Promposal Defenders
v.
The Rest of the Student Body
75 U.Va 14 (2022)
D’ROZARIO, J. delivers the opinion of the court.
Issue
The class action suit before us concerns an age-old tradition, observed by law schools across the country: Barrister’s Ball. The annual event is an opportunity for the great legal minds of our generation to come together, engage in intellectually stimulating jurisprudential discourse, and get blackout drunk in a ball gown. The formal nature of the time-honored event has earned it an affectionate nickname: “Law Prom.” This nickname plays no small role in the issue at hand.
The issue requires the Court to consider whether, in adopting the term “Law Prom,” law students have implicitly agreed to participate in all the customs associated with high school prom (hereinafter referred to as “Actual Prom”). In particular, Plaintiffs wish to compel the student body to plan and carry out elaborate, high-school-style promposals.
Analysis
Plaintiffs, a small number of law students who were never promposed to in high school, argue that the widespread use of the term “Law Prom” creates an implied-in-fact contract. Plaintiffs argue that, in choosing to attend any event which represents itself as a “Prom,” attendees implicitly commit to fulfill the traditional obligations of Prom attendees—Actual Prom attendees. These include but are not limited to the obligation to prompose to your date.
Less than one week away from Law Prom, and having witnessed no promposals whatsoever, Plaintiffs bring this case for breach of contract. Plaintiffs seek relief in the form of specific performance of this implied contract. Given the imminence of the event, Plaintiffs request emergency relief.
Defendants, for their part, filed a motion to dismiss on the grounds that promposals are unacceptably dorky for anyone past the age of seventeen. The Court finds this statement to be conclusory (and low-key offensive). No evidence was provided to support such an assertion, and weak evidence is provided to contradict the existence of an implied contract.
Defendants argue that use of the term “Law Prom,” on its own, is insufficient to create an implied contract. They argue that, apart from the word “Prom,” Law Prom is distinguishable from Actual Prom. Distinguishing characteristics of Law Prom cited by Defendants include alcohol use and the presence of disproportionately litigious attendees. To this, the Court says, “You obviously didn’t go to my high school.”
Conclusion
Accordingly, because Defendants have not met the threshold showing that promposals—as a concept—need to be left in high school, the Court is obliged to deny the motion to dismiss.
Also, I’m writing for the Court here, so I get to base the outcome of this case on what I ate for breakfast. I ate cereal, and I would like to see some promposals.
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IT IS ORDERED that Plaintiffs’ emergency motion for immediate and complete performance of promposals is GRANTED.
PETERSON, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part.
While I disagree with much of Justice D’Rozario’s opinion, as I shall explain below, I cannot dissent in full. Justice D’Rozario is, as usual, on the nose as it pertains to her intuitive jurisprudential practices, a skill that is widely employed, encouraged, and respected on this most petty of courts. As such, while I disagree with the entirety of her analysis, and dissent from it accordingly, I fully support conclusions of law grounded on basic whims, serendipitous moments, and gut reactions. Because Justice D’Rozario ultimately grounds her reasoning in the cereal she ate, any principled Justice must accept that her prudential reasoning is sound.
However, I cannot agree with Justice D’Rozario’s actual reasoning. A crucial step needed to come to any sort of principled conclusion is missing from this analysis. If we are tasked with determining whether law students have implicitly agreed to participate in all of the customs associated with proms, we must first understand all of the customs associated with prom. Today, the Court accidentally sets course on a philosophical mission—what is a prom? The answer, however, is never given. Instead, the Court chooses to enforce its own preconceived notions about proms while ignoring the true original public meaning of the word. This action is a slippery slope leading to a jurisprudential world where our Court may import perceived customs into the law in much the same way a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat: unprincipled trickery. Further, it opens the door to changing proms across the nation—not just in our own jurisdiction—by allowing courts to pick and choose between desirable customs.
To illustrate this, I’ve detailed the following. The word “prom” gets its origin from the French word “promenade.”[1] If we as a Court are to truly comport with the original public meaning of this word, we must first look back to sixteenth-century France.[2] However, before I do that, I would like to ask not only the Court, but also the public: Why? Why would anyone ever want to look back to sixteenth-century France? What next will become a feature of proms around America? Guillotines? We must protect our children from this fate. Because of the authoritarian turn taken by this Court today, I fear for our country, our children, and our souls.
WALSH, J., dissenting.
As a member of this storied Court, I am normally in full support of capricious decisions with little-to-no grounding in either the Court’s precedent or actual law. However, I am so opposed to today’s decision that I must, on both moral and personal grounds, dissent from the entirety of the majority’s opinion regarding that historic tradition known as “promposing.” For what today’s majority opinion ignores in its analysis is not only the original public meaning of what a prom is, as Justice Peterson so astutely points out, but also the emotional and reputational damage that a promposal can inflict on the unsuspecting members of this Law School.
Allow me to provide an illuminating example: my own high school (specifically, junior year) promposal. Picture a large public school cafeteria, the tables long and mildly sticky, with those uncomfortable, weird circle seats—which definitely do not provide ergonomic support to our youth as they eat their lunches—attached. The faces of the school’s senior athletes adorn the walls, smiling down upon the cafeteria and its inhabitants like benevolent gods. It was here, during fifth period lunch, where I first became acutely aware of just how awkward and uncomfortable a promposal can truly be.
As I sat at that sticky cafeteria table, I suddenly noticed in my periphery one of my closest friends whipping out her phone and aiming its camera in my direction. At the same time, one of my closest friends, who I was kind-of, sort-of dating (high school relationships are weird) approached from the other direction. Now, this friend normally sat with me at lunch, so his arrival was not unusual, but the shoe box that he carried with him was. It was this shoe box, combined with the sudden fixing of an iPhone camera on me, that sent a wave of vague unease and a sense of impending doom crashing over me. The promposal itself—which involved a shoe-box diagram based on an inside joke between my eventual prom date and me—would have been cute had it not been so completely and unbearably awkward.
And so I arrive at the crux of my anti-promposal position: Promposals can, at best, be called “entertaining.” But we must ask ourselves, who does this entertainment come at the expense of? For when these promposals are not done well, they are cringy and embarrassing, and it is downright cruel of this Court to not just encourage but require that the promposal practice be continued past the high school years that all of us left behind so long ago.
Accordingly, I dissent.
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jkd2dd@virginia.edu
jtp4bw@virginia.edu
saw8rc@virginia.edu
[1] Oxford Dictionaries, From Promenade to #Prahm: An Evolution of the Night to Remember (June 19, 2014), https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/06/prom-language-history-of-the-word-from-promenade-to-hashtag-prahm.html.
[2] As a more worldly and educated body than the Supreme Court of the United States, we are absolutely willing to venture into the world of French history to decide the original public meaning of words to the citizens of Charlottesville, Virginia. To do any less would be an abdication of our sworn duties.