#iambclaw

What Law School Has Done to the Way I Read the News

/ Isabella Calise / Leave a comment

The other day, I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across a video of a flight attendant walking down the aisle of a plane holding a cat.

Presumably, the cat belonged to one of the passengers. The flight attendant was holding it up and asking everyone, one row at a time, if it was theirs. It was one of those videos that was clearly supposed to make you smile. A cat had somehow gotten loose on a plane, a flight attendant was trying to reunite it with its owner, and everyone was apparently having a pretty good time.

The news story ended there.

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Better Lighting, Better Lattes: Study Spots Beyond the Basement

/ Sydney Byun / Leave a comment

As we enter October, the weather will get colder, the leaves will get crispier, and law school will get spookier than ever. As someone who spent more hours in the Law Library basement last year than any sane person should, I can speak with authority when I say we’re approaching the point in the semester when it’s time to start considering alternatives. Luckily, BC Law students don’t have to travel far to find great study spots.

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Three Questions to Ask Yourself When Picking Your Practice Area

/ Isabella Calise / Leave a comment

No, this is not a BuzzFeed quiz.

There won’t be a personality type at the end telling you that you’re a “natural-born M&A associate” because you picked spreadsheets over courtrooms. Unfortunately, I also can’t promise that answering three questions will magically reveal your dream practice area.

I actually came into law school with a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted to litigate, and I was already interested in white-collar defense. But if I’m being honest, I hadn’t really stopped to think about it on a deeper level. I knew I had experience in criminal law and liked the idea of it, but I wanted to make sure I liked the actual work too. If you took away the cool-sounding practice-area name, would I still want to do the job?

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Lessons on Success Through Helping Others

/ Christopher Campanella / Leave a comment

“Achievement is hollow if it only benefits you; true success is measured by how you help others.” 

This reminder often came when my younger brother and I grew too focused on outdoing each other, yet it took years for me to truly understand my mother’s words. Growing up only a year apart, my youth was defined by achievements through competition, when every challenge felt like an opportunity to prove my worth. That mindset carried into my education, where every debate tournament, Chinese poetry contest, and final exam was met with an unrelenting desire to succeed. My achievements reinforced the value of hard work, preparation, and the payoff from delayed gratification, but it was my pursuit of a career in law that helped me come to fully appreciate my mother’s words. This epiphany revealed how a legal career will allow me to use my competitive drive in service to others to achieve true success.

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So You Want to Be a Bostonian: Weather

/ Devin Martin / Leave a comment

Welcome to the greatest place on earth. It’s probably smaller, colder, and meaner than wherever you came from. Still, you couldn’t have picked a better city to spend law school, or perhaps a lifetime.

Boston is many things; welcoming is not one of them. Our winters are cold, our people, even colder, and our insular culture can send you packing before you even hear someone say “wicked”.​

Luckily for you, the prima facie case for being accepted as a “Bostonian” is as follows:

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What Clients Taught Me that I Couldn’t Have Learned Alone

/ Alene Hanson / Leave a comment

I applied to work in legal research at a time when all eyes were on the police.

My hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, had become a national case study for the consequences of overpolicing, and I realized how little I knew about the legal systems meant to prevent such harm. My first research project, which I began during a separate internship in healthcare data science, focused on understanding the interactions between law enforcement, victims of violence, and healthcare workers in emergency spaces. While research allowed me to formalize my conceptual understanding of certain gaps in our legal system, I grew increasingly interested in litigation as a means to work directly with the affected stakeholders and establish precedents that might shape those systems moving forward. This led me to my postgraduate job in economic consulting, where I was able to apply my academic background in a setting where I could observe what attorneys actually do in litigation and arbitration disputes.

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Three Tips for Taking Care of Yourself (in Law School and in Life)

/ Zoe Arvanitis-Dalpe / Leave a comment

I’ve written a lot about making sure to take care of yourself. But some may not know how to do that, or may forget in the moments when it’s needed most.

When it feels like everything is on the line and your head and heart are pounding, it is easy to forget what a glass of water, a warm drink, a walk, or a hug from a friend can do. And even if none of those things fixes it, they may give you just enough relief to breathe, think clearly, and formulate a game plan.

So, without further ado, here are my go-tos for when life feels like a merry-go-round going full throttle (and also on fire).

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The Anatomy of a Defense: How Criminal Justice Led Me to BC Law

/ Grace Lenahan / Leave a comment

17 minutes. That is how long the prosecution claimed it took our client, an engineering student visiting the U.S. from a war-torn country, to attempt a homicide and flee. When I mapped the cell-tower pings, calculated the distances, and cross-referenced the surveillance timestamps, their argument collapsed. Physics, it turned out, would be our best defense.

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Why I Came to Law School: Health Care Through a Legal Lens

/ Kree Middleton / Leave a comment

As a Black woman, I’m cognizant of the structural racism and sexism implanted within the U.S. healthcare system. As a pregnant-capable person, of the growing limitations surrounding reproductive health. And as a close relative of a recovering alcoholic, of the stigma and inaccessibility of care shrouding some patients, particularly harm reductive care. Life experience and professional engagement have deepened my investment in healthcare justice. As such, I’m focalizing my desire to practice through a bioethics lens with the hope of improving patient safety, health outcomes, and patient autonomy through health law and policy. 

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