The editors of the Overland Scout, you may recall, complained that their school’s principal had complained about a proposed article accurately reporting on the death of a student. The principal, editors say, then informed them that the paper lacked funding to continue publishing for the year, and that their advisor would be pulled from her position.

The school district gave conflicting rationales for the principal’s decision. Today, however, the district has discovered that, indeed, they do have the money to continue publishing — the district itself has a fund to pay for such publications — and chalks the whole affair up as miscommunication.

To his credit, the principal is rescinding his policy of prior review of student articles. A policy of ‘prior review’ permits school officials to read student articles before they go to press. The principal, however, refused to discuss whether the newspaper would continue next year or whether the paper’s advisor of fourteen years would continue her role.

If the district provides funds for student publications, but the publication whose future was jeopardized under suspicious circumstances is the only paper transitioned to a ‘new media’ environment, that would be cause for skepticism of the school officials’ motives.

A preferable course of action would be to allow the student editors to determine their own future, or allowing them to publish both online and in physical print. Publishing online, after all, is often as simple as copying and pasting the text of the article into a web publishing program. But little is as rewarding as seeing the results of your efforts in newsprint, or being read by students in the hallways between class.

“You just have to wake up one day and realize it’s a lifestyle; it’s a decision.”

I was lucky enough this past week to bump into a friend from undergrad, Christian. We chatted a bit about what we had done since we left Whittier, me in 2009 and him the following May. We caught up on each other’s lives, and I asked him specifically what he had been doing since leaving Southern California (he’s from the East coast).

He told me that his company on the East Coast (he owns an auto-detailing service for corporate and fleet accounts) was up and running, but it didn’t need him there so he was traveling. He’d spent some time snowboarding on the Rockies, and then a month or two in San Francisco enjoying his friends and the city, and how he was in Southern California, “just kind of living.”

I told him that I wished I could live a life like that and he responded with the quote above. (Keep in mind, he said this all while skateboarding alone in a parking lot, near midnight, following a lacrosse game.) The conversation itself began with me asking, “Don’t you have anything better to be doing?” and him responding, “I’d rather be doing this.”

At this time of the law school year, if you’re anything like I was last year, you’re seriously beginning to reconsider the decision to go to law school. The academic year itself is long, and feels longer as the Spring continues, the assignments due near the end of the school year begin to pile up, and the deadlines loom like freeway traffic in the distance. This is probably not a new experience for any of you, but rather simply a stronger impulse than you’ve had on the subject so far, because — and let’s be honest here — you’re tired of law school, no?

Keep in mind that you’re not alone in this sentiment. I mean, really not alone. We all feel that way. I know a lot of 3Ls who definitely feel that way right now. And with less than a month until many of them graduate, you would be surprised how many of them are thinking to themselves, “I’d rather go work doing just about anything but law.”

But for those of you who aren’t about to cross the finish line, here’s a few things to keep in mind:

• Researching and memos may be annoying and time consuming and off-putting, but there is definitely more to the legal profession.I can remember, quite vividly, just how much I hated going through the process of researching and writing memos and briefs throughout my first year in law school. And, for a guy who wrote quite a bit in undergraduate, I think I hated it more than most. Not because they were difficult, but more because as they went on, they really just began to feel like busy work. Keep in mind that memos are not the be-all, end-all of the legal profession. It wasn’t until our oral advocacy competition, when I was able to get up and actually argue in front of people, that I really remembered why I wanted to be a lawyer. And every time I get to actually make an argument, instead of just research and advocate, it makes it all worth it.
• That said, research and writing skills are extremely desirable. It may not seem like it at the moment, but when you get out of the classroom and into the real world (even if that real world is just an internship/externship/clerkship) you begin to realize how much all you learned in your 1L research and writing class is really worth it. Having the skills that can help whoever you’re working with over the summer can be the difference between a good reference and a glowing reference.
• The year’s almost over! The year, as I have already said, is long. And, not unlike any long sports season, it can be extremely difficult to make it all the way through without losing your motivation. Keep your wits about you, and remember that summer is only a month or so away. If you can keep that in your head, and you can convince yourself to power through the finish, you’re going to thank yourself later.

