Law in Contemporary Society

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PatrickCroninFirstPaper 8 - 23 Aug 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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 What does creative lawyering look like from the perspective of the bad man?
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  • This question does not actually receive any attention, so far as I can tell.
 

The Playing Field

A case that makes it into a casebook is a concrete and unique clusterfuck – a chaotic section of the world where multiple things have gone wrong. For example:

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 The real world is chaotic – full of individual, unique, asymmetrical problems. And chaotic situations are a source of creativity. We’re scared of this chaos, so we want to normalize it – to turn it into a universal. Think of Dudley and Stephens: “Shipwreck? Cannibalism? This is a clusterfuck. Just get rid of it somehow. There is no necessity defense to murder.” The desire to simplify is natural. Simple and elegant ideas have the most rhetorical power. The task for a creative lawyer, then, is to hold a real piece of the world in his head and at the same time be able to simplify the ethical question it poses without jumping immediately to a universal concept.

This is not to say that chaos or creativity is inherently good – certainly chaotic situations can turn out badly. The idea is simply that chaotic situations hold the potential for something new to arise, and practically speaking, someone is going to determine what that new thing is. A lawyer who wants to work for justice will need to be fight on that terrain – to be able work with chaotic and asymmetrical problems and to guard against the desire to cover them up with universal concepts. \ No newline at end of file

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  • This was certainly an attempt to respond to my comment on your first draft by trying to wring more out of your material. But it did not result in a clear thesis clearly developed, which I think would be valuable here.
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Revision 8r8 - 23 Aug 2009 - 23:22:02 - EbenMoglen
Revision 7r7 - 21 Apr 2009 - 02:15:21 - PatrickCronin
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