How Law School Altered My Viewing of Moonrise Kingdom

With four weeks of 1L classes under my belt, I can affirmatively say that this whole law school experience is quite transformative. The time leading up to my first class (29 days ago!) was marked by a dizzying amount of unsolicited advice from upperclassmen, lawyers, professors, and family. Within the advice on how to not have a mental breakdown or flunk out of school was the idea that law school will change how you see the world. Reflecting on my 4-week long stint so far, I have already seen the relevance of this in my life. 

I recently found myself re-watching old favorite movies to decompress from the long law school days (there is seemingly no escape from the lessons learned in the classroom; I found myself saying under my breath “that’s a tort” as I watched characters on screen act negligently). One of my favorite films I recently rewatched is Moonrise Kingdom, which is set on an island off the coast of New England in the 1960s. Our protagonists, Suzy and Sam, are two twelve-year-olds who fall in love and run away from home. In typical Wes Anderson style, a series of obtuse events follows as the residents of their town search for the pair. Through my new legal lens, I rewatched this Anderson favorite with fresh thoughts to share.  

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Abortion, Metaphor, and the Legal Mind

With abortion rights before the Supreme Court this term, I’ve been thinking about the metaphor that brought privacy—and by extension, reproductive health rights—under Constitutional protection. In Griswold v. Connecticut, Justice Douglas reasoned that enumerated individual rights “have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”[1] Douglas analyzed these penumbras to extend the zones of individual rights, frustrating dedicated textualists who saw no justification for them in the language of the Constitution.

It might be helpful to pause here and clarify exactly what a penumbra is. Hold an object up in front of a light source so that it casts a shadow on a nearby surface: at the center of the shadow will be its most focused darkness, its umbra; move your gaze out to the border of the shadow, to where it meets the light, and you will see a zone of unfocused shadow, a kind of half-light called the penumbra. In Douglas’s metaphor, a certain set of enumerated rights are the umbra and the unenumerated right to privacy is their penumbra, giving them life and substance.

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