EDITORI AL
a. Osgoode Hall Law School, 0014 G
York University
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, ON M3 J 1P3
e. [email protected]
w . www.obiter-dicta.ca
t. @obiterdictaoz
“The best interpreter of law is custom.”
- M ARCUS TU LLIUS CICERO
Editors-in-Chief: Cass Da Re, Travis
Weagant, Karolina Wisniewski
Business Managers: Adam Cepler,
Alvin Qian
Copy Editor: Patricia Wood
News Editor: Citlally Maciel
Arts & Culture Editor: Angie Sheep
Sports Editor: Andrew Cyr
Looking for love in all the wrong
places, or, how The Bachelor is
like Bay Street
Though this issue of the Obiter hits stands
(or MacBook screens) two weeks after the finale of
the most depressing season of The Bachelor, your
EICs were so struck by the similarity between us
law students and Clare Crawley that we decided
to forego timeliness ever so slightly in aim of
expounding this cautionary tale of love, rejection,
and self-delusion.
For those of you who have been living under
a rock (or who have better things to do) the eighteenth season of The Bachelor featured Juan Pablo
Galavis, Latin lothario turned PR disaster/creep
of the century. After slut-shaming a woman on
national television and relying on his language
barrier to excuse calling gay people perverts, JP
ended the season with a bang by telling frontrun-
realize that her moment of profound self-actualization came after “practically begging” for marriage
(in the words of JP’s charming cousin; chivalry
obviously runs in the family) and crawling back for
more each time her suitor undermined her dignity.
All this combined made her send-off seem more
like a sour-grapes post-facto rationalization than a
feminist victory.
Why are we recounting such drivel? Because
we are all Clare. Though the title of this editorial references Bay Street for alliterative purposes,
this metaphor of one-sided adoration applies much
more widely to the relationship we occasionally and
inevitably have with legal employment of all shapes
and sizes. Which one of us hasn’t found ourselves
on the unpleasant end of a post-interview phone
Staff Writers: Michael Capitano, Luke
Johnston, Sam Michaels, Dan Mowat-Rose,
Marie Park, Daniel Styler, Evan Ivkovic,
Hannah De Jong
Contributors: Doug Judson, Daniel Adler,
Clifford McCarten, Paul Gill
Layout Editors: Marie Park, Heather Pringle,
Devin Santos, Wendy Sun
Website Editor: Asad Akhtar
Submissions for the February 3 issue are due at
5PM on January 26, and should be submitted
to the email address above.
Obiter Dicta is the official student newspaper of
Osgoode Hall Law School. The opinions expressed
in the articles contained herein are not necessarily
those of the Obiter staff. The Obiter reserves the
right to refuse any submission that is judged to be
libelous or defamatory, contains personal attacks, or
is discriminatory on the basis of sex, race, religion,
or sexual orientation. Submissions may be edited
for length and/or content.
The Obiter Dicta is published biweekly during the
school year, and is printed by Weller Publishing Co.
Ltd.
The Obiter Dicta is a member of Canadian
University Press.
the m o m ent it a l l c a m e c r a shin g d o w n .
ner Clare that he couldn’t wait for her to have his
children about twelve hours before unceremoniously dumping her, all because she had the nerve
to raise objection to…well, just google “what Juan
Pablo said to Clare in the helicopter”. The tribunal of past Bachelor contestants noted that it was
disheartening to see Clare’s intuition ringing the
night before their last encounter when she confronted him about his apparent misogyny, only to
be silenced by JP’s patronizing words. In the postfinale debrief, Clare proudly declared that she was
proud of the harsh words she had dished out to JP
when he let her go. She had stood up to him, getting the closure she needed and asserting her feelings. Unfortunately for Clare, she didn’t seem to
call or email? Who hasn’t become (dare we say it)
emotionally invested in the thought of a future at a
firm, only to learn their love was unrequited? Who
is stranger to the sinking feeling that your gut was
right all along, and that you should have known
this was not the work environment for you, before
investing all that time and energy into interview
prep?
What lessons can we draw from this? The irony
is that JP, blessedly unaware of his own stupidity
and pig-headedness, inadvertently exposed The
Bachelor for the vapid sham that it is more effectively than any biting op-ed ever could. And in all
this, the viewers are the twisted ones: someone
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