Robinson & Brown

I do not believe that determining whether his methods were right or wrong is a useful exercise. I think that we have spent too much time focusing on the violence. The overall message is to continue to fight for something. I think that Thoreau’s emphasis on Brown’s decision to fight despite not getting any monetary reward for it and without it affecting him directly gets at where we would come in.

In trying to piece together the readings and figuring out what they mean to me, I realized that Brown and Robinson are similar. First, Robinson and Brown prepared or readied themselves to take action. It was not a hasty knee-jerk reaction. Robinson fought in the Vietnam War, went to law school, worked at the prosecutors office, SEC, and then became a private defense attorney. Similarly, Brown prepared himself by learning through experience. He got familiar with the military and war. And although he chose not to engage in it (unless for liberty) it was important for him to understand the costs, and not just the pecuniary costs, of “firing a single bullet.” He prepared himself in other ways—eating and living a certain way and recruiting specific people (among other things).

Second, both of these men tried to get in touch with, as Robinson puts it, the thang, or as Thoreau writes living a life of exposure.

With respect to us, I think that the point to take here is that we have options. We can sit and be naïve—let the world continue and only get up when everyone else has—or we can do something about what we see is unjust. The “what” we do is very particular to who we are and what we can do as individuals. We would need to make informed choices that make sure that our steps help us to develop and mature as attorneys. The problem is that too many of us are way too far from “the thang” and live a life not fully exposed and as a result have a harder time seeing injustices.

It is much easier to sit back and judge than to do something. I think Wylie put it best when he said that he said he was cynical but not a cynic. I think that we are critics but not critical. We can point to methods we think are right or wrong without looking at the message or at least offering an alternative. Instead we are content with the contribution of criticism instead of actually trying to wrestle with the concepts that make us uneasy.

In our discussion of Brown we focused too much on the violence used instead of talking about the importance of taking action and dealing with resistance or the non-action of others. I think that focusing on when to stop does not make sense when (for the most part) we have not started. Thus I would not ask what but I’d ask would you (try to) do something if today 20 million+ people were slaves?

-- LissetteDuran - 01 Mar 2012

I wish I saw this before writing my last post in DecidingInThePresent 2 minutes ago but I just wanted to say that I love the distinction you made in the last sentence between "would you" and "what would you" - sums up really well what Eben wants us to focus on and what a bunch of people, myself included have been focusing on, at least until today. I totally agree with you that the "would you" is much more important right now than "what would you" and I totally get why Eben wants us to focus on the former and not the latter, at least at this point. I feel, and maybe other people would agree, that it seemed in class like Eben was completely disregarding, and perhaps even disparaging, the second question. If I may criticize Eben for a moment (oh what the hell, all my chips are on the table already as it is), I think it might have been more productive to acknowledge that "what would you do" is a legitimate and difficult question (which I still think it's reasonable to say) but that it's not the question we should be focusing on at the moment and that we should put it aside until we've sufficiently answered the "would you" question for ourselves. I think that would have allowed people, including myself, to more easily shift our focus back to the real issue. Just my 2 cents and again, I loved your post!

-- JosephItkis - 02 Mar 2012

I like your comparison of Robinson and Brown – I thought of this as well when doing the readings. I think that together they serve as a good foil to Wiley, who identifies himself as cynical but not as a ‘cynic’ and states, “how can you be a lawyer and not be cynical? But not a cynic – cynics don’t give a damn about the rules”. At the risk of being slightly reductionist, I think this framework presents a useful spectrum upon which Wiley, Robinson and Brown, in their engagement with social and legal institutions, can be positioned.

Wiley is very self-perceptive, acknowledging that his life is governed by the pursuit of money and that he and his fellow attorneys have essential split and sold their souls for the job. When he states that “you can make a million dollars a year by pretending to know what you’re doing, and being able to sit through interminable meetings without developing any serious maladies”, he is clearly being cynical – offering up a rather bleak and realist view of the art of practicing law. However, he has come to terms with his own practice and life – he recognizes it for what it is but has no real desire to affect change or critically engage, as he is comfortable in the life he has fashioned for himself within the institutional moors. He is not a ‘cynic’ – his cynicism and critique of his profession do not define him, subsume him, or influence his day-to-day behavior in any way.

