Struggling with mental health can be overwhelming, especially when trying to face it alone. One of the greatest challenges is simply understanding what we are feeling. Mental health is complex. Emotions do not arrive classified and labeled for our interpretation. It isn’t always clear whether we are exhausted, stressed, depressed, or experiencing something existential like despair. This uncertainty makes it all the more important to draw distinctions. Not every form of suffering is the same. Naming what we experience can provide clarity and direction for how to respond. In the realm of law, learning to name what we’re experiencing, whether it’s stress, burnout, or something deeper, can be as vital as identifying the right issue in a fact pattern.
Continue readingphilosophy
Holy Selfishness & The Gift-Giving Virtue: A Cycle of Overcoming
“All wish to possess great knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price.”
– Juvenal
- HOLY SELFISHNESS
In this article, I offer a perspective aimed at advancing the individual student while uplifting the collective student body. I accomplish this by advocating for the simple act of sharing knowledge. The principles used within this article derive from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Continue readingExploring the Possibility of Being Wrong: A Method to Loving Thy Peer
ACKNOWLEDGING HUMANITY’S FALLIBILITY
Within the legal realm, doubt about the possibility of being wrong is not merely a practical concern but an ontological one. Reasonable doubt, a foundational concept in criminal trials, reflects the level of skepticism a trier of fact must maintain before rendering a guilty verdict. At its core, the principle acknowledges humanity’s fallibility, the recognition that our judgments are, by nature, imperfect. We, as humans, are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and the balance between the two is often shaped by individual perception. In recognition of this fallibility, the legal system embeds procedural safeguards such as appellate review, immigration bond redetermination, and the writ of habeas corpus, all designed to guard against our innate capacity for error.
Continue readingConfronting Anxiety As A Law Student: An Existential Approach
I. INTRODUCTION
As a law student, I am confident that we are all familiar with anxiety, an invisible entity that has psychological and physiological effects upon the individual in whom it arises. It causes us to experience fear and trembling in moments where opportunity and possibility are the ripest. Chronic or severe anxiety can manifest in the form of emotional distress, obsessive thinking, compulsive behaviors, relational struggles, and general restlessness. Anxiety often carries a negative connotation due to these effects. However, in this essay, I’d like to offer a different perspective on anxiety, a perspective that diminishes anxiety to a mere nothing while simultaneously promoting it as the most transformative feeling an individual can experience. An absurd paradox.
Continue reading‘Being’ a Law Student & the Movement Away from Bad Faith
I. INTRODUCTION
We established in “’Being’ a Law Student and the Freedom of Choice” that human reality is inherently and radically free, meaning that freedom is an unavoidable aspect of our existence. In other words, we have no choice but to be free. Because freedom emerges from the very structure of human reality, we are not simply what we are; rather, we must actively become what we are. This process is continuous, unfolding in every moment. The act of being, and simultaneously negating being, occurs instantaneously and perpetually.
Unlike determinism, which asserts that every action results from a preceding cause, human motivation is not dictated by past events but by future possibilities and the desire to bring oneself into being. However, the anguish that accompanies this radical freedom often leads us to negate it. Faced with the burden of being able to become our greatest potential or our worst failure, we attempt to escape this responsibility by resigning ourselves to the in-itself, ignoring choice and possibility.
In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre defines bad faith as follows:
Continue reading‘Being’ a Law Student and the Freedom of Choice
This guest post was written by second-year law student Staniel Brutis.
I. INTRODUCTION
“The cornerstone on which all things are based is man’s concept of himself. He acts as he does and has the experiences that he does, because his concept of himself is what it is, and for no other reason. Had he a different concept of self, he would act differently.” – Neville Goddard
Coming into my 1L year, I wanted to understand what it meant to be a law student. Specifically, I looked to become the “ideal” law student. In search of an answer to this question, I interviewed several of Boston College Law School’s professors and members of staff. In that moment, I figured that they were individuals who had accomplished the goals I set for myself, and it would be best to learn from their experiences. Each person was asked the same question,“ What is one word to describe the ideal trait of a student?” Here are their responses:
Continue readingAbortion, 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.
The Fall from Grace: Tackling Choice and Moral Culpability in Class
“This seems like a philosophical question.”
My classmate was trying to parse the Supreme Court’s reasoning in two cases with similar facts and different outcomes. Our professor did not seem enthusiastic about the prospect of a philosophical discussion. Some professors teach introductory law classes like a foreign language, immersing students in legal syntax and vocabulary until its functioning becomes intuitive and fluid. Imagine trying to teach French students to conjugate a verb while they’re working on a grand theory for the union of sound and thought. You would get further by just drilling, “Je vais à la plage. Tu vas à la plage. Il/Elle/On va à la plage.” So our professor responded with a pointedly practical answer spelling out the officially recognized legal rule at work in the two decisions.
But there was an interesting, philosophical issue beneath the surface of the Court’s reasoning, even if we didn’t have enough time to cover it. These are the two cases:
Helplessness: Why this philosopher needs a law degree
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.
BC Law: Impact 