This Video Is What Happens When Criminal Procedure Meets an Acid Flashback

A BAR/BRI lecturer creates a "trailer" for a film highlighting criminal procedure issues. Is it absolutely insane? You bet!

The task of keeping cranky, nervous, and potentially mutinous law grads on task and learning requires a lecturer being memorable enough to hold the audience’s attention. There are many paths to being memorable.

This video “trailer” for a film by one BARBRI professor takes a very particular route to memorability, and that route is a balls-to-the-wall crazy collection of hallucinogenic images.

As far as I can tell through the psychedelic fog of the production embedded below, a piece of African art in his living room convinced the instructor to kill a bunch of people and then take off his shirt in front of the jury. African art… why does it always have to be a black guy’s fault?

Chad Noreuil is a clinical professor at the Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law (just making the cut at #50 in the ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings). Professor Noreuil teaches research and writing as well as an upper-level Prisoner Rights course.

Prior to joining the faculty at ASU twelve years ago, Professor Noreuil worked at WUSTL Law and as an assistant attorney general in Illinois.

Professor Noreuil also teaches for BARBRI, covering criminal law as well as exam-taking procedures at a variety of locations. To that end, he’s prepared a “trailer” to get us warmed up to his teaching style.

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Professor Noreuil wrote, directed, and produced this trailer, which makes him a triple threat… of awesome:

Let’s go through the highlights. The video opens with our hero (or is he? Dum Dum DUUUM!) struggling to get out of bed using the editing technique of every “As Seen on Television” ad ever. Rewatch the opening of the video and insert this commentary:

Narrator: Do you have trouble understanding how to use sheets? Well now, you don’t have to be afraid to go to bed with EZSleep (TM).

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A shirtless Noreuil walks cautiously into the hallway with a baseball bat while someone on the phone tells him that he lost an appeal. For some reason those concepts are supposed to go together.

And then we get our first shot of the African art piece that’s going to cause all the trouble.

Now Noreuil is the plucky lawyer trying to get some unknown innocent man out of prison. And… I’m already lost. Because now Noreuil appears to be the accused, “just trying to get his family back,” which is driven home by roughly a thousand shots of a baby — interrupted by Noreuil in a doo-rag and perplexed for some reason.

The woman in the shot declares, “That’s bulls**t!” Apparently she’s seen the film.

From here on we get a visit from “Mitchell,” because coke-snorting police officers are always more intimidating in bike helmets.

Mitchell comes back again and is easily my favorite character.

Then there’s some sexual harassment, possible bestiality, and Noreuil hooking up with a student. Issue-spotting abounds!

All kidding aside, this does seem to be a video version of a wild issue-spotter. At least it’s not as bad as some issue-spotters out there. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I can see how a video issue-spotter could appeal to some students.

But then there’s all the crazy stuff with the African idols and the meditation and the weird editing.

The whole thing can be summed up in Noreuil’s own words: “I question my sanity.” Indeed.

Professor Chad Noreuil C.V. [ASU College of Law]

Earlier: ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings
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