So you want to be a lawyer

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Part of The Carolinian

Title: So you want to be a lawyer
Language: English
Source: The Carolinian Volume XV (Issue No. 9) October 1951
Year: 1951
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Fulltext: SO YOU WANT TO BE A LAWYER cr I O BE or not to be, is not the f question of the day. This is not the time for backing out or for being undecided. You must go on because you only have a year before that wonderful time when friends will call you, attorney; and contemporaries, "companero.” Although the rate of mortality in the one last impediment to being what you aspire to be is disquieting, you are not plagued by that be cause they may yet pass a law when the passing grade will only be 65 ( . Right now your worry is the daily hearing wherein your profes-' sor is the judge with powers un limited and you, the accused, un constitutionally, without counsel. Preparation of your pleading to meet the interrogation and the cross ex amination to be propounded by the professor is entirely a discretion on your part. But you do not wish that execution of your promotion be stay ed with a condition. Therefore, to prepare properly is mandatory. How well you can make such preparation is a matter dependent upon the facts and circumstances of your indivi dual case. But if yours is one where moments of mental dementia crowd out the periods of lucid intervals, brother, it is not yet too late for you to hit the road and join the "libe rals", or take a course in cooking. If you are a full-time student you are lucky, probably, unlucky. Be cause you have all the time, you by Ramon T. Malixi Colleye of Luu: • Sink or swim, you must have to do a lot of kicking if you must really want to be a lawyer and not lower. . . have that propensity for doing just what comes naturally. Yours is a will inert to anything tedious, quick to grasp instances when you can escape from the dizziness of mental gymnastics. In short, you are an "escapetic". You prefer to do some gallivanting here and a little galli vanting there. With the Hollywood follies in town, who is not a mortal not to be attracted to what is show ing? And so you see the show to rest your eyes, to untangle your brain jigsawed by the morbid drow siness of too much concentration. You do not like to become a rich lawyer in the cemetery or in a dog house. When the show is over, you go home mentally relaxed, although perhaps physically exhausted........ by the heat of the un-airconditioned theater. What welcomes you? There lies on your table your Code of Civil Procedure in all its splendor, thick and span, enmeshed with the haywire of commentaries and con flicting citations, not to mention the microscopic footnotes — footnoted by other footnotes. Like a kid lost in a harem, you make a hasty leafing of the day's lesson. You remember that your classcard is on deck. That makes things bleak. With a deter mination of a criminal about to hang you desperately read sections and articles, rules and decisions. But law is not a mean subject that can ( Continued on page 17) Page 12 THE CAROLINIAN My Secret Cove The barbed darts of the less understanding may cause pain when it results in stifling the nobler nature of man . . . /HAVE almost come to an age when whatever people say about me matters but little. At lorty-five one ought to possess some measure of wisdom, or at least, some semblance of it. To me it has been slow in coming, a con firmation of the common claim that knowledge comes but wisdom ling ers. This brand of wisdom in me has much of the ingredient of under standing of the lack of it in many people. In their attempt at express ing themselves they become too frank at times and, if they try to be kind in their opinions, they let slip in the most unconscious manner a word seemingly innocent yet un kind and cruel in its ultimate effect upon a sensitive nature into which the barb of the arrowy word makes a painful lodgment. To ease the biting pain of a remark like that my poor outer self has. to say in a soothing voice to the shrinking sen sitive me within: It is said in love. One of my very few loves has been for flowers for as long as I can remember. Flowers, no matter what they are, wherever they may be found, have always had a strong attraction for me. In years past I had them all over our place — out in the garden growing in pots or in the ground; up on the vines on the trellis or on the walls; down from the eaves hanging pendant from potted plants; up on the roof in a mess of intricately woven vines, in the house peeping or openly blowing from pots and vases. They were everywhere, and I loved them all. I knew they loved me in a • By Robert L. Spears (Post Graduate School) • much greater measure than the love I gave them because they came to me in great profusion in exchange for the littlest care. But my love brought pain in its wake. I was young then, and