This Was Not Good for My Résumé or In Defense of Doing Something Pointless

There’s something a little surreal about writing a final piece for the Virginia Law Weekly, mostly because I’m not entirely convinced this paper exists outside of a shared Monday night delusion held together by Google Docs, Domino’s pizza, and sheer force of will. I think part of how I’ve managed to keep writing for it is by aggressively blocking out the fact that other people actually read what I write—a strategy best evidenced by my prolific, deeply unhinged rat law content and various Twilight Zone/David Lynch homage pieces.

This strategy is deeply flawed and requires categoric suppression of memories, such as Professor Rutherglen asking Ashanti ’26 during our 1L Civ Pro class, “What is a galentine?” after she and I co-wrote “Can a Reasonable Person Find Love?”[1] More recently, I have been filled with equal parts honor and deep shame at the realization that the legendary Professor Cate Stetson ’94 both reads what I write and occasionally emails me to say she found parts of it amusing.

And yet—here we are.

This past semester, the SBA (briefly) had a panicky moment where it struggled to find students willing to run for any student government position. This is not a knock on SBA; it’s just a reflection of the reality of law school now. Firm recruitment happens earlier, offers come faster, our OPP office remains violently efficient and competent, and by the time spring rolls around, most people are already set. There is, quite literally, no incentive to do anything.

Which is why the Law Weekly is so strange.

Because while other student orgs are sending increasingly desperate emails into the void, the Law Weekly colophon remains, somehow, deeply, almost offensively plump. I mention this not because I have anything to do with it,[2] or even to make a point about the Law Weekly being particularly alluring. It’s notable because in a place where so much is transactional, where time is carefully allocated toward things that “matter,” this paper persists as something that very much does not. And I say that with love.

The Law Weekly is not particularly good for your résumé. Some even worry that it might be detrimental to one’s résumé (THANKS KIRK WOLFF ’26). It will likely not get you a job. It will not impress anyone who is capable of helping you in any material way. And yet people keep showing up. They write, they edit, they argue about ellipses, they miss deadlines, and then heroically meet them anyway. Their comrades flake, so they band together to produce some weird quiz about what your favorite goddamn bathroom faucet at the Law School says about you.[3] In other words, they care—for no reason other than that they care. Which feels, in this environment, almost radical.

There is something deeply pure about doing something for no strategic purpose. Just the simple, irrational desire to make something with other people who also think it’s worth making. As I said before, I never thought anyone actually read this thing (and I prefer to keep it that way). You do it for the love of the game. Like Dick Cheney being Dick Cheney yet somehow not showing up on the Epstein list. It’s just for the Pure. Love. Of. The. Game.

That’s what the Law Weekly has been. Not always perfect. Arbitrarily organized. Frequently unhinged. But sustained by people who chose to be here when they absolutely did not have to be. And that, more than anything else, is what I’ll remember.

To everyone who has ever written, edited, or stayed up far too late working on this paper: thank you. You made something! You won an award (and now we have four and can make our Aworb)! You wrote for fun! I’m honored to have been a part of it.

And to the next group—may your colophon be full, your deadlines be fake until they aren’t, and may you care more than you should.

[1] https://www.lawweekly.org/col/2024/2/26/can-a-reasonable-person-find-love

[2] We all know any credit due must be paid to Kelly recruiting her entire 1L section in her role as their PA.

[3] One faucet in the school is not like the others. If you know what i’m talking about, then you too might have a familial genetic predisposition to schizophrenia. Kidding! But if you find it, I owe you a drink.