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KarsynArchambeauFirstEssay 4 - 21 May 2022 - Main.EbenMoglen
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It Keeps on Turning | | | With how pervasive this detachment is, the conclusion that law school intends this result is inescapable. It certainly makes it easier, if I am trained to detach myself from the consequences of my actions, to skip happily into work at a firm. It’s not without its utility–we get to the so-called black letter law much faster without the burden of the woes experienced by the respective parties discussed. But what kind of advocates are produced from such an emotionally detached experience? Ones that are uninterested in true advocacy, because that requires an emotional dedication to a cause, or a client, or an outcome. Where distance is a luxury created in other areas of our lives, it should not be one indulged in when it comes to our careers. It is harder, sure, to resist detachment when it protects us from confronting the seedy underbelly of Big Law. But our aversion to that confrontation and the justifications we rely on to make firm life more palatable, are not bad things. They are assurances that we are not detached, that we do care about the consequences of our actions. They represent our own little resistance to the Big Law machine, so that we do not skip happily into work, but walk in with our eyes open. | |
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A much-improved draft. Further tightening was still possible and desirable. Every word that isn't doing its proportion of work should go. Paragraphs need to show their role in the sequence of ideas clearly, at their front. Sentences which do not advance the work of the paragraph should go too.
The proper work of the class in discussing a case is neither to eschew the realities in favor of doctrine nor to ignore legal context in deference to the primacy of politics and social struggle. The first question asked about any case in, say, my Property course always was and should be "What is really going on here?" That's what Legal Realism asks of us, and when a teacher won't show up for the real, the students should make it happen. But this is law school, and what we want to understand is how the powers embedded in and behind the law deal with the realities, and make the law do it on the terms they set.
Dissociation, as I said last time, is a profound, sophisticated human mental response to internal conflicts, including those engendered by law school and, perhaps more importantly, by the practice of law. This draft can be improved in many ways each growing out of a closer consideration of what we read and enacted in this course.
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