Welcome Back to Law School


Dana Lake '23
Editor-in-Chief

Welcome, Class of 2023, to your long-awaited 3Lol. Welcome, Class of 2024, to another round of the grueling slog to summer. Welcome, Class of 2025, to what will feel like the most stressful year of high school you have ever experienced. The Law Weekly remains ready and available (for the 75th consecutive year!) to be your trusted source of North Grounds news and personal opinions stated as fact.

At its heart, the Virginia Law Weekly is a collection of stories about the Law School told from the perspective of students going through it. Our editors have the same questions you do—is Law Review worth the effort? (No.) Do people really dress up for football games? (Also no.) Do my grades 1L fall really determine my whole future? (Only if you are trying to be a SCOTUS clerk.) What is a Dandelion? Will Foxfield happen this year? What does SBA actually do around here, anyway? What is behind those tiny doors on the second floor of Slaughter? Nowhere else on these Grounds will you find a collection of people so willing to use their free time making up answers to these questions than right here at the Law Weekly.

With our monopoly on student publishing, we strive to be informative without taking ourselves too seriously. In between professor dicta and events, you’ll find how-to guides on surviving cold calls and definitive lists on the best chicken sandwich in Charlottesville. It’s sort of a “come for the professor quotes, stay for the COPA” type model. Our weekly meetings run the same way: Come to SL 279 on Mondays at 5:30 for some free Domino’s Pizza, and stay because I guilt you into writing an article for our next edition. If you enjoy working with creative people—the overlap between the Law Weekly Editorial Board and the Libel Show is almost 100%—or you need a fun outlet that isn’t based exclusively around the Corner, come check us out. Do you love satire? Are you an aspiring cartoonist? Have you always dreamed of having a captive audience for a recurring column on some obscure issue you want to shed light on? We have a place for you.

If you don’t want the full commitment of joining our staff, send in a Letter-to-the Editor at editor@lawweekly.org. This paper is better the more students engage with it. Tell us about an event your organization is hosting or a cool thing around Charlottesville you and your friends got up to. Send in a photo to celebrate an engagement. Tell us if we publish something you disagree with, and be ready for some good-faith debating.

For upperclassmen, you’ve heard the pitch enough times by now to have built up a decent immunity. If you join us this year, I offer you instead the ability to control the difficulty level of the Sudoku.

The Law School gets its fair share of jokes and complaints, but the community at UVA is what we build. For many people, it’s the last few years of unrestricted free time and fun you’ll be having before the realities of real employment come in. Make the most of your time here. Go to an event you’re nervous about attending alone. Join a softball team, even if you’ve never played. Maybe even join an organization that will feed you dinner once a week and that has an awesome club room in SL 279. Don’t let the toxic rush of 1L fall determine your whole law school path—you are going to find your people, one way or another.

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dl9uh@virginia.edu