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Law in Contemporary Society
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Oil, Poison, and Other Remedies: Notes from the Only Living Girl-- By ShidehZokaiy - 18 May 2025Lately, everything feels unbearably loud.In my apartment, I hear the water droplets falling from my faulty faucet onto the kitchen sink. During class, I hear the breathy sighs people take before speaking into microphones. I can listen to my peers glance over when I react to a professor’s jokes, almost as if I’ve lost my mind! I stand surrounded by them and separated by invisible glass. Again, I am the immigrant. My peers and educated parents understand the system. LLMs decode complex statutes intuitively. I’m still looking up words I don’t fully grasp. “It’s inefficient,” my professors remind me. How will I ever catch up, and at what cost? Professor Moglen says I’m the only student in my law school. I say cue Simon & Garfunkel, because I might as well be the Only Living Girl in New York. Alas, I fear I await becoming the only lawyer in the profession, isolated by selfish motives, status-seeking, and feeble insecurities. Alone again, looking for some connection that always seems just beyond reach. The city bustles with dreamers oblivious to the unhoused drifting among them. Academic elites pledge to “stand with the people,” but their gestures rarely extend beyond theory or self-congratulation. Perhaps it’s always been this loud. My migraines are less amplified by the noise and more by my awareness of it. Perhaps, in Tehran, the corruption and gore were simply more blatant. Justice Holmes and the legal realists said that law was the condition under which public force is applied in courts, but what of those who sidestep law through power and connections? If judges are moral paragons, why does our Supreme Court include a man accused of rape, photographed wearing blackface? How am I to confidently tackle policy within a system tethered to arbitrary interpretations? Shall I bet on my superior’s intentions, risk unpopular stances, or play it safe? How can I trust Leaders of the Free World when my point of reference remains the oppression I fled?Pick your poison.When I was eight years old, I was nearly taken from my parents for practicing ballet, deemed sexually provocative and thus illegal in Iran. I barely comprehended the situation, but I sensed my parents’ fear, almost as much as I sensed their relief once we escaped. My parents and I arrived in America 14 years ago with our lives packed into four suitcases. We stayed in my aunt’s guest room until we could afford a one-bedroom apartment. My parents slept on mattresses in the living room while I kept the bedroom. Compared to Tehran, life felt lavish. Unable to afford a tutor, I lugged our Farsi-English dictionary to the library every day, looking up every word I didn’t know. As I learned more English, I began to understand the world around me. Like when my neighbors called the police, accusing us of speaking our “terrorist language” too loudly, and when their kids chased me around the courtyard, yelling, “You hairy, smelly, big-nosed monkeys are taking over!” Oh, to be an Iranian-American post-9/11. Despite risks to my family’s safety, I interned at an Israeli-Jewish lobbying firm after college. There, I saw renowned human rights leaders toast to closing backchannel oil deals that funded the Mullas’ extravagant lifestyles. Even the UN appointed Iranian officials to oversee the women’s rights commission despite global condemnation. After Western media reported on the Iranian regime poisoning its schoolgirls, Psychology Today published a study on the 'mass hysteria of Iranian school girls,' despite footage showing the girls being carried away on stretchers, struggling to breathe due to inhaling toxins. By the time links between Iranian elites and Psychology Today’s academics surfaced, the world had moved on. But Iranians persisted. My brothers continued receiving beatings for practicing other religions openly. My sisters cut their hair in solidarity with imprisoned protesters and endured punitive lashings for their defiance. Oil. Our Great Leaders combine oil with blood money to fund their diverse luxury clothing collections! Oil. When government-controlled pharmaceuticals turn teenagers into wandering addicts and when insurance is a laughable concept, you dull the pain or fade the scars by rubbing oil into wounds.If it were up to them, I’d take poison and die.This past year, I almost forgot that my mind is the greatest weapon in my arsenal–a weapon powerful enough to threaten even a Theocratic Dictatorship. I’m afraid of losing myself to cynicism and becoming another clichéd suit whose thrills are oral arguments or clicking buttons to seal a deal. I still cringe when Big Law asks if I would be interested in leading their “international oil deals”. Now, what’s a charming way of getting out of that one, without being a Debbie Downer? I dread accepting the notion that life is reduced to Kafkaesque meaninglessness, punctuated by superficial victories and silent despair. I worry I must walk in isolation, forever searching for something elusive. I worry about making the wrong choice and inhaling the poison. Then what becomes of all this turmoil? My parents protected me, and now it’s my turn to protect them. But what if I can’t? What if I fail?In acknowledging my wandering mind, I become conscious of the cycle.I grapple with concepts of liberty and freedom, corruption and governance, and fairness and equality. I aspire to help my family, to become the first woman in my lineage to attain a higher education degree, and to enact substantial progress in law. Maybe my mind is unruly; perhaps I don’t intuitively grasp codes as peers may. Yet here I am, learning and trying, even when I feel terrified to be doing it alone. And that’s the thing: when you realize you’re caught in the cycle, the awareness itself is a break from the automatic. Being here, grappling with it, and writing about it are my forms of protest, my dance against the forces that say my mind is too dangerous.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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