What's Going on at Penn Law?

Last year, the WSJ Law Blog posed this question: “Are law students emotional wrecks?” Their post generated hundreds of comments.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that some law students have, in modern parlance, “issues.” The stress of law school may have a tendency to trigger meltdowns. See, e.g., here (University of Alabama law student who gave a strange speech in class), here (Indiana University law student who shot up his casebooks), and here (University of Arizona law student accused of kidnapping her ex-boyfriend).
One of last year’s more memorable incidents was this one, involving a student at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who riddled his neighbors’ apartment door with bullets. Now we return to U. Penn — where we recently spoke, and where the students struck us as happy and well-adjusted — thanks to this Daily Pennsylvanian article:

Security has been increased around the Law School over the past several days in response to a student who has exhibited signs of unstable behavior. The student is being placed on involuntary leave….

The student had caused administrators concern because of an incident that happened at the Law School. It was then discovered that he had taken himself off of his psychiatric medication about a month ago, according to two Penn Law employees who were briefed on the situation and spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose this information. However, they were not told the specifics of the initial incident.

A tipster there tells us:

The Penn Law students have not received ANY formal communication about this, and the students are generally very upset that 1) we weren’t told anything and 2) the first communication came from the undergraduate newspaper.

We’ll keep you posted. If you have info to share, please email us. If you comment on this post, please do not mention any individuals by name, consistent with ATL’s standard operating procedure.
Based on past precedent, we’d expect Dean Fitts to send out some vague email offering blanket reassurances, but declining to say more due to federal privacy law. That seems to be par for the course for these incidents.
Student prompts security increase [Daily Pennsylvanian]
Related: Law student arrested for firing at neighbors

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