 Are you looking to spice up your uni life? Need a passion project to get you through 2022? Despise this paper and want to tear it down from the inside?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above, this notice is for you! The De Minimis AGM is nigh and it is time for a new committee to take the reins. Above you will see brief descriptions of the positions up for grabs and the rough time commitment you can expect of each role. Anyone wishing to be considered should attend the AGM, become a member of De Minimis (if you haven’t already), and nominate for the most subjectively desirable place in the pecking order. There will also be constitutional amendments and policy changes proposed at the AGM. Topics will include ‘preventing any editor from conducting secret investigations, character assassination operations, and other such black ops-esque undertakings without the informed consent of the rest of the committee’. Further details and exact date/time/location will be posted in the near future. In a tale as old as time, a commencing class of would-be human rights lawyers have emerged from the MLS cocoon as fledgling corporate cowboys.
Three years ago, the dozens of bright-eyed young whippersnappers had walked through the doors of the Law School, cradling dreams of doing good in the world. Arts degrees in hand, they had hoped to become tomorrow’s ICC prosecutors, Greenpeace in-house counsel, and pro bono civil rights defenders. Over the course of a three-year transformation, those fatty juvenile impulses were carefully pared away, and a beautiful, billowing thirst for wealth grown in their place. ‘Most people, when they see a vampiric corporate lawyer, don’t appreciate the complex natural process that gave him the wherewithal to draft foreclosure notices,’ an unnamed MLS professor told De Minimis. One of the graduates is Fleur,* who had once dreamed of prosecuting war criminals in the Sudan. ‘I didn’t read ten thousand pages of dusty judgements to make hippy money,’ she confided in this reporter. Another student, Christophe,* told De Minimis the decision was one of convenience. ‘I had this crazy plan to defend Tibetan prisoners of conscience,’ he laughed, ‘but do you know how bloody cold it gets in Tibet?’ The complex natural phenomenon, which occurs every year, has been cited by biologists as a rare example of ‘autoacquisitive acclimation’. It is only seen elsewhere in the animal kingdom in failed rock stars, private school potheads, and geese. Perhaps nowhere is this circle of life better embodied than in Joe,* who as an undergraduate environmental activist had spent a summer living amongst a herd of elephant seals as one of their own. He had come to MLS to bring to justice the hunter who had slain his seal-wife, Margaret. Now, he has accepted a job at Rio Tinto, drafting legislative amendments which would make it illegal for Aboriginal people to leave their culture on top of mineral deposits. Despite disruptions caused to the MLS habitat caused by COVID-19, the population of corporate lawyers in Australia is expected to rebound quickly. There is still a plentiful supply of greed in the environment, and diverse habitat available, stretching from William Street to Spring Street. ‘We are so blessed at the amount of litigation coming out of this pandemic,’ said one researcher. ‘The financial carcass of just one insolvent tradie can sustain a young corporate for over a year. Remarkable.’ Winston Baker *Some names have been modified. This article is the result of a collaboration between De Minimis and legendary naturalist Sir David Attenborough. It was originally published in the journal Nature. I've heard it said around the hallowed halls[1] of the #1 Law School in Australia[2] that De Min is a sorry excuse for a publication; a journal of absolutely no note that serves only as a soapbox for hypocritical malcontents[3] to fruitlessly snipe at their fellows in law student politics. All of which might be perfectly accurate;[4] still, I must object. Not to the content of the comments below every article that mentions the recent MULSS election, but to any imputation that such charges amount to criticism of our beloved student publication. And so I find myself moved to write, in De Fence of De Min, of the sense of the sublime instilled in me upon reading a recent article.