On the other hand, Robinson, and Brown – to a greater extent - breach the land of the cynical and move towards becoming cynics. Unlike Wiley, they are not inert observers, passing judgment on the legal community from the comfort of a bistro chair, while drinking expensive Chilean merlot and espresso. They have consciously refused to “commit acts of violence against [themselves] and acts of violence against others” in the name of becoming another suit chasing the next buck. Robinson has fashioned his own practice in a way that suits him, and refuses to be enslaved by his profession. Both men have taken their criticism or cynicism and applied it to practice and life, and in doing so have fashioned identities as 'cynics'.

I do not think Robinson goes as far as Brown, however, in refusing to ‘give a damn about the rules’. This is where their paths diverge. Robinson still recognizes that other people ascribe to, depend on and orient their behavior in a way that conforms to institutional rules. This makes knowledge of the rules valuable to Robinson, as they serve to indicate the actions that others may take and the institutional confines operating on individual behaviors. While Robinson may not always follow the rules himself, he still plays the game, because abandoning them completely would inhibit his ability to use them as leverage in manipulating others and working the wheels of the system. Brown has adapted his cynicism to become a cynic in every sense of the word. He not only refuses to conform to the rules himself, but advocates direct action against them. I think Lissette is on to something in highlighting how these different approaches are instructional and can serve to guide us in our personal decisions regarding how we choose to interact with the legal system. As Lissette rightly points out, it is awfully easy to criticize the legal profession from a cushy leather chair on the 50th floor of a downtown firm office (or, for that matter, from a significantly less cushy desk chair in JG). Brown is a cynic, because, as Eben said, he can’t find a way not to see the elephant when it is in the room at the dinner party, while Wiley, merely making the occasional cynical observation from the comfort of his armchair, can. While the Wiley, Robinson, and Brown approaches are not necessarily so discrete, it may still be useful to look to each individual to draw out the components of engagement and personality (if any) that inspire us and to adapt those approaches for our own purposes.

-- MeaganBurrows - 03 Mar 2012

I really like Meagan’s description of Wiley – I think she’s spot-on that Wiley is not unaware of the destructiveness of his life. The only way he can deal with the negative feelings is by sequencing the drugs carefully, hating on other lawyers (Boola-Boola), and concentrating on the idea of chaos and complexity. Wiley splits because he's aware that he's not living. He's not John Brown, because, as Thoreau expressed, Brown is a rare case of a person who actually lived.

One distinction between Brown/Robinson and Wiley/most of us is courage. Maybe Brown inherently had that courage or maybe he trained himself to have courage. I suspect that at least part of it came from the fact that Brown knew the cost of a human life because he had lost a few. Thus, he understood that "it costs us nothing to be just" because the cost of not being just is human life, which is incomparable to the material costs that his critics based their decisions on.

"How do we feel about ourselves after encountering John Brown?"

The answer to this question is clear from the fact that our class discussion devolved into discussions of: 1) whether John Brown was a terrorist or a murderer and 2) how he might have been prematurely anti-justice (Why didn't he wait until the Civil War became surely inevitable? Why didn't he wait for permission? Why didn't he wait to find out if it's okay to go up against injustice?).

The ironic thing is that our reaction mirrored exactly what Thoreau observed about John Brown's critics: “They cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are…Accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves.” Most of us can't either - which is why we compare him to terrorists and murderers, in the same way that Brown's contemporary critics called him insane. It doesn't take courage to get into law school and many of us will never train ourselves to be courageous. It's not that we're too far away from the thang, as Lisette wrote, but that we don't see the thang even when it's all around us. We hear stories about injustice but we don't remember them. We feel bad for a few minutes after reading a sad news article about some injustice that doesn't directly affect us, and like the Christians, we turn our computers off at the end of the day and go to sleep quietly. When we measure ourselves against John Brown, we get cognitive dissonance and we deal with it the same way that Brown's contemporaries did: 1) classify him in a way that makes him different from us, and 2) don't think about it for too long.

"How we feel about the apprehension of the trauma – knowing that we’re running toward a moment of working in exhaustion at 2am and knowing we're on the wrong side?"

I went to a firm event the evening after our first John Brown discussion and went away feeling somewhat depressed. All day, I had been troubled by the thought that I probably don't have the balls to do anything about 20 million people being enslaved, and at the firm event, I realized that I'm not going to grow balls by working for a firm. I brought this up at a table of law school students the next day. One friend got really angry and went on a rant about how we should be grateful for being at Columbia (Don't we know how many people would kill for this opportunity?), and how he's disgusted by people who complain about the work. Another said, "What else would we be doing instead?" and everyone else agreed. A third mentioned the money. The final comment was, “I’ll go work for a big firm and support you while you go save the world."

