Intellectual Life

Four Tips for Navigating Grade Disappointment

/ Alexandra Staller / 1 Comment

Once again I am directly addressing the 1L class, and also airing out my dirty laundry. Everything I write below—like all my Impact posts—is what I wish someone could have told me before coming to school. As always, all opinions and experiences are my own, as I can only speak to what I endured during my 1L year.

“Endure” will be the theme here. It’s a strong word I typically find only in my romantasy books. Merriam-Webster tells us it means “to remain firm under suffering or misfortune without yielding.” Very dramatic. But to say a student endures his or her 1L year does not fail to satisfy Merriam-Webster’s definition. Some of you may feel like you’re hanging by a thread, trying to go through the motions of law school one day at a time. You are enduring.

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Happy New Year: A Time for Renewal and New Beginnings

/ Staniel Brutis / Leave a comment

The New Year has come. This time of the year serves as a period for renewal and new beginnings for law students like myself, who have survived the previous semester. New classes, professors, and classmates provide us with an opportunity to feel rejuvenated ahead of the remainder of the spring semester. 

However, after 3 years of being a Massachusetts resident, I’ve found that the weather of this winter season fails to produce the same vibration of revival that is felt upon campus. It seems that spring fits the theme of the new year much better than the snow and 4pm nightfall that this dead period brings. Curious as to why the weather and seasons misalign, I took a quick look into history and found answers within the civilizations of classical antiquity, particularly the Romans.

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The Nativity and the Birth of a Constitutional Question

/ Staniel Brutis / Leave a comment

Christmas is near. For many, the season begins with Santa Claus, a generous and magical figure that delivers gifts in the quiet hours of the night. However, I did not grow up celebrating a large, boisterous white man breaking and entering into my home as a child, who supposedly provided gifts but in reality robbed my parents of the appreciation they deserved for buying me the newest commodity solicited to me through advertisements embedded within my after school cartoons. At that time, it was probably the newest Game Boy or Nintendo DS. Nevertheless, instead of the aforementioned trespasser, I celebrated the miraculous events of Jesus Christ’s (Yeshua (יֵשׁוּעַ)) incarnation.

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In Case You Missed It: Boston College’s McMullen Museum

/ Staniel Brutis / Leave a comment

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. 

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Turkey, Torts, and Turmoil: Happy 1L Thanksgiving!  

/ Sydney Byun / Leave a comment

Last week, amidst the frenzy of trying to finish my final memo, I crafted what I thought to be a fantastic plan for the upcoming Thanksgiving break: lock myself in my apartment until I develop a miraculous understanding of the rules of civil procedure, frantically apply for as many jobs as humanly possible, and purchase a pumpkin pie to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

Now that I’ve submitted my memo and the initial mania has subsided somewhat, I can tell that the overconsumption of pie is likely the only realistic part of that plan. This is the paradox of Thanksgiving break for law students—on one hand, everyone is relieved to have some time off. On the other, it doesn’t really feel like a break with the looming threat of finals hanging over all of us. 

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What the Heck is Futtitinni? An Approach to Law School

/ Joe Monti / Leave a comment

Sicilians have an approach to life they call “futtitinni.” The term translates to “don’t care,” “don’t worry about it,” or “let it go.” As a 1L trying to juggle academics and career decisions at the same time, this seems like an impossible mindset to maintain. However, futtitinni is not simply about an indifference to life; it refers to focusing on what truly matters. Obviously, grades take significant precedence at this point in the year. I also do not intend to say that we should all take a lot of time for ourselves or relax for the rest of the semester. We are all in the trenches, and that is precisely where futtitinni can play a beneficial role. The term arose out of hardship and daily struggle, not out of periods of prosperity. Nobody expects finals season to be easy, but joy can still exist within this final push.

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What’s With All The Latin? A Retracing of Our Legal Language

/ Staniel Brutis / Leave a comment

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. 

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