Nick Papageorge (3L)
With November rolling around, the timing just felt right: I should try going to class. Like every exchange student, I had fled U of T Law to spend four months in a land of make-believe while many of my classmates back home writhed in Biz Org agony—and I had not been disappointed. There was whisky and highland cows and nary a commitment in sight!
The beginning of my journey to class was inauspicious. The classroom building was hard to find. See, the university here didn’t seem to understand that a good law school must be housed in a conspicuously repellant building teetering near the edge of campus.
All I could find here were elegant old buildings of stone and beauty. One looked like it had a steeple on it. “That’s not it,” I thought. “Churches can’t be accredited law schools.” I think I heard something like that in admin law once.
Eventually I stumbled upon a singularly ugly building on the edge of campus. “Ah, now this is more like it,” I murmured to myself, feeling more at home.
That comfort quickly dissipated. I was bemused to find myself amongst a bunch of undergrads. Maybe I hadn’t found the right room after all. Then I remembered I was, in fact, back in undergrad. The horror I felt at being surrounded by a bunch of people who still had ideals and stuff is indescribable.
Then the prof came to the lectern and said something about EU law and I blacked out.
When I came to, she was talking about an assignment. Two thousand words? That’s such a poor use of my time, it’s beneath me. You can’t say anything profound in two thousand words; our Supreme Court can’t even introduce a plaintiff in less than two thousand words.
And then I heard there would be an exam—surely the sort of formality I had gone on exchange to avoid—and that it was closed book. Travesty! I would be forced to memorize case names containing silliness like “Lord Advocate” and “Dimbleby” and “Stichting Vormingscentrum voor Jonge Volswassenen Plus” (that’s a real thing).
This suggestion of schoolwork had me ready to storm out indignantly. Then I got an email from Sara Faherty, and another from the CDO, and I realized that life could always be much, much worse. I wondered if maybe the school here would let me stay for a couple more months. Just long enough to come to class again.
