Bad Lawyer by Anna Dorn

Author:Anna Dorn [Dorn, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Freya wasn’t the only faculty member to “go crazy” at Berkeley Law.

After I graduated, I heard that my favorite writing instructor, Rhonda, was let go on dramatic terms. Rhonda taught Advanced Legal Writing in my 2L year.

I missed the first class, and Spencer G-chatted me: “You’re going to love the instructor. She kinda reminds me of Lisa Love from The Hills.”

(I had to google the reference. The Hills never did it for me. If I wanted to watch a bunch of vacant blondes with too much money and nothing to say, I’d go back to high school.)

But Spencer was right about the first part. I loved Rhonda instantly.

First, there was her polyester tracksuit, a sharp departure from the boxy suits most law professors wore. Next was the two-liter bottle of Diet Coke that never left her grip. Best of all was her attitude, which I think is where the Lisa Love comparison came in. Rhonda was scathing and nihilistic. She would mock overeager students to their faces and talk openly about her depression in the manner of a social media–addicted millennial.

She didn’t shy away from controversy. Two weeks after the aforementioned bird decapitation story hit the halls, she strutted into class and unfolded a massive newspaper to a photo of the perpetrators and said, “Let’s discuss.” She didn’t have a “take,” per se, she just wanted to hear what we thought. Which was, like, unheard of in law school. No one cared what we thought. Professors typically only cared what the Supreme Court thought.

Her kooky irreverence was so . . . refreshing!

From her frequent monologues about herself at the beginning of class—much like a late-night host—it seemed Rhonda’s life had taken a downward turn in the past decade or so. After graduating from law school, she became a successful employment law attorney in Chicago and then San Francisco. She left Big Law to direct Berkeley’s First-Year Skills Program but was gradually demoted over the years, I assumed because of her, well, quirky personality and her utter inability to play the game. At this point, she taught only one class—Advanced Legal Writing, which hardly anyone took. (It wasn’t tested on the bar.)

There were five students in our class, two of whom were named Brad. Rhonda quickly nicknamed them “Good Brad” and “Bad Brad,” I don’t remember why. But she had a very obvious crush on Bad Brad, evidenced by how she frequently used his name in case examples and giggled whenever she did it. Leave it to Rhonda to prefer the “bad” one in the dynamic she’d invented for herself. Truth be told, it was kind of metal.

Spencer and I quickly developed a friendship with Rhonda. We would stay after class and chat with her, pretending to have questions about the assignments, just to hear her peculiar opinions on things. She told us she was writing a novel “about mental illness” and talked a lot about her childhood friend, who also was named Rhonda.

She said people called her “Big Rhonda” and her friend “Little Rhonda” to keep them straight, sort of like Good Brad and Bad Brad.

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