Dispatches from Dubai: Attending the COP28 UN Climate Conference

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Note: this is the first of a two-part guest post series from BC Law 3L Edwin Ward.

Day 0: 12/6/23

On December 6, after taking my criminal procedure final, I prepared to fly halfway across the world to the United Arab Emirates on a mission to save the planet. 

Maybe I should back up. I am one of the two BC Law students who were chosen to represent Boston College at the 28th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—more commonly known as the UN Climate Conference, or simply COP28. 

This annual conference is a meeting of all the nations of the world to reach consensus on the fight against climate change. The most famous of these conferences, COP21, delivered the groundbreaking Paris Agreement. This year’s COP is the first global stock take to assess our progress on meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. COP28 is also notable for being hosted by the United Arab Emirates, a fossil fuel state that has presented more roadblocks than solutions in the fight to phase out fossil fuels.

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Take a Break from Studying: The Pets of BC Law Ch. 3

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This holiday season, I’m incredibly thankful to everyone who participated by submitting their pets. Stay tuned for Ch. 4, released during the Spring semester, to meet even more of our furry, scaly, and feathered friends!

Asmodeus: Joey Black’s Flemish Giant Rabbit

Joey is a 3L from Rolling Hills, CA and Asmodeus is his 14-month-old Flemish Giant Rabbit who is a “menace to society.” He loves to rampage through Joey’s apartment, tear holes in his clothes and bank account, and destroy Joey’s sense of sanctuary. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Joey shared that Asmodeus “Is perfect and I love him.”

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Get to Know the CSO: Michelle Grossfield

/ Tess Halpern / Leave a comment

A career services advisor can be an amazing resource in law school as you navigate OCI, externships, clerkship applications, and more. However, it’s important that you find the advisor who can best help you reach your personal goals! To do so, follow along with this new series to learn about each CSO advisor at Boston College Law School. Here is our interview with Michelle Grossfield.

What was your path to the CSO, and why did you choose to go into career advising?

After law school, I practiced child welfare law at the public defender’s office in Massachusetts. It was an incredibly rewarding and challenging experience to represent children, families, and legal guardians in the Juvenile and Probate and Family courts in Plymouth and Worcester counties. The stakes in care and protection matters are incredibly high for families, given the fact that parental rights can be terminated, and parents may have no ability for future contact during a child’s upbringing. I was fortunate to have excellent mentors, colleagues, and training early on in my career, and was honored to advocate for the children, mothers, fathers, and parental figures appointed to me as they navigated incredible societal barriers and multiple complex systems.

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From Prose to Precision: A New (Legal) Approach to Writing

/ Christopher Tan / 1 Comment

The end of fall in New England. The trees are bare. Leaves crunch underfoot. Mornings bring a frigid chill that whispers of the winter to come. During these reflective autumn days, amidst the trepidation of exams, I often ponder my journey so far through law school and particularly how it has reshaped my understanding and approach to writing. While in undergrad, writing was taught to evoke a more emotional response through vivid imagery and ideas, legal writing thrives on a different kind of grace — that of precision and clarity. 

Legal writing is a world away from the lyrical prose of Hemingway and Joyce. It is an economical discipline where every word carries weight, and the flourish of language gives way to the sharpness of mercilessly direct expression. In the world of statutes, case law, and legal reasoning, the ability to communicate complex ideas in a simple and effective manner is an exercise in disciplined succinctness. 

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Sticks and Stones: Handling Confrontation Like a Lawyer

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Today’s guest post is written by Glenn Cunha, a Boston College graduate, BC Law adjunct professor, a former managing attorney of the Criminal Bureau in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office and retired Massachusetts Inspector General. He is currently serving as a special prosecutor to the Suffolk County District Attorney.

Please note that today’s post contains language and situations that may be upsetting.

As lawyers, we sometimes take for granted the skills we hav‌e honed over the years during law school and in practice. I wanted to become a lawyer when I realized I could have a career based on talking, arguing and going after bullies. It’s just who I am.  Teachers, family members, coaches and friends would always tell me that I would make a good lawyer someday.

The legal skills we use — advocacy, quick thinking, level headedness — are skills I’ve had my whole life. I certainly refined them as a law student and throughout my career but because they are so natural to me, I tend to think everyone has them. After a situation this past summer, it became apparent to me that this isn’t necessarily true.

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Get to Know the CSO: Chris Teague

/ Tess Halpern / Leave a comment

A career services advisor can be an amazing resource in law school as you navigate OCI, externships, clerkship applications, and more. However, it’s important that you find the advisor who can best help you reach your personal goals! To do so, follow along with this new series to learn about each CSO advisor at Boston College Law School. Here is our interview with Chris Teague.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in law school, and how did you overcome it?