My synapses were set a-tingling at the first - "A spectre is haunting..." - for I knew that to see so bold a filching from the Manifesto in a student publication meant that I was about to read the thoughts and furies of a literary talent befitting a second-year polsci student. I expected spittle, blissfully unaware self-implication in minor acts of immorality, and an unstated sense of entitlement that can only come from failing upwards one's entire life. And let me tell ya folks, I was not left wanting. But imagine my delight to find, six paragraphs in, so abrupt a change of topic that I was left reeling. To draw your readers in with platitudes of a problem universally acknowledged before awkwardly framing a personal vendetta as a case in point - why, it takes practice to care for the ills of the world only as far as one is personally affected, and here I beheld a master of the art. "But why," you fairly ask, "would you want to read such drivel?" Allow me to answer my rhetorical device by means of simile. Consider the McDonalds Cheeseburger. A $3.65[5] agglomeration of industrial starches and congealed fats, eating one is by any measure an objectively dreadful experience. And yet, by virtue of that one burger I ate while pissed drunk at 19 in the gutter by the 24 hour Elizabeth Street Maccas, every cheeseburger I have eaten since then has evoked the chemical memory of that perfectly contextualised ur-burger, and is transmuted into something subjectively good. As the cheeseburger is, dearest void, so be de Min. Reading it calls to mind those heady days of my first weeks of my first semester of my first degree, with my youthful potential stretching out ahead of me and a stack of student magazines toppling to my side. I picked a copy up and beheld the articles within - so much passion! so much pique! so much unattributed borrowing from core readings that I, too, would briefly skim in due course! While nothing can truly return what time generally and two years of MLS specifically has taken from me, reading de Min evokes that fading memory of feeling so young that I still thought that student politics mattered enough to whinge about. So I must stand in defence of this august[6] journal and applaud its utterly gutless anonymous contributors[7] for never letting the pettiness to be found in stupol north of Grattan Street lift from our hearts. [1] Read: FB group chats. [2] Now #5 in the world; moving on up, natch. [3] Excepting, of course, the competent satires within. [4] Read: is. [5] When did a cheeseburger get so dang expensive?. [6] Read: rotten to the core. [7] And I am proud to now count myself among their number. Anonymous is a Second Year JD Student. A spectre is haunting the MLS – the spectre of clerkships. A delirious aura of exhaustion surely hangs over every law student who has spent weeks writing cover letter after cover letter to law firms they’re not even interested in. If they’re lucky, they get to sit a psychometric test deliberately designed to stress them. If they’re even luckier, they get to sit through an interview trying to explain why they’re interested in a job they’re not interested in. Then, at the end of it all, they are probably going to get an email about the “large number of strong applications this year”, with no idea of how to get a job in law other than through a clerkship.
With clerkship offers rapidly approaching, maybe we should reflect on what this process is doing to us, and how it became this way. The state of affairs is familiar to all of us: there are vanishingly few positions in clerkship programs compared to the number of applicants, and most people end up finding jobs outside of clerkships and graduate programs with the big commercial law firms. Even though we know this to be the case, a massive amount of resources are spent advertising seasonal clerkships, and providing advice on how to ace your interview, spruce your C.V., or compose a killer cover letter. Clerkships often dominate discussions about career opportunities after law school. Even though only a few people will get into a clerkship, it is treated as the default path, if not the only way, into a ‘successful’ legal career. A large number of law students wind up with the tacit impression that their whole worth as a legal professional depends on getting into a clerkship at a commercial law firm, with perverse ethical outcomes. We all do our fair share of puffery when advertising ourselves in job applications, but the hyper-competitiveness that is cultivated by the clerkship process in particular seems to encourage seriously unethical behaviour, and hostility among us all. As an extreme example, De Minimis has been made aware of allegations that a member of the MULSS executive committee misrepresented their employment credentials in order to secure personal benefits. De Minimis understands that the individual has been employed as a casual at a prominent law firm in the past, but continues to mislead others, both face-to-face and via platforms such as Linkedin, into believing their employment is ongoing. A senior representative for the firm at which the individual claims to be employed confirmed to De Minimis that although the person had not been formally fired, their contract was