With all this said, however, remember that there’s the genuine possible that law school just isn’t for you. There is, sad or terrifying as it may be, a real chance of that. And if it really isn’t for you, there’s no harm in accepting that. Life is too short (and law school is too expensive) to spend three years (or the rest of your life) doing something you don’t enjoy. My grandfather used to say, “If you can find something you love to do, you never have to work a day in your life.” The ability to have a profession you enjoy, rather than a job you have to work at every day, is worth so much more than all the money, praise, or anything else you might get from the being a lawyer.

It occurs to me, now days later, that Christian was absolutely right — and that his quote wasn’t just about his style of living; it’s about all styles of living. With law school or lawyering or any other choice you make it life, “You just have to wake up one day and realize … it’s a decision.”

This affair began on a sad note, when a sophomore at Overland High School died from complications several weeks after being injured during a wrestling match at the school. The staff at the student newspaper, the Overland Scout, drafted an article largely composed of what you would normally expect from a sad story: remembrances of the departed student by his peers and members of the faculty.

The school had apparently recently implemented a policy of prior review after an editor wrote a “graphic” piece about how she coped with her brother’s suicide. Thus, the editors submitted their article to the principal, who, according to the students, said that the article incorrectly stated the cause of death. When the students retrieved a copy of the death certificate (showing that, indeed, the student died for the reasons the article stated), the principal apparently shifted his criticism to this statement from the article:

“[Phillips' mother] was not called and notified about his injury after it happened and found out from a student who saw her when she came to pick him up after.”

The school district — likely conscious of the potential of litigation — says that the student left without telling anyone of his injury after being placed on ice in the locker room, so the principal’s concerns were that the article was inaccurate. It’s unclear whether the school is denying that the student’s mother wasn’t called, but this report suggests that the school blames the student for the lack of a phone call. Even if the facts were inaccurate, they probably aren’t libelous, which is one of few times when Colorado law authorizes school administrators to exercise prior restraint. School district policy notes that “[w]hile educators must encourage accurate, responsible journalism, such responsibility cannot be employed as a guise to censor student expression”

But it would be difficult for anyone to read an article mourning the loss of a fellow student and then appear to shift any level of blame to the deceased. Instead, students say, the school gave the newspaper’s advisor her walking papers and ended physical publication of future issues.

The school district, of course, says that this is nothing more than your regularly-scheduled budgetary complication and that, far from censorship, this is simply a shift in the educational focus of the journalism class. Rather than focus on dead-tree newspapers — a dying industry — the school is following the lead of nearby University of Colorado and shifting their attention to online media.  Furthermore, the advisor will continue her role through the end of the school year — and the disputed article is available online.

But let’s be skeptical. The article isn’t online because the Overland Scout published it on their website: it’s online because the Student Press Law Center and Denver Post, among others, posted it. The Overland Scout doesn’t appear to have a website at all.

What should raise red flags here is the timing. Student Press Law Center attorney Adam Goldstein put it best:

“On Tuesday the students are told they have a fact wrong, on Thursday they prove that they have that fact right, and on Friday the journalism teacher is fired and the newspaper is canceled for the rest of the year,” he said. “That doesn’t sound to me like a well thought-out, reasoned change in the course of the program.”

The paper’s editors say that the principal told them the article could not be published — and it’s unclear whether it will ever be published, or whether the newspaper will be allowed to publish anything other than a traditional end-of-the-year farewell to graduating seniors. But censorship is rarely as cut-and-dry as telling a newspaper what they can’t say or threatening sanctions if prohibited words are printed. Modern censorship arrives in a baby basket of bureaucratic maneuvering, sudden devotion to inflexible red tape, and strong hints from those who control the purse strings about what is ‘appropriate.’

Announcing, abruptly, an end to a newspaper’s physical publication, shifting articles to a non-existent website (which students are even less likely to read), and terminating the newspaper’s advisor the same week as telling editors an article was too ‘inaccurate’ to publish is insensitive timing at best.

Should be an interesting experiment, assuming we can keep it up.

This blog has long been on the backburner. We intend to cover issues for law students, discuss First Amendment law and other legal issues, tackle the occasional parliamentary procedure, and maybe talk about some music.

For now, I intend to sleep.