Dear Wormwood:

After the innumerable bake sales, drinking events, speaker meetings, dinner events, and even Law Revue [1], it will not be until this part of the year that you can join the most important social grouping: the Fraternity of the Damned. [2]

You join about twenty-four hours before your second legal memo is due. There's not really an initiation ceremony as such: you'll just be able to tell your fellow members from how they look. Bruised eyelids over bloodshot eyes, an unbalanced air of distraction, they'll be murmuring about causes of action and counting the hours until it's over.

I'm a member of the Fraternity, dear Wormwood, and while I will pass on the required warning against membership, there are some advantages. For one thing, you will never spend too much time on a task that you leave to the last minute. Required as our memo is, it's a pass-fail task, and thus allocating time elsewhere is not unwise. Similarly, while the stress in the last two days is awful, it is only stress for two days. This is particularly useful if you're a not-so-young man who wants to keep his hair.

Anyway, here's the important thing about Fraternity membership: in the end, you know you're not alone. In the weeks leading up to this hazing ritual, you'll hear a lot from the non-members. They'll ask you to justify your position on how you should Bluebook quotations from Egyptian law review articles on conversion of intellectual property relating to bovines, leaving you to sheepishly admit that you've not started your research yet. Undeterred, they'll question you as to whether the dissenting opinion in a state court ruling that was overturned might be used to justify a novel reading of an otherwise unquestioned area of law in a federal case brought on diversity jurisdiction. You'll look blank. And they'll keep going, even though you have nothing to say on the matter, because... well, who knows? This will make you feel very alone.

Here is where the Fraternity of the Damned steps in. These are the people you'll want to buy drinks with after you've been up all night crying over string citations. They're the people who, when you say, "Yeah, I've only begun researching summary judgment," reply, "Oh, yeah, I need to write that section too, don't I?." Every member knows that tonight is going to be a very long night, and that they'll be enjoying copious amounts of Colombia's finest (legal) export well after most of humanity is in bed. In short, they're the people who don't make you feel ashamed that despite your fine time management skills, you're about to pull the equivalent of an undergrad allnighter.

We don't have t-shirts yet. But I'm working on it.

[1] A song-and-dance number put on by members of Columbia Law School once a term. Congratulations to everyone who played a part in it last week, it was top notch.

[2] I use the term 'fraternity' loosely, because in no sense is the Fraternity closed to women. It's an equal opportunity group, open to members of all races, creeds, genders, sexual orientations, and political affiliations, nor does it discriminate on the basis of age.