Hello! I, Super Lawyer Jeffrey Clark, Am Super Good At Lawyering!
The celebrated attorney doles out a little career and life advice for the newest graduates of his law school alma mater.
Greetings, all. My name is Jeffrey Bossert Clark, and I am a serious lawyer .
Stop laughing! Would an unserious lawyer be here giving the commencement address to his alma mater, the Ave Maria Sewer Tank Repair and Law School?
That’s better. I was almost Attorney General , you know. Show some respect.
Boy, the old AMSTRLS sure has changed since my day. Back then, all the classes met at that old taco place on Acute Lesion Street. We sure loved those free refills! Probably why the place went super-bankrupt and the owner threw himself into a wheat thresher.
By the way, super-bankruptcy is a little-known part of the US Code you may not yet be familiar with. You’ve got Chapter Seven, Chapter Eleven, and Chapter, uh, (unintelligible) . Anyway, those of you moving on to careers in bankruptcy law will figure it out, probably.
Where was I? Oh right. Classes in the old taco shop. Professors’ attendance was spotty, since they all worked second jobs at that kazoo factory on the edge of town. Oh, those were the days, when the sound of kazoos being tested hung over the town day and night. Adjuncts today think they have it bad, but do any of them have to go straight from third-shift kazoo tuner to teaching Contracts Law at ten in the morning in a place that smells like refried beans? Hoo, boy!
So yes, our professors were not always what you would call (makes air quotes with fingers) “present” or (makes air quotes with fingers)“awake enough” to (makes air quotes with fingers) “teach.” But that was okay! It allowed even more intellectual exploration than you would ordinarily get in a taco-shop-cum-classroom. We would all sit around drinking our free refills of Mr. Pibb and arguing the law. It is in these sugar binges, surrounded by my peers and the piles of pigeon meat the shop passed off as chicken, that I truly learned how to be a lawyer.
Ah, to be so young, with the pleasure of time and quiet — after the din of the lunch rush and in between kazoo quality control tests, of course — to debate the lofty legal traditions of America! Questions such as, “Does the Constitution say that all election results are really more like suggestions?” And “If not, it should.” And “Do chicks dig balding and pompous weirdos who awkwardly engineer pathetic coup attempts that fail partially because none of the superiors he has to out-maneuver has anything but sneering contempt for his legal acumen and the fact that he has the charisma of wet sand?”
And of course I can’t forget that old standby, “Ouch, I just broke a tooth on a BB in my chicken burrito.” Which was really more of a comment than a question.
Granted these are not questions you encounter often in a legal career. Heck, up until my involvement with our Great and Mighty Sun God Tr — excuse me, President Trump — I had spent most of my career in environmental law, where I worked on more prosaic issues such as whether Congress could legally make oil the only approved nutritional source for the nation’s pelicans. Spoiler alert: Thanks to our current Supreme Court, the jury is still out on that one!
Of course many of you would like to hear more about my involvement with President Trump. Unfortunately my criminal defense attorneys have advised me that if I’m going to take the Fifth more than a hundred times in front of the congressional committee investigating the events of January 6, I should definitely not waive that right by giving the public the story in a law school commencement speech.
I can, however, tell you that if I am guilty of anything , it is the crime of being a forceful advocate for my client, the president, and for having the bravery to investigate his sincerely held belief that Italian intelligence agencies were using orbiting satellites to beam commands to Chinese thermostats in polling places, and those thermostats could then send out signals that changed votes in nearby electronic voting machines. Really it was my so-called superiors at the Justice Department who violated the Constitution by not heeding our Great and Mighty Sun God’s command to seize the machines and the thermostats and put all of America’s poll workers in the prison in that Nicolas Cage movie where all the prisoners wore magnetized boots that could lock them in place at any moment.
You see, when the commander in chief gives you an illegal order, it is not enough to advise him that it is in fact illegal, or insane, or that the high-tech prison with the magnetic boots does not in reality exist. No, it is important in those situations to recognize that you are a grasping and desperate mediocrity who has hit his professional ceiling and has one final chance to prove all the haters in the DOJ cafeteria and hot babes who turned you down for dates wrong about you. And to act accordingly.
Finally, if I can offer one last piece of life advice to you, the fresh-scrubbed members of the Ave Maria Sewer Tank Repair and Law School class of 2022, it is this: Be bold. Be brave. And always, always remember that you can have the last laugh, provided you can find enough like-minded souls who enjoy Dinesh D’Souza movies and always let the legal theories of the Gateway Pundit be their guiding light!
Oh, and also always sleep in a pair of nice slacks. Because when those federal stormtroopers execute a search warrant on your house, they will not let you change out of your pajamas before making you wait out in the street.
At the very least, make sure you’re wearing very flattering pajamas that don’t have little Buzz Lightyears all over them.
Congrats to you, class of 2022! Now go forth and lawyer!
[ NBC News ]
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