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MatthewZornSecondPaper 3 - 18 Apr 2010 - Main.MatthewZorn
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondPaper" |
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still work in progress, will be done tomw
A stream of consciousness | | | Law school teaches its students to cling to these half-baked concepts, rules, and terms as if they were real life actual things. And inevitably, these new alive things take on lives of their own, divorcing themselves from the things they were supposed to represent. And you get lost in rules. You get asked by your criminal law professor whether a sailor who is trapped on a dingy in the middle of the ocean can legally kill a fellow sailor for food. And then you get asked whether the uninvolved sailor bystander could be charged as an accomplice. And when multiple law students chime in, restating, agreeing and arguing about what should be a non-law, you realize that most lawspeak no longer represents the things it was supposed to represent. | |
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< | And, it is at this point of realization (fn) that one becomes aware of the delicious irony that looms in the background of the general law school experience. You begin to see lawspeak as it really exists, abstract concepts laid on top of other abstracts concepts, piled so high that only a $150,000 bill can reach it. You begin to truly feel Marshall's dissenting words. That the true function of lawspeak is to conceal not explain, a facade for injustice to hide behind. Most of all, you learn that you are in the ultimate Arnoldian instution and that lawspeak is a preverse type of fool's gold: an intellectual currency that should help express ideas but instead functions as a barrier, whose effectiveness is measured by its ability to make others misunderstand ideas. And you begin to wonder whether the primary reason law professors insist on teaching lawspeak is because they don't understand anything else. Or perhaps unconsciously these professors know that their tenure depends on lawspeak's existence and opaqueness. | >
> | And, it is at this point of realization (fn) that one becomes aware of the delicious irony that looms in the background of the general law school experience. You begin to see lawspeak as it really exists, abstract concepts laid on top of other abstracts concepts, piled so high that only a $150,000 bill can reach it. You begin to truly feel Marshall's dissenting words. That the true function of lawspeak is to conceal not explain, a facade for judges to hide behind. Most of all, you learn that you are in the ultimate Arnoldian instution and that lawspeak is a perverse type of fool's gold: an intellectual currency that should help express ideas but instead functions as a barrier, whose effectiveness is measured by its ability to make others misunderstand ideas. And you begin to wonder whether the primary reason law professors insist on teaching lawspeak is because they don't understand anything else. Or perhaps unconsciously these professors know that their tenure depends on lawspeak's existence and opaqueness. | | | But a true lawyer is not merely a judge or a law professor. A lawyer is an advocate for a client. Which means law school in its current manifestation is not producing lawyers. Being an advocate for a client is not just about reading and interpreting law. It is about addressing client needs that almost always stretch beyond reading and interpreting statutes and caselaw. Or it can be about finding a non-lawspeak way to sell the fools gold back to the vendor. Being a client's advocate, requires knowledge of a different language: the language of society, the very thing lawspeak is supposed to represent. |
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