Jack Brown ‘23
Staff Editor
The annual student satisfaction survey has confirmed that the sense of camaraderie amongst the class of 2023 is higher than any other class in the history of UVA Law. This is welcome—but not unexpected—news to the administration, who believed that a lack of contact between new students would help foster a level of community never before seen at UVA Law.
“It's so awesome having everyone at a distance, it helps keep up the façade that we’re a collection of well-adjusted people who are here to do good in the world” said a girl who might be in section B or H. “Only knowing people as Zoom squares, or as a masked person who sits across the auditorium from you, prevents you from finding out how toxic their personalities really are!”
While the local Charlottesville bar scene does miss the incredible profit margins produced by sheltered law students eager to prove they could hang with the K-JDs they brought with them to bar review, the death of the practice has only helped this class grow closer. In particular, not having FedSoc true believers and future Big Law Bernie Bros mingle in the lead up to the 2020 election helped keep the 1L discord at a low level.
Professors have also reported enjoying the distance they have between their students. One hundred percent of respondents to the professor survey chose “being able to claim they didn’t see the gunner’s hand raised” as their favorite function of Zoom. Combined with an ability to feign technical difficulties when they forgot to prepare a PowerPoint for class and the ability to tell which students seem “mad chill” based on what their rooms look like, has led many professors to push for a permanent switch to distanced learning.
This socially distanced era has also elevated another remarkable tool for community building that has helped this class become so close. r/UVALaw previously had been a little-used tool mostly for 0Ls too timid to send an email to the Admissions Office. However, thanks to the complete collapse of the PA program, most 1Ls have to use this site to get basic information about surviving law school.
The complete lack of accountability on Reddit has led to an unparalleled sharing of ideas. Questions about being “too hot for OGI” and calls to “appreciate gunners for the work they put in to making class great” that normally wouldn’t have been expressed have helped show 1Ls that they are not alone in their concerns. Every day there is some new scandal that has helped keep members of the class of 2023 from alienating themselves from their section mates by complaining about their A- average or bragging about the managing partners their parents golf with.
Of course, despite the best efforts of the administration, there has been some in-person interaction between the new class. Luckily, these have also helped foster trust between the disobedient students who have had the audacity to meet together. The threat of disbarment if one of the seven people you’re eating with decides to snitch, along with the lack of FOMO-inducing posts of everyone in your section except you at a vineyard, has helped curb the community-destroying effects of in person gatherings.
Not all is sunshine and rainbows within the 1L class unfortunately. Students who identified themselves as members of the Federalist Society report normal levels of dissatisfaction with their classmates. The shift to virtual classes has not allowed them to escape the typical bullying they endure from what one student described as the “virtue signaling left.”
One student reported a lack of congeniality from his section after making a post celebrating his acceptance of an unpaid internship in the ICE deportation office. Many other FedSoc members confirmed that the added hurdle of being virtual has not stopped the NLG shame squad from doing everything in their power to dunk on FedSoc members every chance they get.
Members of the Federalist Society also have the added burden of seeing their ideological peers at the same rate as normal years. Thanks to their importance in keeping UVA’s U.S. News ranking so high, they have been able to continue to have in-person events throughout the pandemic, while all other organizations that contribute nothing to the school’s ranking have been blessedly banned from seeing one another.
Despite this small blemish, on the whole, the Zoom School of Law experiment has been a massive success. The administration’s next challenge is to figure out how to keep the distancing into the fall semester, as the number of vaccinated Americans grows. Beyond praying for a vaccine resilient strain to emerge or for COVID-21 to show up, the administration has not given any indication on how they can keep next year’s class as distanced as possible.
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jwb4bb@virginia.edu