Journalists at London office of social news website BuzzFeed think people who study law are much less cool than them
BuzzFeed has recently launched a new discussion series where its UK writers sit around and pontificate on an agreed topic before publishing the transcript of their musings. The latest coming together of these top minds has seen the following question tackled: “What does your university degree say about you?”
Of the 33 different degree courses reflected upon, law is seen to attract arguably the most annoying people with the least redeeming features. While students of medicine, English and journalism are deemed, respectively, “exceptionally good drinkers”, “unreasonably attractive” and “like an opinion tsunami”, the BuzzFeed team has this to say about law students:
“People who do law have those pencils you have to add bits of lead to.”
“They take pub arguments way too seriously.”
“And their voices could be described as ‘booming’.”
“Also, they really like telling people the law at inopportune times, but then when people actually ask what the law is, they suddenly become very shy.”
“I think they get very annoyed with people who just did a conversion course.”
Not only do these judgements fail to acknowledge the impressive cost-saving possibilities of mechanical pencils, but they quite unfairly present law students as a bunch of pompous, earnest bores who no one seems to like. Such stereotypes are hardly new, of course, with student newspaper The Tab trotting out similar stuff in its recent plea to law students to “shut the fuck up”.
The truth, naturally, couldn’t be more different, with brilliant Legal Cheek contributors such as Pupillage in Panem, Wigapedia and Waitrose Law revealing law students and lawyers to in fact be a brilliant cluster of renaissance men and women whose talents the rest of the world is very much jealous of.
As for the final BuzzFeed charge that law students “get very annoyed with people who just did a conversion course” — which seems a little out of step with the rest of the criticisms — could its inclusion be down to the fact that these young hacks spend their quiet moments pondering whether to do the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) themselves?