Damp spirits
Barely Legal • Tuesday, March 8, 2022 Scenes from a law school ... Rain ... Back to Zoom ... It's too wet to think ... Fear of law ... Thucydides ... Balzac ... Hart-Fuller ... Maxim Shanahan's Barely Legal
According to Thucydides, after the Athenian plague of 430, "it was settled that present enjoyment, and all that contributed to it, was both honourable and useful. No fear of law ... had a restraining influence".
Such a post-pestilential attitude seems clearly to have passed by Sydney Law School. The locale is distinctly barren of enjoyment, while a deep-seated existential and immediate "fear of law" drips from its students in the moist and miserable start to semester.
Two years of Zoom isolation has not softened the law student. Scions of the squattocracy clop confidently through the halls in blindingly polished RMs; insufferable future-PM types - enjoying a brief flirtation with leftism before their Clayton Utz clerkship - position themselves for maximum recognition; and the plain bores - one of the few in the law school taxonomy that are worthy of grudging respect - mope aloof in the library.
In the first half-hour of class for the new year, a student – fully suited and tied – ignores an exegesis on the executive power to trade securities on his laptop, asks the lecturer to repeat himself, then packs his swag and scarpers.
A Labor Right hack from Kirribilli – even the Labor members here come from the North Shore – crops and colours his Instagram post as the lecturer journeys through the appearance of celebrities in the defamation courts of NSW.
In their great fear of law, the majority of our students blast away at laptops with a stenographic zeal - with eyes fixated on the final exam to the exclusion of any critical thought or casual conversation. As Balzac put it:
"The oily wheels of every fortune, the hideous wrangling of heirs over corpses not yet cold, the human heat grappling with the Penal Code."
Sydney Law School: plumbing issuesThe faulty plumbing - water gushing behind the walls, dripping metronomically from the ceiling - combines with the humidity to create a suffocating atmosphere, temples tightening, the over-caffeinated heart beating far too hard for the Hart-Fuller debate.
Balzac rightly developed a distaste for the law from his studies, but had the privilege to "remain, like all men with a future before them, wallowing in inexpressible idleness".
In the end, it was a relief that the university cancelled classes due to ... rain.
A few more days in the comfort of Zoom, classes in pyjamas, free from the fear of law that pervades the law school corridors, wallowing in that inexpressible idleness.
It was fanciful to expect that the pandemic might have made the law school a more enjoyable place. Better to stay away.
Max Shanahan
Law school, Law students, University of Sydney
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