MinnLawyer Blog

On a lark we started a poll last week after news broke of the death of John Hughes — king of the ’80s coming-of-age movie, including “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” ”Sixteen Candles,” “Pretty in Pink” and, of course, ”The Breakfast Club.”  (By the way, Hughes was also responsible for one of my personal favorite flicks of the period, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” starring John Candy and Steve Martin.)

As a tribute to Hughes, we started a poll on which character from “The Breakfast Club” would be the most likely to go on to become a lawyer. (In case you forgot, the movie characters, who all for various reasons wind up in the same detention session one Saturday, represent various high school types — jock, popular, freak, geek and burnout.)

With 45 votes in at the moment, the preliminary results show no clear winner. I had thought the geek character (Anthony Michael Hall) might do the well because of the level of study involved in a JD, but he’s only marginally ahead of three of the other choices: the popular prom queen (Molly Ringwald), the freak (Ally Sheady) and the burnout (Judd Nelson). Only the jock (Emilio Estevez) seems to be significantly lagging behind the others.

If these results hold up, it may mean that folks think there are a lot on lawyers who are not athletic. Or, perhaps, Estevez fans are in short supply (at least since the 1980s). Certainly I could see Estevez’s brother, Charlie Sheen, as a lawyer (just think of him in “Wall Street” or even “Spin City.”)