Van Gogh Painting Law

Van Gogh, Prisoners Exercising (After Doré)

Cheesy Law School Pop Song Knock-offs

You may or may not (depending on how far down you read this post) experience the following: cheesy law school renditions of pop songs using legal lingo.  It happens way too often.  I’ve decided to highlight this social phenomenon with a blog posting.

There is something in law school that inspires creativity. Or maybe creativity is not the right word for it. Law school and about the legal profession begin to filter life experiences.  It goes well beyond airs of  class superiority,  it permeates ways of thinking. Leonard Cohen apparently dropped out of law school for this very reason – in his first year at McGill law he told the dean that he didn’t like the way law school was making him think.

Some students take this new way of thinking and apply it to pop culture. Here is a short collection of law-related pop renditions. Students so enamored with the study of law that they ruined their favourite pop songs by making law school versions. Each of the selected videos have been viewed over 40,000 times. Just think about that for a moment.

Here is a classic tune from students at Queen’s University, “Tort Law Back”. It is based on the much more popular Justin Timberlake single “SexyBack“. Skip the first minute to get to the song. Don’t be deceived by the tacky Terminator II musical introduction, video is actually not so bad. Best thing to come out of Kingston, Ontario since, … , probably ever.

This next video is just lame. It purportedly is made by first year associates at Drew and Napier LLP in Singapore. It’s a cliché video lamenting the difficulty of law school to the tune of Blink 182’s All the Small Things. It’s a bit unbearable, I will forgive you if you can only stomach about 30 seconds.

Now we get to the good stuff.   “Snail In a Bottle” is fun to watch, trying to capture the rambunctious and rebellious spirit of The Police’s original Message in a Bottle.  The song references the famous tort case Donoghue v Stevenson. Overally, this one wins in the best video category. The song lyrics aren’t so bad, including the last line “I founded modern negligence”.   The creators of this video call themselves “Tongue in Cheek Productions”.  The main actor’s whig is available for purchase over EBay for an extremely affordable price.

To finish off this magical journey through the land of legal sounds, we have my personal favourite: the “Hearsay Exception”.  This one seems to be an original tune. The authors have some association with the following site. Based on the views, it beats the other videos by several thousand.  Not only do you have my own person vote of confidence, but the highly scientific indication that this video beats the others. I also like their use of lego – it’s nostalgic.

Here is one last addition to the list. The self-described “Law School Musical” has over 300,000 views. It goes through a 1L’s experience at law school. One or two humourous moments.