unambiguously casual, and they had received no work from the firm since February. De Minimis understands that the lack of work for eight months means that the person is no longer considered an employee as a matter of law. This raises questions about whether they deceived electors during their 2021 election campaign and whether it would be most appropriate for them to step down from the MULSS Executive Committee. Also in question is when exactly other figures on the Committee became aware of the deception. It isn’t our place at De Minimis to name and shame this person, or to engage in a private crusade against members of the MULSS, but we are genuinely concerned about this as a manifestation of the toxic, hypercompetitive behaviour that the clerkship process in particular seems to encourage. While singling someone out for lying about their work status might seem petty, this is the kind of unethical behaviour that could prevent someone from being admitted as a lawyer, and beyond that, it’s the kind of behaviour that makes people cynical about participating in life at MLS, and makes life miserable for those who try. This concern leads us to raise a question: why is the careers information provided by the MULSS seems so heavily skewed towards the clerkship process, when it is ultimately relevant to so few of us? While events are run to provide information about legal careers in the public sector, or criminal law or public interest law, it nowhere near matches the amount of information or resources devoted to raising awareness about clerkships at commercial law firms, which get their own handbook – which is two and a half times the length of the more generalist careers handbook. Why? Is it perhaps because of the massive amounts of revenue generated by selling space in the handbook to commercial law firms? Is there a conflict of interest experienced by those who organise and publish the careers information? Again, we would like to emphasise that De Minimis is not trying to launch a crusade against members of the MULSS. We all sit in a structure that incentivises hyper-competitive behaviour, and we are not suggesting that members of the MULSS have acted with nefarious intentions. Nevertheless, the pattern is clear, and its malign effects are evident. We need the MULSS to recognise that they put too much emphasis on clerkships as the default pathway into a career, and devote more resources to raising awareness of the normal ways of getting a job after graduation. Clerkships can be a great way to gain experience and exposure, but they are not what most people will experience, and the MULSS has a duty to put its resources into information that is more relevant to the student body at large, who won’t get into one. Note: This article is the result of an investigation by De Minimis. Anyone seeking to learn more about the methods involved in that investigation, and the veracity of the information, may contact the Editor-in-Chief at: [email protected]. CORRECTION: A previous version of this article cited an incorrect reference. Sorry about that. This is the absolute, ultimate, final ranking of the signs. The results are not up for debate. The following is, in order from best to worst, which signs reign supreme.
1 - Pisces 2 - Libra 3 - Virgo 4 - Capricorn 5 - Gemini 6 - Cancer 7 - Leo 8 - Scorpio 9 - Sagittarius 10 - Aquarius 11 - Taurus 12 - Aries As Melbourne enters its 253rd day in lockdown, Garry Gale is pretty sure he fucked up.
Back in 2019, it had seemed like such an easy call to take the MLS offer over USyd’s. Melbourne was the cool city – Sydney, the place for people who wear boat shoes. Not to mention the prestige. Every man and his dog knows MLS is Australia’s top ranked law school. And if you don’t know, it’s JD students will be sure to tell you. But it doesn’t take a law degree to know a lot has changed since 2019. Since moving from Sydney to Melbourne, Gary has now spent two-thirds of his degree online. “It just feels like a bit of a stitch-up, y’know?” he told our De Minimis reporter this morning. “We did everything right, but now Sydney gets to open back up again. Before us. I can’t even doomscroll instagram to pass the time anymore. Do you know how it feels to see my old friends share beers at the pub and then kick on the beach? Let me tell you – it’s not fucking great.” More to come. Bumblebee is a first year JD student. Volume 20, Issue 10 Our culture today seems very willing to throw the label movie star towards any up-and-coming actor after only a few good films in a row, with an increasing number seemingly ascending to the divine status of membership of the ‘A-list’. A few good movies in a row are undoubtedly an achievement, but what is almost unfathomable is four decades of classic after classic. With a career entering its fifth decade, there’s a strong case that for the entirety of his career Tom Cruise has been at the very top of the A-list. This led me to the question: what about Cruise has enabled him to achieve such success over four decades and counting? Are there more important questions to be asking in today’s world, even ones people might be more interested to read about? Probably, but let’s have an explore of Cruise anyway to try and find the answers. The