ATL March Madness: Best Law School Scandal

Now for the second region in this year’s competition: Wacky Students. What will those crazy law school kids do next?

Here’s the bracket:

1. UVA Law Student Arrested: Charged With Breaking and Entering

Once again with the Virginia students. This time it’s Joshua Gomes who was arrested for, and subsequently pleaded guilty to, breaking into the registrar’s office to steal transcript paper.

From his lawyer’s statement to the judge:

“Gomes was conducting surveillance on the registrar’s office to determine their transcript printing/operating procedures. Gomes had a summer internship arranged with a large New York law firm,” according to the commonwealth’s evidence, which indicated that the firm was going to submit a transcript request on Dec. 8.

“Gomes was concerned about his actual grades being revealed and losing the internship since he had inaccurately reported his GPA. His goal was to intercept the transcript request.”

8. The Height Of Law School Toolishness (A Law Review Citation Tattoo)

This was one of our vaunted caption contests. Some Ohio State kid decided to get a tattoo of his published Note’s citation.

This kid is the greatest argument for radically overhauling the Bluebook’s citation conventions.

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2. Student Found Bound And Gagged At Law School Faked Her Own Kidnapping

What would you do to get out of having to take a final exam? If you’d go to the extremes of binding and gagging yourself and then claiming that a gang of masked men had kidnapped you and then dumped your body at the law school, then you might be a student at the University of Houston Law Center. Yikes.

7. T14 Law Student Expects You To Answer 185 Crazy Questions To Join His Elite Club

If you’re a gunner at Georgetown Law, then have we got the perfect study group for you! Unfortunately, there’s a catch. You’ve got to answer almost 200 questions to join The Actually Going to Try to Change the World Club. Somehow, this group was sanctioned by the school’s Office of Student Life as an official student group. Here are a few sample questions from group’s “membership interrogatories”:

• List 43 areas of your expertise.
• Discuss seven things that you would really rather not.
• Physics? Chemistry? Biology? Linguistics? Cooking? Dancing? Singing?
• Do you prefer to do things slowly or quickly? Do you like writing? Are you meticulous? Are you detail-oriented? Are you quick? Are you tone-deaf? What do you care about when you cook? What do you look at when you are at the store? Do you care about money? Do you care about fame? Do you care about having children? Would you like to have a clone? Would you like to be a superhero? Do you welcome responsibility?
• Why don’t you like Lady Gaga right now?
• Are you [a] racist?
• Estimate the length of your nose and that of seven other people.
• Are you lazy? Stupid? Compare yourself to seven other people?

Are you smart crazy enough to qualify for membership?

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3. Harvard Law Jerk Confirms Everything You Thought About Harvard Law

Imagine you’re hard at work in the library, busting your ass on the Law Review write-on competition. You and every other gunner at Harvard Law are diligently working on that one assignment that could really make the rest of your life, if you manage to get yourself on Law Review. You take a quick break — you aren’t a machine after all — and when you return, the work you’ve been poring over is gone.

From the Harvard Law School Class of 2017 Facebook page:

For those of you who are doing the competition, please keep your eyes on your work. Someone just stole my subcite while I was gone away from my desk for a break, and now I will have to re-do it again without concession. My understanding is this is not the first report of stolen work during competition so please watch out.

Devastating blow, especially when you’re sleep deprived and have so much on the line. But it is a valuable life lesson: law students be trippin’.

6. Law School Cancels Barrister’s Ball Because Of Donald Trump

Every bracket has a couple of misseeds, and this seems to be one of ours. That having been said, earlier this spring, students at DePaul Law decided that thanks to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s flagrant campaign strategy of insulting members of just about every race, religion, and creed, they’d rather not have a Barrister’s Ball at all than have one at Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. The law school allegedly lost $15,000 to cancel the contract with the venue. We’ve heard that the event was rescheduled at another banquet hall, but this was a YUGE deal at the time.

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4. Cornell 1L Loses His Damn Mind On Message Board, Spars With Dean

The title really says it all. Even though we hear this particular 1L got in off the waiting list, he somehow got it into his head that it was a great idea to take to the school message board and complain that Cornell couldn’t hold a candle to Yale. Which… I mean, your point being?

There doesn’t seem to be an endgame here: this top-tier school isn’t as good as some other top-tier schools so we should… what, go to the other schools we couldn’t get into? Good plan!

Then the dean gets involved in the back-and-forth, because why not?

5. Fed Soc Chapter Offers Chick-fil-A At Gay Marriage Event With Disastrous Results

The Northwestern Federalist Society gang decided to host an informative discussion about marriage equality. They invited Ryan Anderson, a leading apologist for the “one man and one woman” camp, to defend an interpretation of marriage that even FedSoc Hall of Famer Ted Olson doesn’t defend. In any event, there’s nothing wrong with hearing out a different intellectual viewpoint — or in this case, just a different psuedo-intellectual viewpoint.

But the FedSoc chapter decided to slather its event with an extra layer of trolling by having its event on gay rights catered by Chick-Fil-A. Free publicity, check.

Brilliant PR move or Neanderthal douchebaggery? We weren’t even sure. The story struck a chord in the ATL offices and we argued about it internally. David Lat said he’d cater his wedding with Chick-Fil-A. Mercifully, he did not, in fact, follow through with this.

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Get to voting. Reminder, voting is open until Sunday, March 20, at 11:59 p.m. EST.