I was not wise. People passing by our house or coming in for a visit would immediately exclaim, "What a lovely home! A young woman surely lives here." Time and again I hear such re marks. I looked at the Howers and they seemed to say, "Don't mind them, they mean well." Yes, per haps. But I was not ready to take their words in that light. I was beginning to be afraid that I was different and to be different from all other men was, to a young man like me, the height of unmanliness. In a dilemma I had to make a choice between love for flowers and love for self. I chose the latter. As days went by my growing neglect for the plants and flowers was registered in the speed the poor dears wilted, withered, died. In the wake of their going came a pain, soul deep, refusing to be soothed in the many years that fol lowed. I knew it was there be cause like a breeze of nostalgia it swept through my being time and again. My refusing to have any plant in my new home to which I moved from the old, my stifling the itch for flower arrangement wrought in me a change. I was unhappy. 1 realized that something important was missing in my life. The recurring pain of the soul unsoothed must be eased; the great longing for flowers must be satisfied. So, now that 1 am heavy with fortyfive years of weight, now that I have acquired a thin sheet of wis dom to shield me from the barbed darts of the less understanding, I can, with some degree of courage, give vent to my secret love for the children of Mother Nature — the flowers. SO YOU WANT TO BE . . . (Continued from p. 12) be sized up by a once-over. You begin to be sorry for the time wasted for good nothing. You wish it were a long way off before the start of classes, but time can not be check ed just as you can not hold back the dawn. Suddenly "big ben" thunders forth its lengthy announcement that classes are about to start. So to school you go, with a couple of oversized books You look impres sive. Your brain may not be above board but with those huge commo dities in your arms it is sufficient advertisement that you belong to the college elite, that "eres estudiante de derecho." You make the ladies sigh. At this time you do not care for the impression and the sighs. Your heart is at a state of convulsion awaiting the moment of reckoning when to the professor you render an accounting of the day's agenda............... Now we come to you who wear double crosses: the inevitable work ing students, who are not immune to extra-curricular activities besides. At break of day when it is time to get up it is so easy to sleep; but come Sundays or holidays, you can not sleep even when it is no time to get up. Because this is a working day you must have to get up. You have to earn. Monetary claims with perennial school activities must be satisfied. Your account with the uni versity is probably piling up. With the examinations just next door, "permits" to take the exams must be had. To office you go with your load of law books. Friends and people who see you wonder whether you also have classes at the City Hall or at the Gotiaoco building. The building is where you work; the books, for the moments when you do not work. Your job is one that involves transactions with people and bosses. When there are no people there are the bosses. Somehow you manage to make a sneak preview of the day's les son. You finger the pages covered by the provisions assigned. You nearly faint. You come to the pain ful realization that the two articles of law eat up nearly a hundred pages. You forget that in law a three-little worded enactment is as complicated as tens of cases based on it. What do you care for the cases? You would say that you are (Continued on page 34) October, 1951 Page 17 WHAT IS RUSSIAN .. (Continued from page 10) an effective weapon to spread Communism. 8. Constitutional government must be violently overthrown, even by bloodsheds. 9. Patriotism is absurd. The only "patriotism" is love for Soviel Russia and the desire to soviet ize the entire world after the pattern of Russia. 10. Practically all true private own ership must be abolished. 11. Farmers are lowered to the level of the serfs. 12. Workmen are reduced to the level of slaves and are but cogs in a steel machine. CHAPTER II COMMUNISM REJECTS ALL MORALITY eOMMUNISM is of its very na ture materialistic, and hence it denies that man has a spir itual soul and that there is any such thing as morality emanating from any source beyond man himself; in fact, morality, in the true sense of the term, is quite meaningless in the Communist vocabulary. It is not my present purpose to refute Communism or to prove the truth of the Catholic position; I am but giving a full exposition of the teachings and practices of Russian Communism, without any exaggera tions of misrepresentations, in order to show the utter repulsiveness of this system of "philosophy" and this brutal policy. If man has no spiritual soul, as