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JOSEPH MOORE
Vol 11, Issue 12 (!) Towards the start of this year, I made the decision to depart from Pelham Street. My destination was around the corner, at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. The decision has been a grand one thus far – I have always been drawn more to enthusing people about the pursuit of knowledge and challenging them to develop their thinking than engaging in crisp rules and argumentation. ANONYMOUS
Vol 11, Issue 12 The oft-repeated phrase law students are all too familiar with: “you need experience to get experience”. And you need experience to get a job, as a general rule. As the months pass and the end of my degree starts to creep up on me all too quickly, I figured I’d better get my butt into gear and get some of that experience. What kind of experience or for how long, I didn’t know and frankly didn’t care – I just wanted something. KAI LIU
Vol 11, Issue 12 The development of the split profession is largely something of a historical accident. The distant ancestor to the modern barrister, the ‘Serjeants-at-law’, were an import of the Norman Conquest of the 11th Century. As an aside, this is also why so many older English precedents are peppered with French. From at least 1216, English courts were beginning to limit the rights of audience to ’regular’ advocates’. LORAINE MACDONALD, SOPHIE KAIKO and MADELEINE LLOYD
Vol 11, Issue 12 It’s almost that time of year again. There are networking events all over the joint (oh hai free alcohol just lying around!), and daily pangs of anxiety from seeing everyone else in a suit and wondering which memo you’ve missed this time. The spectre of clerkship/ summer vac applications looms over the entire law building, whether you’re applying for them or not. Knowing that there are a smaller number of clerkships/ other vacation work opportunities than there are students in this building unfortunately makes application season a competitive time that can lead us to compare ourselves to our peers and feel as though we’ve come up short. NICK PARRY-JONES
Vol 11, Issue 12 I'm a smidge older than the majority of my cohort. While that age grants me no authority, it does beget me having more experience. Job wise, I've been around the block a few times: I've worked in start ups; for up starts, in hollywood films; in tech; as a referee; as a competitor; for an illegal call centre; for a legal call centre; for international media companies; for local blogs. I've been a bartender, a rule bender and a Russian language comprehender. I've worked in security, as security and around security. I've worked with the homeless; with kids; with refugees (while homeless). I've been in lawyer's offices, courtrooms and prisons, sometimes even of my own free will. PAUL GODDARD
Vol 11, Issue 11 In my understanding of it, anxiety is when there is considerable dissonance between yourself and your surrounding environment. It affects a considerable number of people in Australia, around one in five men and one in three women. Environmental pressures such as work, friends and family all build and you feel like you have no space to yourself. AYU MAYLINDA
Vol 11, Issue 11 I was a Literature and Linguistics major. In first year, there were not many subjects to which I was naturally inclined. I could rattle on and on and on about Othello and Chaucer but I could not tell you what a mortgage was. JESSE COWIE
Vol 11, Issue 11 I’m just about in my final weeks of the JD, and I’ve found myself developing an unhealthy habit – stalking people on LinkedIn. It began innocently enough: ‘Wonder what some other people in my cohort are up to outside of the course’, but it quickly spiralled into a panicked scrolling through the profiles of just about everyone I knew in the course. My conclusion? My god…..people are doing really, really well! And then the bitter afterthought. Why aren’t I doing as well? STEPHANIE MCHUGH
Vol 11, Issue 11 I have recently taken up long distance running. This is hilarious to the people who know me best, given my total lack of any kind of athletic ability. But it is funny how 1km can turn into 2km, and then 5km, and then 10km, 15km … and now I am training for a half-marathon. Things kind of snowball. This is similar to how I articulate my pathway into the JD when people ask me how I got here. I wanted to be a secondary school teacher, but I sat the LSAT as a backup, somehow got accepted and then just went along with it. Three years and five months later, I am nearing the end of this hard-fought degree. ASAD KASIM-KHAN
Vol 11, Issue 11 If like me, you have no choice but to display your ethnicity by the colour of your skin, texture of your hair and physicality of your body, it’s no secret that how you look alters society’s perceptions of who you are. Race is undoubtedly a part of the judgements we make of others which apparently happen in one-tenth of a second. We know these race biases exist. MARY CONNELLAN
