility are the ripest. Chronic or severe anxiety can manifest in the form of emotional distress, obsessive thinking, compulsive behaviors, relational struggles, and general restlessness. Anxiety often carries a negative connotation due to these effects. However, in this essay, I’d like to offer a different perspective on anxiety, a perspective that diminishes anxiety to a mere nothing while simultaneously promoting it as the most transformative feeling an individual can experience. An absurd paradox.
Continue reading‘Being’ a Law Student & the Movement Away from Bad Faith
I. INTRODUCTION
We established in “’Being’ a Law Student and the Freedom of Choice” that human reality is inherently and radically free, meaning that freedom is an unavoidable aspect of our existence. In other words, we have no choice but to be free. Because freedom emerges from the very structure of human reality, we are not simply what we are; rather, we must actively become what we are. This process is continuous, unfolding in every moment. The act of being, and simultaneously negating being, occurs instantaneously and perpetually.
Unlike determinism, which asserts that every action results from a preceding cause, human motivation is not dictated by past events but by future possibilities and the desire to bring oneself into being. However, the anguish that accompanies this radical freedom often leads us to negate it. Faced with the burden of being able to become our greatest potential or our worst failure, we attempt to escape this responsibility by resigning ourselves to the in-itself, ignoring choice and possibility.
In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre defines bad faith as follows:
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BC Law: Impact 