Innocent Enough

The Hearsay had a three-person editorial team, because one person working alone wouldn't have been able to get themselves into enough trouble.

My co-editors were Mike Dunleavy and David Kaufman. Mike was a 3rd-year student whose sense of what was funny is illustrated by his sex advice column for law students:

Some Hearsay articles were thinly veiled slanderous attacks on recognizable people, which I assume (I didn't take Secured Transactions) is the case here. 

David was a 2nd year student whose contribution to editing the Hearsay was to sometimes write one article per issue and hand out the printed copies (leaving the hard work for me and Mike). He didn't have a funny bone in his body. Case in point, for the SEX issue, he wrote - at length - about how he found it hard to use a public urinal when another man was present. 

As for me, I was the brainy one with glasses, and, as the sole female editor, also the Hearsay's "feminist shield." For the SEX issue, I wrote a fake interview with Madonna who allegedly got it into her head that she wanted to go to law school.

Standard conventions of the publication were, as illustrated in the photo at the top of this post, that contributors were ritually humiliated by having their names turned into bad puns or stupid aliases (the editors got the same, but gentler, treatment), and every issue had a theme.

As an editorial team, it was our collective idea to publish a sex issue. When we picked the sponsoring law firm on the rigorous basis of who was next on the list, we also agreed as a team to spice up the sponsorship line to say SEX is brought to you by Fasken Campbell Godfrey.

When I wrote to the Jewinskis about the SEX issue, I said I'd had some misgivings, one of which was my drawing of Madonna, which was supposed to have gone inside the magazine. But, we had so many submissions, there was no room for it. Rather than cutting it, my two male co-editors said we should use it on the cover.

The issue went out on a Monday. As I told the Jewinskis, for all of that day and the next all I heard from my fellow students was that "the treatment of sex was playful and funny."

I was glad, and relieved.

Relieved, that is, until Wednesday morning, when I picked up the phone to hear Robert Sharpe, the dean of the law school, say to me, "the law firm doesn't think it's funny."

Thanks for reading!

Get that vaccine!

Karen

Another source of misgivings - a 2-page
spread of law prof dress-up dolls,
by M. Piaskoski