Vol 11, Issue 10 As we head towards exams, now is the time to take a moment to step back and be kind to yourself. You will perform better if you are happy. Also, happiness is infectious, so be kind to others. NICK PARRY-JONES
Vol 11, Issue 10 In an interview,1 David Foster Wallace2 decried the influence of postmodernism on his generation. As a method of analysis, postmodernism doesn't prescribe an overarching framework of understanding. Instead all knowledge3 is contextual and constructed. Thus proponents of postmodern art are self referential, ironic and cynical. When DFW gave this interview, the effects of 50 years of post-modernism were being felt across the art world. An idea that reconstructed colonialism and gave credence to subaltern studies4 for academics, post-modern art had become it's truest form, a dry joke. While David was famously elitist on the question of TV,5 one cannot avoid the idea that Seinfeld was indeed cynical. Nothing was taken seriously. No problems were ever solved. As Larry David6 said “No hugging, no learning.”7 THOMAS WHITESIDE
Vol 11, Issue 10 Several weeks ago I wrote an article outlining the case for public transport concessions and plugging Fares Fair PTV’s first public event. Given that some time has passed, I thought it appropriate I write a follow up to update students on the progress of the campaign. ALICE KENNEDY
Vol 11, Issue 10 There had been rumblings amongst the student populace for weeks. The faint stink of inequity floated through the MLS corridors as rumours spread about the toilets on Level 10. Students claimed that the Level 10 toilets are home to a burning beacon of injustice. Apparently, these privies are privy not only to the behinds of esteemed guests of MLS, but also to better toilet paper than the rest of the law school. Clearly, it was time to get to the bottom of the matter. KAI LIU
Vol 11, Issue 10 In my continuing quest to procrastinate rather than do anything productive (and exploiting De Minimis’s generous publishing policy to do so), I present for your reading (dis)pleasure my (entirely unqualified) reviews of three history books. All were read on a Kindle. CAMERON DOIG
Vol 11, Issue 9 Run The Jewels 3 electrocutes your brain with an imagining of the America to come This is a fertile time for visions of the future, particularly for our American cousins. Gerontocrats, waging a war against women’s reproductive rights, are making feminist speculative fiction unhappily instructive. The murder of human hopers-after-refuge in seas, camps and deserts galvanises those who are pessimists by intellect, optimists by will, and visionary creators by empathetic compulsion. And while resurgent race-patriotism plunges industrialised nations into sectarian, proto-fascist ructions, two artists are talking about what’s coming and what to do. ELIF SEKERCIOGLU
Vol 11, Issue 9 In a moment of literary narcissism, I recently acquired the novel The Idiot by Elif Batuman. If you search my name online (Elif Şekercioğlu), the algorithm elves spit out a 2011 New Yorker article called ‘Natural Histories’, in which Elif Batuman interviews her friend Çağan Şekercioğlu, a ‘conservation ecologist, ornithologist, tropical biologist, and nature photographer’. He is a fascinating fellow – the article notes, delightfully, that ‘In high school, Çağan found a rare beetle specimen and donated it to the Harvard entomology collection.’ Our algorithmic connection feels significant to me in some way. ANONYMOUS
Vol 11, Issue 9 I’m not white. This fact is surely noticed by most people upon meeting me, although I think it’s far from the most interesting thing about me, and not something that I constantly think about. Nonetheless, in instances of discrimination and racism, as well as more benign social exchanges that I’ve faced, it’s something that I’m instantly reminded of. Nothing like being asked the brilliant “Where are you from?” in a circle of otherwise only white people to make your day. Or, to be spoken of as a ‘person of colour’. DUNCAN WALLACE
Vol 11, Issue 9 “Hey guys, some of you may be aware of the dire circumstances surrounding the Dal Pont book. Three copies missing from the library, sold out at the Co-opt. Truly sad stuff.” “I tried to borrow a book from the high-use section of the law library today, only to be told by the librarian that three copies (which only arrived from the publishers last week) have already been stolen - presumably by students.” EUGENE TWOMEY
Vol 11, Issue 9 Every day, normally in the morning, I take a tablet containing 50 milligrams of Sertraline. I’ve been doing this for about a year now. According to drugs.com, sertraline is one of a group of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Reassuringly, the way these drugs work is “still not fully understood”. They do seem effective, however, in treating conditions including anxiety and depression. While I still suffer from both to various degrees, the medication has made a considerable difference to the way I feel day to day. |
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June 2020
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