What do law students do during the summer break ... Start a newspaper ... A counterpoint to the law's dry stuff ... First edition of Amicus Courier online now ... From Djokovic to haiku ... Eamonn Murphy reports
For the law student, a semester of learning can be rather tedious. A textbook chapter the length of a novella; a selection of judgements, some brilliant, others turgid; a ream of legislation; a lecture, a tutorial, a seminar, a study group, mooting, negotiations, note-taking, networking - all in one's first week.
Recently, these activities have been relegated to the digital world: technical glitches, bleary eyes and restless legs are the new norm. The law student is exhausted.
The summer holidays came as a blissful repose. The law student sleeps in, reads novels, nabs a summer job, wanders the racks of mothballed vintage shops, and lazes on blistering sands before wading into the deep. However, when all this is too much, we create a newspaper.
Amicus Courier is the Sydney University Law Society's panacea for any dull aspects of the Law School's curriculum. The paper's editor-in-chief, Ariana Haghighi, writes of the law's "whimsical" side, one that tends to be absent from our studies.
Lectures are dominated by a meticulous focus on black-letters and semantic interpretation, memorising rules and elements and dates and pinpoints; Amicus Courier brings welcome colour and spiritedness to our learning.
Haghighi's eight editors and nine additional contributors have sought out the law's whimsy.
Brianna Ho addresses tort liability when artificial intelligence makes a medical diagnosis.
Marlow Hurst discusses the Sydney Law School's migration to the battle stations of World War II, replicating a law degree on the field to combat a 70 percent decline in enrolment.
Anson Lee and Justin Lai satirise the legal side of the Djokovic debacle, and I explore the treatment of domestic animals in Spanish divorce settlements.
The haiku also makes an appearance, representing a selection of cases in verse: Anthony-James Kanaan paints the 1773 case of Scott v Shepherd as follows ...
"Do not throw a squib
Through a market square or else:
Liability."
The paper's whimsy does not preclude piercing dissections of the current legal climate. Amelie Roediger explores the limits of intellectual freedom in Australian tertiary education, and Mikaela Nguyen examines the ramifications of passing the Religious Discrimination Bill and amending the Sex Discrimination Act.
Where William Price proposes solutions to the Sydney housing crisis, Mae Milne questions the limitations of "smart contracts" in dispute resolution.
The stories are varied and detailed, allowing students to write on whatever takes their fancy.
A few weeks ago, at the dinner table, my father mentioned a recent episode of the ABC's Law Report - one that explored how Australian consumer law developed from a pair of itchy underpants.
Everyone chortled at the quaint idea that consumer law owed much of its origin to woollen long johns.
We need some of the fun that the curriculum lacks. Our semesters are brief, our coursework extensive, and we can't necessarily expect whimsy throughout the year. In the holidays, however, the law student can be free.
The first edition of Amicus Courier is out online. It's a fun distraction as the drudgery of the semester returns.