Boalt Hall, Drinking, John Yoo, Pranks

UC-Berkeley's Gun Club Secret Society Rides AgainJohn Yoo unimpressed

By  
on

UC-Berkeley once again topped Michigan in the (leaked so still unofficial) U.S. News law school rankings. Boalt Hall also dominated the Wolverines this month when it comes to secret society activity.

Whereas, members of Michigan’s “Barrister’s Society” threw their dirty laundry o’er the rooftops, resulting in campus-wide derision, recent activities by Berkeley’s “Gun Club” have left their fellow students appropriately mystified and intrigued.

A Boaltie tells us:

Last week, flyers featuring John Yoo’s face, with the phrase “I’m sorry, for everything” were posted around Boalt Hall.

Everyone assumed it was just the usual torture-memo protesters who flock to Berkeley, in the hope that it’s still the Bezerkeley of the 1960s, only to find a bunch of JD and MBA students hurrying by, scowling at their unshowered ways.

On Tuesday morning, the flyer reappeared in the student center, attached to the King of Beers….

Sponsored

Nuts & Boalts reports:

[T]his morning… a keg mysteriously appeared in the student center, plastered with the very same posters. The keg (seemingly of Bud Light) looked like it had been there overnight, much to the consternation of M*ndi and L*sa.

The cups sat beside a photo of Earl Warren… Who was perhaps the most illustrious (and only known) member of the original Gun Club, a secret society founded at Boalt in the early 1900s composed of “[m]en” who “lived for the drink and died by the gun.” Time Magazine reported that Warren and his friends in the Club would gather on Thursday nights at Pop Kessler’s Rathskeller in Oakland for evenings of beer drinking and poetry reading.

We imagine Warren & Co. imbibing something finer than Bud Light while sharing their lyrical rhymes (although Warren was a “man of modest ability who attained singular achievement,” so maybe he was just swilling Prohibition-era bathhouse mead).

Professor John Yoo was not impressed by the Gun Club’s prank. He told us:

Sponsored

While we are teaching our students the finer points of law, we have clearly failed to teach some of them how to throw a party. Spoilt beer and posters with professors’ photos — especially mine — do not a throwdown make.

Beyond flat Bud, one lame thing about the Gun Club activities is that they revolve around John Yoo at all; that’s not exactly original. Protesters have been pranking the prof for years (e.g., the Australian comedian who made a hooded appearance in class). Yoo’s California Constitution class this semester is a bit of a secret society of its own, since it meets at undisclosed locations to avoid the riffraff.

This is not the first time in recent memory that the Gun Club has let its merry bullets fly. Somewhere in Boalt Hall library, a flask of aging liquor is hidden in a tome, awaiting a throwdown.

Resurrection of Boalt’s Legendary Gun Club? [Nuts & Boalts]

Earlier: Michigan Law Secret Society Openly Mocked
John Yoo’s ‘Secret Class’: The Professor Responds

Topics

, , , , ,