-- MichelleLuo - 04 Mar 2012

I enjoyed Michelle's thoughts on the firm reception. I'm curious about connecting the general enthusiasm about the receptions with Eben's comments on prestige. Why is it that most law students here consider working for a plaintiff's personal injury firm to be worse in some prestige sense (aside from money or hours) than practicing at a large corporate firm? Why have I repeatedly heard that white collar criminal defense work is considered the most prestigious litigation at those same large firms? None of these ideas are consistent with at least my basic moral intuitions, so maybe part of the function of law school is to teach us to ignore those intuitions.

-- DavidHirsch - 04 Mar 2012

I really enjoyed Meagan’s post. I, myself, have been having difficulty making connections and drawing parallels between all the characters and themes we have encountered so far. On top of that, it’s also been difficult for me to get away from focusing on the “what would you” as opposed to the “would you” as Lissette discussed earlier, primarily because the “would you” feels like a definitive “no” and that reality has been troubling me for quite some time.

But I appreciate the exercise that Meagan invites us to participate in, that is, think about how these characters can illuminate for us, and help us understand, the ways in which we can or will engage with the legal system and its institutions.

While it’s important to think about if we would act in the face of injustice, and, eventually, ask ourselves what we would do, a lot of us are going to have to make some personal sacrifices before we get there. And, for some of us, that might involve operating in environments- for a short while, or maybe for the entirety of our careers- that are hostile towards us, that demean us, and that wear us down both emotionally and intellectually. And before you can really do anything for anyone else, or even know how to do anything for anyone else, you'll need to learn how to operate within these systems in a way that allows you to make optimal use of your talents and efficiently work towards your goals.

Wiley is a character that is easy to feel some distaste towards and, to a certain extent, compassion. He is a character that has chosen to work within a system that he does not entirely believe in, but- like many of us- he had his reasons for going in and he has his reasons for maintaining the course. But rather than feel either distaste or compassion, I’ve found myself feeling more intrigued by his own internal “splitting”- how he is simultaneously aware of it on a conscious level and continues to do it on a subconscious level- and the ways in which he has chosen to subsume any frustration or cynicism he may feel into snideness, and rationalize the rest of it away. When thinking about those who will work in legal institutions that are inherently hostile towards them, or people like them, in order to get that much vaunted, second-to-none “legal experience” on the path to pursuits they might find worthier, I wonder whether Wiley has chosen a valid or healthy survival mechanism, and what tools we should think about cultivating now in order to survive in and make the most of these environments down the road.

In slight contrast, Robinson is not a straightforward character to figure out, primarily because he always seems to be speaking in a sort of ironic double-speak. This too, is a survival mechanism- as Meagan points out, he has decided to play the game and work within and "grease the wheels" of a system he does not entirely believe in himself. But I think there’s clearly something driving him beyond principles or noblesse. He’s driven by his desire to get close to “the thang” and thinks_ “criminal law represents civilization’s pathology.”_ He seems almost unabashedly infatuated with the nature of crime- both those who determine what it is and who has committed it, and those who are branded by it. His pontifications about lawyers and prisoners switching places believing it would be “no more than a form of exacting justice” seems to reflect his belief in the very fragile, if not somewhat arbitrary, nature of the entire enterprise. In that regard, I feel like he chose the path he is on neither because he wanted to “do the right thing” nor because he wanted to make money, but because he wanted some way to encounter day-in-and-day-out what it means to be human, because there’s something simultaneously thrilling and grounding about that. I don’t see it as a bad reason to go into criminal law, just one we rarely explicitly consider.

Finally, Brown made me think about the larger question of how much I am willing to sacrifice and how much I am willing to be subsumed by certain values in order to live a “principled” life in the law- if such a thing can be said. Brown’s direct engagement with “the thang” is, for many of us, a terrifying proposition. Furthermore, he lived in a different time, so even if any of us decide to go down that road, our methods will surely differ. Professor Moglen continues to emphasize that we live in the fastest and most abundant part of the global “network” which confers a certain amount of power and privilege. A peer in class then countered that she was skeptical as to how “robust” this privilege really is because we live in a world where there are “systems of misinformation on top of systems of misinformation.” John Brown makes me feel simultaneously galvanized and helpless, so I am, clearly, sympathetic to both views. And I continue to feel the acute tension between them, as I mull over these characters, and the divergent paths they chose.