social justice

Remember “The Why”: A Letter from the Alumni Board President

/ Rob Rossi / 2 Comments

Editor’s Note: Kevin Curtin is the Boston College Law School Alumni Board President and a member of the BC Law Class of ’88. He is Senior Appellate Counsel/Grand Jury Director at the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office. He has tried approximately 100 jury cases and handled over 100 criminal appeals. Mr. Curtin is also an instructor in the Harvard Law School Trial Advocacy Workshop and a faculty member of the national trial Advocacy College at the University of Virginia School of Law. He is also an adjunct faculty member at BC Law. All of us at Impact are pleased to be able to host his guest blog post.

Commencement is a time for remembering why you chose to become a lawyer. That idea was reflected in the remarks of this year’s Commencement speaker, Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Political Strategy and Outreach David Simas, BC Law ‘95. Dean Vincent Rougeau talked about it. It was also mentioned by Class President Lainey Sullivan ’15 (who recently committed to join the office of Middlesex District Attorney Marian T. Ryan ’79).

Coincidence? Maybe.

But what about this? Dean Rougeau, University President Father William P. Leahy, David Simas and Lainey Sullivan also spoke about something else: the idea of a tradition shared in common with those who have come before them. Something that makes Boston College Law School special—an essential bond that cannot be seen, but which is continuously affirmed as true.

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An Invaluable Experience Like None Other in Law School

/ Rob Rossi / Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: Erica Coray is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice.  Erica was kind enough to author a blog about the academic journals at BC Law, and why she chose to join JLSJ. We are very pleased to present our fifth and final letter about the benefits of being on a journal and why 1Ls should participate in the writing competition.

You’ve just finished the last exam of your first year of law school, you’re exhausted and elated at the same time, not quite sure of what just happened, and you follow the crowd upstairs to pick up the writing competition packet for journals. And it is huge. And long. That’s when you start questioning, “do I really want to do this? Two more weeks of research and writing? And Bluebooking? But I just finished, don’t I deserve a break?”

Yes, you do want to do it, and not just because it looks great on your résumé (though it does), but because being part of a journal your 2L year is an invaluable experience like none other in law school. Continue reading →

It’s Baltimore, Gentlemen; The Gods Will Not Save You

/ rwmakawa / Leave a comment

Let’s talk about Baltimore.  Most people outside of the D.C. area know Charm City from David Simon’s The Wire. The Wire is a masterfully conceptualized piece of work that truly transcended television (full disclosure: I took an entire course on it in undergrad).  Simon, in an interview, once said that:

The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak.

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If You’re Reading This You Should Commit to Boston College Law School

/ Rob Rossi / Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: Nirav Bhatt is the incoming President of the Boston College Law Students Association. Much like his predecessor, Nirav embodies the very best qualities that BC Law students have to offer. As his classmate, LSA colleague, and intramural basketball teammate, I can personally attest to the ways he pushes those around him to better both themselves and the BC community as a whole. In keeping with the Drake theme of this post’s title, he is and has been Steph Curry with the shot in all conceivable situations. Without further ado or musical references, I am very pleased to present… 

If You’re Reading This You Should Commit to Boston College Law School

by Nirav Bhatt, President, Boston College Law Students Association 2015-16

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Black Lives Don’t Matter

/ rwmakawa / Leave a comment

They don’t. That’s the message that plays on a loop against a seemingly never-ending backdrop of killings of unarmed minorities at the hands of those who are sworn to serve and protect society. That’s the message that’s forced a movement around the idea that #BlackLivesMatter. That’s the message that made me wake up in a sweat early this morning.

Silhouettes

The only light came from the eerie glow of the crescent moon as I stood in the middle of a wheat field. It was slightly windy, and there was a dilapidated farmhouse about 100 yards in front of me. Around the field and the house were dark, uninviting woods. For no reason, I noticed I was wearing a white t-shirt and black pants. As I walked towards the house, I suddenly realized there were figures approaching me on either side from out of the wooded areas. They were just black silhouettes lit against this breezy field, but I could tell they were wondering what I was doing there, and I, of course, would have no explanation. Continue reading →

What privilege and Mario Kart have in common

/ Charlene Ochogo / 2 Comments

I’m going to take a tiny detour from my Things I Wish I Knew series to address something that came up this week for me and that most of us are guilty of forgetting in one form or another: privilege.

Now this is where I expose my inner geek. One of my absolute favorite things to do in college was to have people over and play the game that has been ruining friendships since the 90s: Mario Kart. Remember when you were all set to win the race, and you’d drive through an item box and it would roulette through all the different items before it landed on the one you got – usually something useless like a banana peel, because unless one of your fellow racers beat you out in the last second, chances are you’d be crossing the finish line first.

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Tinker Bell or Prison Time? (Paradigms of Criminal Law Part One)

/ Amelia M. Wirts, Esq. / 2 Comments
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sujatha baliga, Restorative Justice Project and Associate Director, NCCD, speaking at the Rebellious Lawyering Conference at Yale Law School, Feb. 21, 2015 (photo taken by me)

“What do crime victims actually want?”

That is a question that sujatha baliga is asked quite frequently as a facilitator in restorative justice programs that focus on making a victim whole after a crime rather than punishing the person who committed the crime. “You can never really predict what will make a victim whole. Sometimes, it’s Tinker Bell,” balinga said. Continue reading →

Mardi Gras Fundraising and the New Orleans Spring Break Trip

/ Rob Rossi / Leave a comment

Hey everyone, my name is Tom. I’m filling in for Rob this week to talk about one of the pro bono service trips open to BC Law 1Ls. There are four different spring break trips through BC Law: the Haiti Service Trip, Navajo Nation Service Trip, Gulf Coast Service Recovery Trip (New Orleans), and the Immigration Law Service Trip (various cities across the U.S.). Rob went on the New Orleans trip last year, and that’s the one I’ll be doing this year.

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Helplessness: Why this philosopher needs a law degree

/ Amelia M. Wirts, Esq. / 2 Comments

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.

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