On a recent Monday morning at the LSU Law Center, third-year law students Jack Zeringue and Cam Miller are putting together the latest episode of “The Legal Ease,” the Louisiana Law Review podcast. They’re about to have an academic discussion about a technical legal issue, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have a little fun.
As Business Report details in a feature in the current issue, their guest is Chris Ortte, a fellow student and a regular contributor to the podcast. He’s from Lafayette, but he doesn’t speak with a noticeable Cajun accent until they start recording and he adopts his “Bayou Barrister” persona. As the name suggests, the “Bayou Barrister” segment highlights Louisiana-specific legal quirks.
Ortte opens with a Boudreaux and Thibodeaux joke—the one about Thibodeaux forgetting his glasses at a truck stop while on a road trip to the beach—before launching into a brief explanation of how the state civil code treats “alluvion,” soil added naturally over time on the bank of a river or stream. Legally, alluvion belongs to the owner of the bank, but the owner must leave public the portion of the bank required for public use.
“So Boudreaux and Thibodeaux could pull their pirogue up there,” Miller notes.
“They could do that, and they could fish,” Ortte responds.
“The Legal Ease” is in its second season. Zeringue and Miller say they want the show to be informative and entertaining for law students, academics and legal practitioners, while also shedding light upon legal topics in the news that interest the general public.
A podcast is basically an internet radio show that can be downloaded on demand and listened to at any time, usually on a smartphone or tablet. A 2016 survey by Edison Research and Triton Digital found that 21% of Americans age 12 and up had listened to at least one podcast during the previous month.
The LSU Law Center’s Louisiana Law Review, a student-edited journal of legal scholarship, is one of just a handful of law reviews across the country with a podcast. Others include journals based at UCLA, Yale, Northwestern and Fordham. LSU’s first episode went live on Sept. 16, 2015, making Louisiana Law Review one of the earliest adopters, although Yale, at least, beat them to the punch the previous April.
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