Law Library Graffiti

Selected graffiti from the carrel I was using in the UCL library yesterday:

  • (On a white square sticker with rounded edges)
    I won’t deny the pain
    I won’t deny the change
    And should I fall from grace
    Here with you
    Would you leave me too?
    (Signed off mei3 nu3 du2 LAW, which roughly translates to beautiful girl law student)
    (this promptly put the song into my head for the rest of the day, where it is still.)
  • SOCIALIST WORKERS FUCK OFF
  • My pen is Better!! (with the dots in the exclamation mark replaced by circles)
  • Today is the first day of the rest of my life!
  • moo moo moo (in neat cursive, the person probably does very legible lecture notes)
  • shezad is an annoying fuck
  • (below, in red) SO YOU BOTH HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON…
  • (I think the following few constitute a continuous exchange, although various snippets were sprawled all over the surface wherever writing space was available)
    IF YOU’RE TIRED/BORED, GET THE FUCK OUT OF ‘ERE!
  • YOU WERE OBVIOUSLY NOT SUITED TO A LIBRARY
  • YOU WERE OBVIOUSLY A KNOB
  • Using a vibrator (this word underlined in red, with concentric “vibration” marks emanating from it) sometimes helps. Put it on your brain perhaps!
  • What has a VIBRATOR got to do with REVISION?
  • What little imagination you have!
  • I wouldn’t mind a vibrator. Will it hurt?

I Wasn’t Made For Diplomacy

The reading on cultural relativism I’ve been doing for my comparative human rights course has been boring me so far. This isn’t because it’s especially tough or dry, it’s because it’s just so earnest and civilized. Human rights are important. Social and political cultures are complex and diverse. It’s really, really difficult to figure out how best to protect everything and everyone, but we must keep trying. GROUP HUG!!!

In contrast, Voltaire once said he would rest in peace only when the last king was strangled in the entrails of the last priest. Philosophical discourse must have been so much more fun in those days.

Halfway Through, Need More Bullshit

It’s half over. There was an annoying little man in my dreams last night; he had black spectacles and a reedy voice and followed me around rasping “interpretation, interpretation” when he wasn’t engaged in unintelligible mumbling. Without needing to don my armchair dream interpreter hat, I think I can safely say that he was very much inspired by this man, whose existence I was hoping to completely ignore in today’s jurisprudence exam due to my hatred of his Law’s Empire. I unfortunately failed in this noble endeavour, but am comforted by the fact that I only invoked his evil name in criticizing Fuller’s The Morality of Law, which richly deserved the criticism anyway.

So much for the fun exams. Today’s went fairly well compared to public international law last Thursday, where I found myself answering an essay entirely from hazy memories of the Human Rights Act, which I studied in 1999. I daresay much more has happened since then than Naomi Campbell’s grudge match with the tabloids, and I’m sure actually studying the topic would have allowed me to write an essay more than one page long, but such is life.

And now to Conflict of Laws next Monday (which I haven’t started studying for) and Company Law the day after. I think the bullshitting possibilities of these exams ran out today. Ulp.

Boguslawski!

Must really stop giggling every time I think of the Boguslawski case, but this is difficult given that my mental connection of the facts of the case with its name involves imagining a bunch of Polish people in an English courtroom shouting “LAWSKI!” and “No, BOGUSLAWSKI!” at each other.

(Sorry, I know that’ll be lost on anyone who doesn’t know public international law. I’ll stop talking about it soon enough, I promise. Monday is jurisprudence.)

Bloody Typical

I write the Great American Novel, save it to disk, and come in here to find that my disk can’t be read.

Okay, it wasn’t the Great American Novel. It was company law notes on agency and shareholder litigation, plus two blog entries, and I’m not American. But regardless of all this I claim the right to be annoyed.

Public International Law on Thursday. If Re Pinochet (No.3) and humanitarian intervention don’t feature strongly in the paper, heads will roll, namely mine.

In Which Zen Calm Eludes Me

Fucking dissertation due today. Fucking moot tomorrow in fucking Lincoln about the fucking law of fucking finding i.e. if Lord Fucker leases his land to Fucker 1 who employs Fucker 2 as a gamekeeper, and Fucker 2 finds an antique brooch one day while walking through the forest, who gets to keep it? DUDE, DO I LOOK LIKE I FUCKING CARE????????

[Hmmmm. An addendum, now that Microsoft Word has finally kindly consented to stop conducting chaos theory experiments with my footnotes. The dissertation is printed. Love dissertation. Love computer. Love printer. I am calm and full of love. Except for the fact that I now need to prepare the moot. Which I still FUCKING HATE.]

Step Aside Ron Jeremy!

So there I was, suffering acutely from dissertation exhaustion, and then Jeremy Bentham pornolized to Jeremy “Big Cock” Bentham.

The Dialecticizer’s results bring less glee but are edifying nonetheless, especially Redneck, Swedish Chef and Hacker.

Deep Thinker

Trying to home in on a dissertation topic, I slave away in my room reading Nonsense upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man (Waldron, editor), Utilitarianism and Natural Rights from Hart’s essays in jurisprudence and philosophy, and Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy (Rosen).

I then go down to meet John and be fodder for his dissertation (anthropology). By this time my fried brain is capable only of metaphysical gems such as “I like American prime time drama more than British, because it just looks…glossier” and “I don’t like widescreen TVs, they make all the people look misshapen”.

Juxtapositions. I can delude myself no longer. I am clearly a pleb.

It’s Like Riding A Bike

You never lose the art of wasting time no matter how long you’ve been out of practice. In the euphoria that followed winning my moot on Wednesday I managed to fritter all of Thursday away in languid nothingness, although given the blood, sweat and tears I’d been putting into the moot I contend (still using courtroom language, oops) the R&R was well deserved. It will, however, be short-lived, given my currently non-existent 8000 word dissertation, vaguely on Jeremy Bentham, specific topic as yet unknown, deadline April.

All the same, yesterday began pleasantly when mum woke me up with a phone call at noon, and continued in much the same vein with a surprise meeting and girliness with Jolene, rambling conversation with Tay where Spiritualized and Madonna were liberally pissed on, final retreat to my room for solitaire (literally, I’m not just smarmily including words in foreign languages in normal sentences just for that sense of je ne s’ais quoi) and eventually, reluctantly, work.

Today has been mostly lectures, mostly dreary, with this one little sunbeam of surreality – in the computer room, this overheard conversational snippet: “My dream night out? Ronald Dworkin, sucking my dick.” This probably won’t make much sense to you unless you’re a disgruntled jurisprudence student, but it’s insanely funny if you are.

[Addendum: French spelling mistake corrected by Russ – my thanks. There is probably a flippant remark to be made here about how I’m relieved he has enough proficiency in at least one language to demonstrate its proper use (I conspicuously fail to mention English) (I also remember our trip to Paris where he explained he could go into great lengths in French about his ambitions and what he did during summer but couldn’t ask if the restaurant was still serving food), but I guess I shouldn’t make that flippant remark.] :P

International Ass

Oh, I forgot to say: things will probably be quiet here till Monday at least, because I’m Ryanairing off to Ireland tomorrow.

Meanwhile I continue to utter unfortunately phrased and embarrassing statements garnering strange looks from surrounding people in the computer cluster room, such as explaining on the phone to a public international law coursemate that “I really have to get my public international ass into gear”.