The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and while I’m not pulling my hair out over the prospect of finals, I’m thinking wistfully about summer plans. Not a vacation, no – I’m thinking of the 48 hours I will have every week, free of assigned readings and impeding cold calls.
The perfect amount of time to visit one of the city’s many bookstores. For those of you who will be in Boston this summer, here’s a small guide.
Continue readingBC Law Magazine has been writing about what makes our community special for over thirty years. I always look forward to a new issue, and the Winter 2025 edition is full of stories of alumni, faculty, and students doing pretty amazing work that speaks to our mission of delivering justice all over the world.
I found the cover story, “Then Came the Reckoning,” particularly compelling. It was not an easy read, telling the story of alumna Erica Brody fighting for justice for a group of children abused by their foster parents, but the results were truly astonishing–literally changing the way the system works in Massachusetts. One of the most frightening things about the case was not just what happened in those foster homes (one in particular over many years), but how the state agency involved in placements actively worked to cover everything up. And until Erica and her team fought for change, the agency was pretty well protected by state law. Well worth the read, but we should offer a trigger warning for depictions of abuse of children.
Continue readingHappy Valentine’s Day, BC Law! Remember to tell your law school people that you love them!
Love is all over the place in law school. It probably makes sense since law students spend so much time together (shout out to our workload for inspiring a forced proximity trope). I had the opportunity to talk with BC Law class of 2016 alum Meghan Morgan about how she met her husband back in her first semester of law school in Fall of 2013 during one fateful 1L softball game. Fun fact: Rob actually helped to create BC Impact. Thank you to both of them for sharing their story with me and for letting me share it with the BC Law community. Let this be your sign to join your section’s softball team next fall.
Continue readingIf you’ve ever seen Once Upon A Time in Hollywood – or are chronically online (like me) — you’re familiar with the image of Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo Dicaprio in a violently yellow t-shirt, pointing furiously at an (off-camera) television screen. The image was reenacted by me recently, as I poured over my criminal law reading this week.
The reason I was furiously pointing at a case from the 1800s? Well, I recognized it. Not from a previous class, but from a podcast I had listened to on my commute to work this summer – ‘Rebuttal,’
Continue readingI like to think of myself as one of the most non-traditional students at BC Law. I have a three-year-old daughter named Rose, who I am simply obsessed with. I am in my 30’s, a fact which seems to shock my classmates. I am an Active Duty Military member of the U.S. Coast Guard, having served eight years of service already, and I will (hopefully) get to serve at least twelve more. My little brother is also a 1L, grinding through his first year at BC Law and thriving.
Lastly, I am a transfer student.
Continue readingI’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone.
– Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About when I Talk About Running
Most days, especially as fall rolls into winter, I get up before the sun. In the pre-dawn hours, I fumble around in the darkness of my quiet, slumbering apartment, attempting to make coffee and not wake up my partner. As this process gets underway, my dog follows me around dutifully, eyes shining like copper pennies, ears at full mast, ready to head out for another morning jaunt. His herding eye remains trained on its quarry as I put on my running shoes, and he readies himself for our adventure, stretching and strutting around on my creaky wood floors.
Continue readingThank goodness the library doesn’t issue noise complaints on the first day of school.
My friends and I — running on the high of eating a grocery store salad in the Yellow Room — skipped to the fourth floor of the library. There, we each took turns accidentally playing Instagram Reels on full volume. Like clockwork, anxious 1L’s flooded the library atrium at 3:00 p.m., muttering reflections about their inaugural lectures and cold calls to new friends.
There’s nothing like the first day of 3L — or as my friends and I have dubbed it, “senior year.” Novelty accompanies familiarity: freshly-painted Stuart Hall walls and large-scale portraits dot the paths we’ve spent pacing between classes. Somehow, Legal Grounds manages to brew better coffee every year. And even the light streaming through the library’s fourth floor windows cuts different shadows on the books and reports lining the shelves.
Continue readingTwo weddings, a funeral, and a naturalization ceremony. This pretty much sums up my time in law school, in many ways. I lost my dad suddenly at the end of my 1L Spring semester (during finals: really wouldn’t recommend). During my 2L and 3L years I had two weddings: one in the U.S. and one in the U.K., where I grew up and my family still live. (For the sake of clarity: these weddings were to the same person. I’m nothing if not consistent.) And after having lived in the U.S. since 2016, I became a citizen in February of last year.
Of course, my time in law school was marked by a great deal more. But, when I think back to my time at BC Law, these are the progress points—the proverbial highway markers as it were—that map out the last three years for me temporally. These events were the points at which “life” most intruded into law school. Law school is all-consuming in a way I do not think I fully comprehended before I began my 1L year. I had worked for five years before returning to school, including three and a half years in a high-pressure role in New York City. But nothing prepared me for the way that law school threatened to take over and take me away from my sense of self. The death of my father, marrying my wife, cementing my life over in the U.S.: these were the events and the life-is-what-happens-to-you-while-you’re-busy-making-other-plans moments that burst the illusion of the bubble of law school for me.
Continue readingAs we embark on final exams and the end of a semester, I’m grateful to wrap up my final BC Law Impact Blog post with the pets of BC, thanks to everyone’s stellar submissions of their adorable pets. My niche at the blog has not been hard-hitting journalism, and I’m happy not to start now.
Caleb is a 2L from Lakeville, MN and Cooper is his 3-year-old Golden Doodle who is energetic, loving, and [a little too] friendly.
Continue readingWith less than a month before finals, the reality has dawned on me. After I take my last final for Con Law, on May 13, I’ll officially be done with 1L. Law school, thus far, has been a rewarding experience. I’ve learned more about the law than I could’ve ever imagined possible in just one year.
Here’s what I’m looking forward to as I take the next step in my law school journey.
Let’s face it. The 1L schedule is rough. In one way, it’s great to come away with exposure to all different types of law. But I definitely won’t miss the 8:30 am-4:30 pm school days. The main piece of reassurance I’ve received from my older peers has been that “it only gets better from here.” Having more of a work-life balance next year will certainly help.
Continue reading
BC Law: Impact 