Posts Tagged ‘Students’

In all reality, Harvard Law School is still on break. The current “classes” are a joke. Being at Harvard though, where apparently everyone is required to take everything seriously, we remain just as miserable as pre-break. But I’m not going to bore you with details about what Harvard Law School thinks we should know about becoming a lawyer. Instead I’m going to talk about drugs at HLS.

There is a the bizarre pothead siutation at HLS. I went to a state school so I’ve obviously enjoyed my fair share of the drug, but there is a group of HLS students numbering in the high thirties who seem, as a whole, to take the drug far more seriously than any entity I’ve ever encountered. The strangest thing about it all? They aren’t any more mellow than the rest of us! They are just as gunnerish as their non-pothead colleagues; they merely smell substantially worse.

The potheads are, of course, better than their hyper Adderall abusing counterparts. (Note: I used Adderall a few times last semester, though not out of academic concern.) Combining additional alertness and paranoia with the intense stress of law school creates a terrible, wicked beast. I’ve often stumbled into these people in the library, where they surround themselves with seemingly random books, taking up as much space as possible. They are the same guys who walked into the open book exams with a more useless than not, hand-bound, two-hundred page outline. They are also the people who answer class questions completely without logic.

It’s not a bad strategy though, as the professors do not seem to know how to handle completely illogical answers. They just move on and call on someone else. It’s far better than someone who gives a stupid yet nearly accurate answer, which the professor uses an excuse to explore parts of the issue that nobody gives two shits about.

And so I get to what I actually want to talk about. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU ALL DOING? I’ve read about the FBI and the CIA asking about drug use as frivolous as pot and Adderall and forcing applicants to take a polygraph to confirm their answers. In the toughest legal job market in history, it seems extremely stupid to basically opt out of a large quantity of job opportunities.

You are probably wondering now – “But you just said you did the drugs too.” Yeah but I already have paying summer employment at a firm. I’m doing very well in school. I’m not one of the bottom barrel HLS students who are not going to get biglaw. Unless the government starts doubling salaries, I have no interest in working in the public sector. Quite frankly, even if I wanted to work for the government, my $2000+ loan payment would prevent such dreams from coming to fruition.

I don’t even know what I’m trying to say with this post. I suppose I’ll leave it at:

Never do drugs in excess. If you are going to do drugs, make sure you will not need to work for the government in the future.

God I suck.

So as I said before, I have some thoughts about gunners that might run counter to what most people think. That is, gunners aren’t all bad. I am not, nor do I ever intend to become, a gunner and the gunners in my place have made themselves easily recognizable — always raising their hand in class to add their thoughts about some principle or another, countering the Professor’s hypo with a slightly modified hypo of their own, rushing to pack up their things at the end of class to be the first in line to ask questions to the Prof. Yes, it can get very annoying. Especially if the gunner has like an annoying voice or something, it can be like nails on a chalkboard whenever you see their hand shoot up mid-lecture (or better yet, when they don’t even raise their hand and just interject mid-lecture . . . which is quite disrespectful I’d like to add. Even more so considering how brilliant these professors are; I am sometimes awestruck how some people interrupt the flow and dynamic of the classroom with sometimes ridiculously trivial side comments).

Ok, so there’s a lot to be said about the negative qualities of gunners, but gunners live everywhere, not just in law school: business school, med school, even undergrad. Moreover, gunners exist everywhere OUTSIDE of school, like in your office when they might be competing to get the boss’s (or senior partners’) favor. So while it’s fully established that most people dislike gunners (unless one is a gunner oneself), what about the positive characteristics of gunners? This topic is something that has largely been neglected and I must say that I don’t think I have ever seen or heard anyone talking about the great things gunners do for the rest of us — not in person, not on ANY law-related Internet forums I have read, and not in any other venue. But from what I can tell, there are at least two very distinct and very positive qualities about gunners that deserve attention.

First, gunners give the rest of us a break in class. That is, when a gunner raises their hand and makes some comment that everyone else is certain is irrelevant or maybe extremely tangential, it gives us a break from the mad rush of typing notes for an hour-long class session. Unless a gunner’s comment or question is particularly brilliant or engages the professor in some compelling way (which it NEVER does) you can almost guarantee that it won’t be at all important in the scope of the class and that it will most certainly NOT be addressed on the exam. Thus, you can bet that any notes on the issue raised are useless, giving all of our cramped fingers and cloudy minds a short break from a bombardment of Socratic case analysis.

Second, everyone hates gunners. If the mutual suffering of 1L year doesn’t get people in a class to bond, you can bet that mutual hatred of another person will. Everybody else can rally around their distaste for this one person (or small collection or people). In effect, what you get is a great benefit to the many at the detriment of the few.

So at this point, that’s all I’ve thought about on my pro-gunner argument. But I would appreciate any further ideas — I’m writing a research paper. Ya know, in all the free time I have between writing memos and reading casebooks.