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-- By MeherGeorge - 18 Feb 2025

An Elegy in More Ways Than One

I read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy when I was sixteen years old; my adolescent self would be shocked to know the same thoughtful author who cast light onto the trials and tribulations of the economically insecure in Appalachia would become the proud Vice President to a vapid trust fund child. It would have been utterly inconceivable to my sixteen-year old self that someone whose mother suffered from drug addiction in an impoverished Ohio steel town could sign his name onto a ticket that represented anything other than understanding. Maybe I didn't read the memoir closely enough, but Vance's perceptiveness about the rotting effect of despair and its cyclical downwards force was not a figment of my imagination. I won't accept that J.D. Vance held a hard-earned Yale Law degree in his hands and prayed one day to rename the Gulf of Mexico and fire thousands of National Park Service employees. What did Usha Vance, who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts and edited the Yale Law Journal, think about Trump's birthright citizenship order? I guess I should instead ask what her twenty-something year old self would think. Anti-intellectualism in the United States and a politician's drive to take advantage of it has run rampant since its conception, but has it always looked this awkward? I can't help but feel betrayed. I'm a terrified freshly minted law student. If this is the "legal elite" I'm apparently dying to become absorbed by, I'm in trouble.

The Impetus for a Legal Education

Many of us were told to go to law school because we had strong opinions. Mainstream media, discourse (name your medium of culture) told us lawyers like to argue. Lawyers are hot-headed, fiery, bursting with passion for their craft, their clients, and perhaps life itself. Spend time within the walls of law school though and you're told a different story. You're told to neutralize yourself, as much as you can, to preserve the full breadth of your professional network. You never know who will be on the hiring committee of the next firm you work for, they say. You're told to join the Federalist Society for their stellar outline bank and clerkship options even if you vehemently disagree with their ideals; the omitted part is that they'll call your bluff if you're not a "believable" member. Really though, what does it say about a group if it must be a hoax when a woman of color joins?

Things are what they do, not what they are called.

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