Intellectual Life

Tinker Bell or Prison Time? (Paradigms of Criminal Law Part One)

/ Amelia M. Wirts, Esq. / 2 Comments
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sujatha baliga, Restorative Justice Project and Associate Director, NCCD, speaking at the Rebellious Lawyering Conference at Yale Law School, Feb. 21, 2015 (photo taken by me)

“What do crime victims actually want?”

That is a question that sujatha baliga is asked quite frequently as a facilitator in restorative justice programs that focus on making a victim whole after a crime rather than punishing the person who committed the crime. “You can never really predict what will make a victim whole. Sometimes, it’s Tinker Bell,” balinga said. Continue reading →

Passion Killing and Mercy

/ Amelia M. Wirts, Esq. / 1 Comment

Finding one’s wife in the act of committing adultery, flying into a rage, and killing her or her lover is probably not a murder. At least that is the way American law has treated that scenario. Passion killing is an old term that used to designate small set of circumstances, like finding your wife with another man, in which intentional killing did not amount to murder. These circumstances, including such chivalrous acts as ‘mutual combat’ and ‘resisting illegal arrest’ were fixed, and they could drastically reduce your sentence.

The distinctions that structure our law are often also the distinctions that structure our shared values, and sometimes in the middle of a criminal law class, you can get an insight into those values.  Continue reading →

BC Law Magazine: John Kerry AND Amazing Law School Admissions Essays

/ Luciabc / Leave a comment

For anyone thinking about law school, and BC in particular, the latest issue of the BC Law Magazine (http://lawmagazine.bc.edu/) is not to be missed. One of the things BC prides itself on is educating future lawyers who go out to serve their communities in a variety of ways. This issue of the magazine profiles a number of such leaders who got their start at BC Law, including of course Secretary of State John Kerry. As if that wasn’t enough, there are also a number of exceptional law school admissions essays reprinted which are great examples of the kind of succinct and compelling narratives which can grab a reader’s attention. Enjoy!

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Helplessness: Why this philosopher needs a law degree

/ Amelia M. Wirts, Esq. / 2 Comments

Do you think the world is basically just? Do people get what they deserve most of the time? Provoked by an article in The Guardian entitled “Believing that Life is Fair Makes You a Terrible Person,” I discussed this question with one of my best law school friends on a ride home from school. Neither of us could square the idea of fairness with the world in front of us, and I think that is why we are both in law school.

The article discusses a theory– the just-world hypothesis– based on a number of studies. The theory suggests that people just can’t handle being helpless in the face of great injustice. So they find ways of imagining that the injustice is deserved. They imagine that this poor family is lazy, that black man was a criminal, or this woman was asking for it.  On the other hand, the same studies suggest that when terrible things happen and there is a concrete way to help, people tend to sympathize with the sufferer rather than blaming her.

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Life at BC Law: Working During the School Year

/ Luciabc / Leave a comment

Working at BC Law’s Admissions Office I often hear from prospective or accepted students who are wondering about whether they can work during the school year while attending BC Law. I remember when I was getting ready to go to law school I thought I would try to work my first year. I worked all throughout undergrad, so I expected that it would be the same in the law school. After starting 1L year, however, I realized that there were a number of reasons to hold off and wait for my second year before getting a part-time job.

Most importantly, something I didn’t know before I got to law school is that students are highly discouraged from working during their 1L year. I think there may be an ABA rule about this but I’m not completely sure. In any case, you’ll be adjusting to a new way of learning and studying and it is best to devote yourself to your classes. I know a few students who have quietly worked a few hours a week at service industry jobs they had before school, or gotten a cushy job at the library, but the general consensus is that it is wise to steer clear of working during 1L year. Your grades during this year are extremely important so it is best to hunker down with the books and use your time outside of the library to get to know your new classmates.

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Racial Justice, Law, and Doing More

/ Amelia M. Wirts, Esq. / 2 Comments
Die In

Photo of the student organized BLACK LIVES MATTER – A Demonstration of Solidarity @ BC Law Event. Photo by Laura Partamian

Her voice was quivering, but she was still shouting. That’s what I remember most about the young woman in front of me. I could almost feel the sting of disrespect as she described her face being shoved against a brick wall by a police officer. I couldn’t help but relate to her — a graduate student in her 20s, pulling off the hipster look much better than I can. The difference between us was that she is black and I am not. That difference meant that she had spent her life in fear of law enforcement, treated like a criminal when she wasn’t one.

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Witchcraft and the Law – My Reading Assignment this Week

/ Rob Rossi / 2 Comments

The reading assignments for most law school classes consist of cases and statutes. They’re often long and complex and necessitate multiple read-throughs in order to fully grasp the core concepts.

In this regard, Professor Bilder‘s American Legal History is a very different class. It fulfills BC Law’s “Perspectives on Law and Justice” graduation requirement, which means that the course “examines the normative ideal of justice from a theoretical, historical, or comparative perspective.” In other words, the reading assignments are not just cases and statutes.

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Better Love It, and at BC, I know I do…

/ mptierney / 1 Comment

When you pick a law school, one of the biggest things you have to recognize is that this is the place where you are going to spend three years of your life. For most, that’s a third of your twenties, and almost as long as college. You better love where you go to school (I know I do). The thing that has made law school for me is the faculty.

The faculty at BC Law are nothing short of incredible. Of course they are leaders in their fields. Of course they are legal pioneers. This is BC, remember? But what truly sets these doctors of law apart is just how dedicated they are to their students. It’s almost scary how much they are willing to do for us.

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My Law Review YouTube Playlist

/ Rob Rossi / 1 Comment

This past summer, I had the honor of being invited to join the Boston College Law Review. BCLR is one of five academic journals operated on campus by BC Law students. Like much of law school, it’s a great learning opportunity that requires a lot of hard work.

Bluebook

A lot of that hard work involves thumbing through this thing.

Membership on journals is made up of about an equal number of 3Ls and 2Ls. Generally, the 3Ls serve as editors and the 2Ls serve as staff writers. I can’t speak to what it’s like to be an editor, but what I find to be the best part about being a staff writer is the opportunity to research and write a Note about a topic of your own choosing. So what did I choose for my Note topic?

I pitched the topic as “jurisdictional limitations on the postmortem right of publicity.” What that means in English is that the estates of celebrities love to keep other people from using those celebrities’ images to make money, and they come up with creative and not-always-legal ways to do it.

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Finally Finished Finals!!

/ rwmakawa / Leave a comment
This is the face of unbridled joy.

This is the face of unbridled joy.

I promise I’ll stop with the alliterative “F” titles. It’s nice to be able to put another semester in the books, and spend some quality time with family and friends back home! It’s always surprising how fast the semester ends, and also how much you’re able to learn in 13 weeks. Learning is the fun part, and preparing for The Law School Exam is…well, the non-fun part. It’s important to realize that exam season is a marathon, not a sprint, and even though you don’t get a cool medal, it’s such a great feeling to cross the finish line and know that you’ve put your all into it.

If you had a slate of classes like I did, your exam prep probably looked like this…at a minimum:

Finals Prep

 

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