Communism maintains; if he is but an aggregate of merely material elements following the inexorable laws of matter without any power of self-determination, then man is assuredly not different essentially from a horse, a dog, or a pig. In his most instructive pamphlet, "Just What is Communism?" (pu blished by the Paulist Press), Fa ther Raymondo Feely, S.J., narrates the following amusing incident, told him by a young American athlete who had just returned from Russia. One evening the specially train ed girl-guide furnished tourists, asked him (the young American) if he would like to see the grave yard of the Revolutionary heroes. He replied in the affirmative. Wandering about the tombstones, he suddenly asked: SO YOU WANT TO BE A LAWYER (Continued from page 17) studying law not cases. My dear budding lawyer, you forget again that law is not what it is but what the Supreme Court says it is. "Down with the Supreme Court!" You are about ready to shout. You were about to grasp the meaning of a provision you were trying to eat up when you hear the bell. It is your boss. Must he call you at that time? What can you do? You are being paid to work. You are not in the City Hall. At the close of the day you hurry in winding up the day's tran sactions so that you may yet out smart your boss and sneak out of office, before time is up. But of all times you can not locate the difference which prevents you from balancing your day's transactions. You curse, sweat, and finally makes it; but at what time? Too bad we do not have jet-propelled jeepneys that can take you from your office to school during such occasions when there are but three seconds before class time. You are lucky, though, for your first period is always a period late. It is handled by a professor who probably himself has a case here and a case there, or else he would not have the guts to be a professor of law. You knock out a few more pages of the lesson, but to no avail. You forgot the "unlesses" and "ex cepts". And so, like the prodigal fellow who only has his father to blame for his concupiscence and desire for the lighter side of life, you are in class, raring but not daring.......... The professor comes in. He calls the roll. Your name is tenth. You size up the situation and employ your bit of strategy shared in by your classmates. It would have been too bad had your name been on top of the roll, er, on top of the deck of class cards, because you will never know whether he would pick up from where he left off, in the other day's discussion. Profes sors have a way of jumping from one end of the lesson to the other. You jump at a decision to center "Didn't you tell me that you didn't believe in a soul?" "Surely, we young Communists have gotten over that," came the stereotyped response. "Didn't we see paintings this afternoon of some of the cavalry of the Red Army?" the American your concentration on what seems to be the veritable ground on which the professor would explode the first bombshell. Because you are not the first called upon to recite, yours is a more strategic situation. This is the time you use your knowledge of "calculus". You cal culate what on section of the lesson you will be asked, and there all the honor lies. You do not bother so much for the preceding sections nor the following ones. It is going to be a sure hit. Somehow you sense there is something wrong with your time table. The guinea pigs seem to be falling out and annihilated which throws off-balance your timing sche dule. One by one they drop out of the picture with the professor not covering enough ground to reach your name as per your estimate. You have overshot the objective. Like a south Korean caught unaware in the wake of new developments you abandon your line of defense and move towards another to meet, an unforseen event. Although there is nothing like an old fort you have dug in so heavily. To a fresh and open ground you must go or else it shall be the iron curtain for you. You take to another section. You find it completely hazy. One more guinea pig fell before the professor's battery barrage of cross-examina tions, and it is two minutes before time. With the fellow preceding you a well-known figure for his propensity on delaying tactics, you let off a sigh of relief. You are saved. Wait, no. The professor by accident side-steps him. He calls on you instead. You sweat. You squirm. What a catastrophe! To think it was a matter of forty seconds before salvation by the bell. Maybe it was the food you ate. With wobbly knees you stand up. The professor asks the ques tion. At the sound of the musical chimes you drop dead. Anyway there are still tomorrows when you can make up and probably many more tomorrows when you will do some more dying acts. continued. The girl, puzzled, replied, "Yes, of course." "But why aren't the horses ol lhe cavalry buried here?" persisted the American. (Continued on next page) Page 3-1 THE CAROLINIAN