Aren’t All Law Students “Mature?”

On the first day of school, Omar Ha-Redeye welcomed incoming first-year students at the Mature Students Reception during Orientation Week.

As President of the Mature Students Club, Omar related a common law school saying,

In 1L they scare you to death,
In 2L they work you to death,
In 3L they bore you to death.

He warned the students not to let others scare them during their first year, reminding them that many brought skills and experiences that their peers lacked.

Omar also thanked Lerners LLP for hosting the reception for the students.  The reception would also not have been possible without the assistance of the Orientation Week Committee.

The Dean of UWO Law, Ian Holloway, also gave a moving welcome, both at the Mature Students Reception, and to the entire incoming class.  Dean Holloway elaborated on the importance of lawyers in democratic societies,

Many of you will be familiar with the line from Shakespeare, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.  It’s generally taken as one of the early lawyer jokes – and as a sign of how long we’ve actually been unpopular, but the truth is that Shakespeare offered this as proof of the opposite. The passage, which is taken from Henry VI… is uttered by a character named “Dick the Butcher”. Dick is part of a gang led by a character named Jack Cade, whose goal is to stage a coup d’etat – to overthrow the government. The line – uttered as it was by a murderous bully – was intended by Shakespeare to highlight the precariousness of our tradition of the rule of law, and to make the point that the surest way to chaos and tyranny even then was to remove the guardians of independent thinking.