Down With This Sort of Thing!

Issue 10, Semester 1, 2019

PED ANT

To the student streaming the NBA playoffs on your laptop in the Level Three study area:

While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with your desire to keep up to date with Damian Lillard’s ridiculous three-pointers and Nikola Jokic’s freakish passing, come on dude. It’s Level Three. We have to use our study cards to access this space in the first place! This special, nay, sacred, space is so important that we have security posted outside of it during SWOTVAC to keep out the great unwashed (i.e. literally anyone not enrolled in Australia’s Number One Law School™ according to metrics of questionable value which primarily take into account research output rather than anything to do with the actual standards of teaching taking place, but that’s a matter for another day and another article).

Just think of all the other students who could be using this space to be productive, doing things like:

• Aimlessly scrolling through Instagram
• Procrastinating by reading news articles tangentially related to their studies
• Watching cat videos on Facebook
• Skimming through assigned journal articles that you almost certainly will have to re-read during SWOTVAC
• Aggressively shushing other students for daring to so much as make a sound above five decibels
• Much, much more

As a Very Serious Law Student (did I mention I study Law at The Melbourne Law School?), I hereby call for a regular inspection of students using the study area to make sure they are focusing on academic matters at all times, with the punishment of either summary execution, or being forced to read the entire Legal Theory syllabus from cover to cover.

And besides, we all know the Golden State Warriors are going to win anyway, so what’s the point?

Yours truly,

Ped Ant
Juris Doctor™ Candidate (per my LinkedIn), Melbourne Law School™

​Ped Ant is a Third Year Law Student​