The Yale LL.M.: HALLOWEEN

The last post revolving around IDEAS, this one is about their lack. It is a tale of a meerkat at heart in its desperate and ultimately unsuccessful search of a HALLOWEEN costume. The injustice of this situation was manifold:

“Meerkat” would have been a pretty good costume. Unfortunately though, being a meerkat disqualified me from impersonating one. After all, the law of HALLOWEEN demands us to dress up as someone or something else.

Which leads me to my second point: The Law of HALLOWEEN. Why is there such a thing and why should we LLMs have to yield to its demands? By virtue of what authority? As foreigners we certainly did not incur this obligation by way of self-authorship. We did not partake in the making of this custom of making up costumes. Should we nevertheless have to assimilate? Should we abandon our own, diverse cultures to a bunch of pumpkins? Should we not demand some room for cultural accommodation? You could say that we forfeited this claim when deliberately leaving the customs area at the airport, thus renouncing our natural liberty in exchange for whatever costumes-custom our host country might come up with. But shouldn’t there at least be an exception to laws so clearly and utterly horrific as the Law of HALLOWEEN?

In the face of such injustice, of course, we yielded. Not only did our LLM-class yield, we even organized our own HALLOWEEN party. This left some of us, including me, in the even worse position of being stripped of the network of mutual support against the American yoke that our LLM class generally provides. While wars are being fought about whether the LLMs should be properly referred to as “foreign exchange students” (some of us minded the somewhat condescending ring of the term) by our American counterparts, nobody joined me in taking up arms against HALLOWEEN’S dictate.

Being neither a fool (meerkats seem too alert to be fools) nor a martyr (not being fools, meerkats have little inclination towards martyrdom) I was still faced with the urgent need to come up with some costume. In my desperation, I aimlessly erred around the law school in search of an IDEA. This being the usual modus vivendi at Yale Law School (see Originalism, How to be a Meerkat and the Reading Myth) my agony went completely unnoticed. Since nobody knew, nobody offered me any help or hugs.

So in the end, what outfit did I choose? Why should you care.

But why am I writing this?

To let you know that HALLOWEEN is HORROR. That you should start thinking about your costume as soon as you arrive here next summer. That you will have to figure out for yourself how much to yield to American legal and general culture. That no matter how you position yourself towards this question, you will definitely be hearing and talking a lot about political legitimacy, the groundings of authority and the moral duty to obey the law. That you may sometimes be called a “foreign exchange student”. That the LLM-class, although busy, has not dropped out of the partying business yet and usually offers a great support network. Also I intend to give you a vivid impression of how all these ideas and papers and workshops and conferences and lunch lectures that will be pouring down on you will deeply confuse you. I think this post demonstrates that – in an entertaining and benign fashion - day by day Yale Law School steals my sanity.

For more on the LL.M. programs at Yale Law, please see the school's profile on LLM GUIDE.

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