My biggest challenge in law school came during the spring semester of my 1L year. I started the semester very excited to take a class that was closely related to the type of law I wanted to practice, but much to my surprise, I ended up hating the class. This really threw me for a loop because I was one of those students who came to law school knowing EXACTLY what they wanted to do with their degree. When I realized I didn’t enjoy the class, I started to feel kind of lost. I had been so hyper-focused on one practice area that it was hard for me to start thinking about what my other options might be.

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What Students Are Thankful for at Boston College Law School

/ Tess Halpern / Leave a comment

Thanksgiving comes at a difficult time of year for law students. While we want to enjoy the holiday, the hours of travel and time away from our computers can make it stressful as finals inch ever closer. But this year, I wanted to make sure we as a community took at least a little time to focus on what the holiday is all about. There’s plenty to be thankful for here at Boston College Law School, so take a moment to remember what you love about this school. Here’s what some students had to say when they were asked what they’re thankful for at BC Law.

Conner Packebush, 1L: The community, which is incredibly kind. It’s also so easy to talk and connect with professors.

Maria Russo, 2L: Friends who make the stressful finals season more bearable.

Adel Clemonds, 3L: Affinity groups and free food.

Meghan Doyle, 1L: The welcoming community.

Jared Coltey, 2L: First Generation Professionals — this group has given me a sense of community and belonging during stressful times in law school.

Katie Cross, 3L: The amazing friends Boston College has given me that make coming to school everyday something to look forward to.

Christian Bilgrien, 1L: The professors showing care for our mental health.

Laura Stateler, 2L: Community, community, community. 

Paul Sevigny, 3L: Community, support, and being treated like a human first and foremost.

Katarina Bettencourt, 1L: The kindness and support of students and faculty.

Nicole Kerrigan, 2L: My section’s softball team.

Aaron Morris, 3L: The understanding and appreciation of life outside of law school from professors, faculty, and other students that allow law school — and the stresses it brings — to not overtake my entire life.

Andres Leiva, 1L: The opportunity to meet lawyers from big law firm practices and make professional connections.

Cordelia Houck, 2L: The sense of community both inside and outside the classroom, which makes the stress of law school more manageable. When things get stressful, the people around me keep me grounded and remind me that there’s more to life than law school. 

Gabriel (Gabe) McCarthy, 3L: The friends I have met from all walks of life, and the chance to learn from such amazing professors.

Tess Halpern is a third-year student and president of the Impact blog. Contact her at halperte@bc.edu.

The Yearly Conundrum: Three Ways to Get Ahead of Flu Season and Exams

/ Alex Mostaghimi / Leave a comment

It’s not like a solar eclipse or Hadley’s comet, it’s the annual convergence between flu season and first-semester exams. Lucky enough for us, nature dropped a new addition on the menu of discontent four years ago, in the form of Covid-19. Unless humanity manages to eradicate the most common seasonal viruses or the earth’s hemispheres flip, it is a problem we must contend with as long as the school year begins in Autumn.  

Inevitably, there is a cost-benefit analysis within every fevered mind: the need to balance the benefits of attending a class where material is likely to be more complex as the semester wraps up and the cost of potentially infecting your classmates, neglecting rest and recovery, and having to face a long day in a fatigued state. Moreover, professors still need cold call victims and a dwindling pool of targets only increases the burden of each unwilling participant. Finally, professors are more likely to drop hints at what will be covered in the exam the following month.  

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Get to Know the CSO: Amy Kolb

/ Tess Halpern / Leave a comment

A career services advisor can be an amazing resource in law school as you navigate OCI, externships, clerkship applications, and more. However, it’s important that you find the advisor who can best help you reach your personal goals! To do so, follow along with this new series to learn about each CSO advisor at Boston College Law School. Here is our interview with Amy Kolb.

What’s the best piece of career advice you can offer students?

I think it’s important for students to stay flexible and open-minded during their job searches and throughout their careers. By approaching a job search with an adaptable mindset, students may discover unexpected interests and opportunities they would’ve otherwise overlooked.

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The Implied Warranty of Fitness

/ Justin Sells / 1 Comment

As finals season approaches, many of us are buried in our textbooks, reviewing case briefs, finalizing outlines and memos, and visiting professors during office hours. In doing so, a few may have encountered the doctrine of “implied warranty of fitness.” For some, this doctrine might sound familiar from contract law.1 For others, it might sound familiar from property law.2 But the “implied warranty of fitness” I’m referring to exists beyond model codes, cases, and classrooms: the implied need to be physically and mentally fit. 

For newly minted 1Ls, law school has shown us that we constantly engage in rigorous and complex thought processes, from comprehending unnecessarily convoluted cases and writing legal memos to pondering hypotheticals and participating in competitions. These “mental gymnastics” require countless hours studying in the library and at home on top of regularly scheduled class time—all of which is spent sitting down. Evidently, life in the legal world is largely sedentary, which makes sense considering that physical fitness is neither an ABA requirement nor testable material on the UBE.

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