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Law in Contemporary Society
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Facing Death, Facing Uncertainty: Building the Right Law School for Me.-- By ShannonFrampton - 25 Apr 2024 This class has posited that courage is an important quality in a lawyer. I agree. I do not know how to develop courage, but I imagine that it requires identifying my fears. Two weeks ago if you had asked me what my biggest fear was, I would have told you that I am most afraid of death. I have been thinking about death a lot recently for two main reasons. First, the war against the Palestinians raging in Gaza and the West Bank, throughout which Israel has killed over 40,000 people.Second, because my father is dying of cancer. When my father was first diagnosed with multiple myeloma I wept for weeks. I woke up crying and went to sleep crying. My only relief came from phone calls where his voice and face, brought me back into the present moment; reminding me that he was not yet dead. Things became easier when I spoke with a friend whose mother was dying. She helped me see that nothing had really changed. Death had not changed; only my awareness of it. Death is all around all the time. In a way, my father is no closer to death now than he was before cancer and no further away from it than I am. My father could be hit by a truck crossing the street. It might not be the cancer that kills him. Somehow that reminder allowed me to put death back in its box, hide it away where I didn't have to think about it all the time. It allowed me to think about the diagnosis as a gift. I could use the time. We began writing his autobiography together, using an online service with pre-formulated questions. We have not finished writing the book. I don’t think we will ever finish it. The last time I was at home my father called me into the living room with his wife and then left us. I could see all the unfairness of making her be the one to tell me that he no longer wanted to take chemo and that he would let the disease take its course. I did not cry because that would have been unkind. I waited until I left for a relative’s house to internalize the news. That night I slept next to the toilet. I could not stop throwing up. I’ve spent the last year thinking about death even when I did not know I was doing it. I was seeking it accounts of it in cases, laws, novels, television. Now I know that I am not afraid of my father dying. I am sad about it. I am learning that I may not even be afraid of death itself only what it represents. Death is unknowable. I know that one day I will die but I do not know when that day will be. In the millisecond before it happens, I may know that it is imminent. But I cannot know that I have died. In that sense, death is the opposite of knowledge. Of course, the reason I believe that I cannot know I have died is because I do not believe in any sort of an afterlife. But even my half-hearted atheism creates a knowledge problem. Because even though I believe that there is no after-life, I know that I cannot know that for sure. I’d like to spend the rest of my time in law school excavating my discomfort with uncertainty, which is also a desire to know, which is also a desperate insistence that every question has at least one ‘right answer.’ From my current location, I can see that it makes me too outcome focused and risk averse. I feel ambivalent about fighting battles I don’t know that I can win. I don’t want to waste time persuading judges, professors, people who might be unreachable. I am more interested in searching for a ‘right answer’ and sharing how and what I found on my own terms not those of the audience. I used to think that was hard-edged clarity (generous) or pessimism (neutral) and now I wonder if that is just fear(difficult). I’m guessing that my fear of uncertainty places more limitations on me and my imagination that the one that’s clear to me now. When I return to law school in the fall I will be thinking about building a curriculum that gives me the skills to tackle uncertainty, evaluate risk, and find meaning in process and struggle and not just outcomes. I think that the right law school for me is one that allows me to look at uncertainty and see opportunity instead of fear.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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