Beginning: 1981-2001 Risky Business, Top Gun, The Color of Money, Rain Man, A Few Good Men, The Firm, Jerry Maguire, Magnolia, and Eyes Wide Shut. If Cruise were to have retired even as early as 2001, he still would have been left with one of the greatest film careers of all time. His filmography in this period is truly absurd, and what is even more astounding is that these classic films came one after another. With the change of the film industry in recent years, and the rise of streaming and actors flocking to TV, I really wonder if any actor in the future would be able to ‘achieve’ a run of hit films to this extent. Moviemaking is really a team sport, with winning (making a good film) requiring the entire team, both players and coaches, to be of high quality. While Cruise has worked with a litany of great actors, what sticks out is the coaches that have directed his films. These directors included a list of names that are etched into the history of cinema, such as Coppola, Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Stone, Scorsese, Pollock, De Palma, Robert Towne, PTA, and Kubrick. Advocates for Belichick in the Brady-Belichick debate would suggest this identifies Cruise’s success is caused by the quality of the coaching staff he has worked with. However, like with Brady, when you have had so much success, and you are in so many good films, eventually some responsibility must rest with the common denominator, Cruise. The Tom Cruise Character In looking at these films in the list above, several similarities appear. The characters Cruise plays are all narcissistic, self-assured, arrogant douchebags. These characteristics never reach an extent where they cross the line to being truly unwatchable, and as William Goldman suggests movie stars tend to avoid such roles. However, I would argue that many of these roles could very easily cross that line, and it is only because of Cruise’s infatuating charisma and irreverence that the audience is prevented from ever disliking his characters. Rain Man and Charlie Babbitt is a great example: Charlie is undeniably horrific and while we as the audience might be able to identify that, Cruise is so enjoyable we never want to look away. In Michael Caine’s view, Charlie's actions are so overwhelmingly hateable that Charlie should be unwatchable - Cruise’s ability to lead the audience to like Charlie could therefore be classed as a best of all-time acting performance (and one arguably better than that of co-star Dustin Hoffman, who won the Best Actor Oscar for the film). Cruise’s off-screen life and general intensity makes it by no means difficult for one to imagine why he is so easily able to play these douchebags, often returning to these parts. Specifically, these similar characters often have an extremely similar arc, something critic Roger Ebert conceptualised in what he calls a ‘Tom Cruise Picture.’ They open with a hyper-masculine and greatly confident flog that has raw skill in a particular craft, the meeting of a mentor to help him develop these skills to defeat an enemy, and ending with the defeat of said enemy, resulting in the character transforming into a better man. In effect, a straightforward three act structure we all learnt in primary school, nothing too elaborate or unique, merely a tried and tested formula that effectively guarantees an entertaining narrative. While it is true that many classic Cruise films are simplistic, when the outlined elite directors are coupled with the specific skills of Cruise to play his archetypal character, the result is almost always a great movie that is endlessly rewatchable. Acting Skills Like a true A Lister, his inability to age only furthers his legend and divinity, with Cruise looking like the youngest fifty-nine-year-old in human history. Movie stars have familiar traits and aspects to their acting they repeatedly deploy across movies. For Cruise, his intensity, facetiousness, strangely enthralling yelling, and distinctive running style are all seen time and time again. To me, Cruise is at his best when he’s either loud and dominating or when measured and taciturn. Both can perfectly be seen in that courtroom scene in A Few Good Men. Nicholson deservedly received praise for the scene, even receiving a supporting actor Oscar nomination effectively for it alone, but to me the better actor in the scene is Cruise. Tom’s ability to suck the attention of the viewer entirely onto himself, through his engrossing magnetism and acting skill, builds the scene to a point where it almost didn’t matter what Nicholson brought to the table. So, to me, Cruise’s work in the scene is far more difficult and impressive than what Nicholson provides. The Legend of Tom Cruise: 2001-2021 First of all, apologies, I was not expecting this to be this long, and ya boy most definitely does not have the time to edit this down, so congrats if you’re still reading. Shifting now to the next two decades of Cruise’s career: Mission impossible 2-7, The Last Samurai, Collateral, Jack Reacher 1-2, Edge of Tomorrow, Oblivion, Top Gun 2. Two decades of classic after classic gave Cruise a level of power rarely seen in Hollywood, and to me he uses it to establish and promulgate ‘The Legend of Tom Cruise.’ He transitions into becoming almost exclusively an action star, playing himself in every movie with little variation or nuance (also known as becoming a student of the Jason Bateman School of acting). Some argue the catalyst for this substantial shift in Cruise’s career was his lack of an Oscar win for Magnolia, with Cruise consequently shunning traditional dramatic acting. To continue the sports analogy, Cruise’s power build up is like Michael Jordan transitioning into becoming an NBA Franchise owner, except Cruise took it a step further by establishing himself as a player-coach-owner. When you have such power, you obviously must let everyone know how great you are. TOM CRUISE DOES HIS OWN STUNTS. HE HUNG ON THE SIDE OF A PLANE FOR MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, DID YOU HEAR? HE BROKE HIS ANKLE DOING A STUNT! HE WANTS TO GO TO SPACE FOR A MOVIE! HE FLEW PLANES FOR TOP GUN! ALSO DID YOU HEAR HOW X PERSON TOLD HIM X STUNT WAS TOO DANGEROUS BUT HE DID IT ANYWAY? WOW! TOM CRUISE, WHAT A LEGEND. This legend creating is not only applied to acting, with many articles discussing how Tommy boy is the one calling all the shots on his films, by being a hands-on and intimately involved producer. Are we really going to believe the “leaked” audio of him ‘politely’ talking to his cast and crew, while also talking about how seemingly all of Hollywood calls him all the time just magically appeared? It could be argued that it was instead the careful cultivation of a brand - Cruise remains a beloved cultural figure, drawing eyes to screens simply for the purpose of seeing him, his schtick, and his production efforts. Well, we’re now scarily deep into this, so it’s probably time to wrap it up. Travelling through Tom Cruise’s four-decade career has hopefully illuminated to both you and to me why he's been able to achieve this incredible career. To close, this clip of Cruise opening the 2002 Oscars is a perfect example of his skills as an actor, his magnetism, and his deeply engaging ability to tell a story. Tom Cruise: a true movie star. Tim is a First Year Student. Volume 20, Issue 10  Dear Ousted and Offline,
This question is predicated on lawyers and law students not only having the time to socialise but wanting to. This is incorrect. Therefore, there are no secret social channels for lawyers beyond the company Slack group and Microsoft Teams chat. If you are thirsting for some kind of outlet, the cesspool that is Twitter is ready and waiting for your extremely unimaginative and uncontroversial auspol opinions. Want to talk to your friends and family? Make the bold move and pick up the phone. Somewhat sincerely, Your Learned Friend Volume 20, Issue 10  This vaccination rollout has felt like the worst group project imaginable. I never thought I would have to again depend upon the kids in high school science who did nothing during class – not after VCE. But alas, the freedom of my family, friends, and myself now depends upon these people yet again. Without coercive measures of sorts, the vaccine hesitancy of these individuals would likely have prevailed.
Now, hopefully, it won’t. Vaccines provide individual protection (in most cases), but they work best in their ability to create herd immunity. The concept of herd immunity is simple: the more people vaccinated, the fewer people there are who are able to carry the virus and facilitate its replication for prolonged periods of time. Thus, there is less virus around. This is especially important because vaccines don’t actually produce efficacious immune responses in all individuals (esp. the elderly, immunocompromised, etc), nor are all individuals safely able to get vaccines for health reasons. I used to think vaccine hesitancy was pure selfishness – and I still do, to some extent – but now I can also appreciate the effect the government’s poor vaccine messaging has had on vaccine uptake. The COVID-19 vaccines are safe – they have been approved by Australia’s thorough, rigorous standards. Of course, there are risks associated with the vaccines, but that is literally the case for most medicines and vaccines. Yet, these COVID-19 vaccines have been utterly demonised by people who should have known better, even before they were deemed mandatory. We are living through the first coronavirus pandemic in recorded history. Consequently, coronaviruses, unlike the plethora of influenza strains, have not been studied as thoroughly, making them unpredictable. Neither SARS nor MERS became pandemic, ultimately disappearing by themselves– SARS-CoV-19 (COVID-19) has not. Scientists have been trying to make a coronavirus vaccine since the SARS outbreak (2002-2004) and their research has essentially culminated in the production of the vaccines we can freely access today (albeit, for a different coronavirus). The biotechnology that went into the production of the Astra-Zeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer vaccines in Australia all benefited from years of SARS-initiated research and, of course, supercharged funding. People don’t realise how poorly funded medical research usually is, and how this inevitably affects the speed in which new medicines and prophylactics are produced. |
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