By Alexander Curtis

COHORT-WIDE HYSTERIA: Washed-up first years are being brainwashed by woke legal thinking. Following weeks of being tasked to define apparently simple yet dangerously nuanced terms such as “person”, “material”, and the universally feared “reasonable”, LLB107 ‘Statutory Interpretation’ students are succumbing to a cohort-wide existential crisis after realising that the process used in their assignment cannot help them find the legal purpose of our mortal plane.

With a projected cohort average of 19/50, next week’s assignment due date has devastated and demoralised students taking up philosophy in the hopes of finding a new reason to live.

“They taught us the golden rule, the literal rule, the mischief rule, but none of them are teaching me what I was put on this world to do,” said one student who was spending her LLB107 lecture booking flights for a “spiritual pilgrimage” to Bali. “Where is the syntactical presumption that life is worth living?”

After days of poring through prescribed readings however, there was no answer to be found. Where the Acts Interpretation Act doesn’t provide an exhaustive or even inclusive instruction as to the meaning of life, and current case law has been surprising silent on the matter, the ordinary meaning should apply. But for some students, an authoritative dictionary was simply not enough.

When leaving this week’s lecture, our veteran journalist was quickly absorbed by a flash mob of self-proclaimed “statutory shaman”. After being led into an unlit study room in the law library, they was granted an exclusive audience with high profile guru Caitlyn “Ejusdem” Generis, revered by current LLB107 students after she bagged a 76/100 on the unit last year. This is what she had to say:

‘It was A.V Dicey who insisted on equality of all before the law. And what’s one thing that affects us all equally? Time. Which naturally equals money. Now, everyone knows that lawyers bill in six-minute increments. This means that the purpose of life is to do the next six minutes better than anyone else. You worship yourself, six minutes from now, hundreds of dollars richer. That’s the clerkship winning mindset.’

When the 20-year-old figurehead was asked whether her new “following” would affiliate with the QUT Guild, she declined to comment.

In response to what can best be described as the birth of a new religion, unit faculty have released a public statement reassuring students that existentialist philosophy “won’t be assessable on the exam” and that “cult behaviour violates the student code of conduct”.

The question remains – will this trend die out at the end of semester? Or are we witnessing the rise of the next great prophet?

Will there be more to come?