Once upon a time, when I was a dewy-eyed innocent little 1L at Michigan Law, I went to an informational meeting for law review where we were told all about the glories of law review. (Don’t laugh.)

One of the things that is different about Michigan Law Review, we were told, was that we had a book review issue—an issue dedicated to reviews of books.

And—it gets better! Every book review issue had a “classic revisited”—a review of a classic book from a legal perspective, where they usually got some luminary to write it.

For instance, that year, Chief Justice Rehnquist (!!!) had written a review of George Orwell’s 1984.

Now, I want you to imagine poor innocent dewy-eyed baby 1L Courtney. She was both a gigantic law nerd and a gigantic book nerd.

She heard about a “classic revisited” and of course you know what she thought.

”I want to write one.”

It was one of those things that I thought about when I was being wildly dreamy and ambitious for my future. Maybe one day, I thought dreamily, I will be enough of a legal luminary and they’ll let me write something.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. If I am good enough, someday, maybe.

This... didn’t happen. I packed up all the ambitions and dreams I had about law and threw them haphazardly into the dump.

This particular aspiration... hurt just a little bit to relinquish, because while the book nerd ended up winning big over the law nerd, this was an ambition deeply embedded in my book nerdy self.

But I let go.

And I was—and am—happy with my choices.

Last year, one of the Michigan Law Book Review editors contacted me out of the blue and asked me to write a “classic revisited” book review of Pride and Prejudice.

Did I have time?
.
.
.
Well, now I did.

This was not a thing I ever thought I would be able to do, and I’m so deeply grateful to the editors and law review staff who worked with me on this piece. They were helpful, professional, and just lovely all around.

Anyway, your surprise reading for the evening is here:

Pride and Predators, by Heidi S. Bond a/k/a Courtney Milan

https://michiganlawreview.org/pride-and-predators/

I am feeling just a little weepy about this right now. Sometimes your path takes you down roads you don’t expect, and sometimes it takes you back to places you didn’t know would exist.

Anyway, this book review spends exactly one word dragging the federal judiciary, and I do in fact like my footnotes.

Also content notes: this review discusses abusers and serial sexual child predators