Law in Contemporary Society

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OurOwnMyths 5 - 12 Feb 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Those of us who stay for Torts with Professor Rapaczynski immediately after Prof. Moglen’s class were yesterday treated to apparently diametrically opposed visions of freedom and autonomy. After Moglen’s passionate lecture on the libertarian impulse’s responsibility for the national predicament, we were treated to a reasoned and logical explanation as to why, in order to promote freedom and autonomy, we must not punish someone who shrugs his shoulders while watching a child drown at his feet.
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 My language may have been broad but my thoughts were quite specific -- my concerns are not with "lawyering" (at this point I'm far from sure what lawyering means in our class -- Homer changed the world with words more than any 'lawyer,' and the words that Paul Robeson changed the world with did not come from CLS), I'm concerned with the group of us in this room and what we will be doing in three years. Do we need to ask what we will be replacing the old guard with before we soldier forth with an abstract mandate ('get people out of prison,' 'feed the hungry')? Do we need to have a set of our own positive myths in place before we take action? Is there any way to move forward without myths at all? I sense Arnold would say no -- so if myths and folklore are necessary, shouldn't the content and context of our myths come before our examination of others?

-- AndrewCase - 11 Feb 2009

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  • This reminds me of the suggestion that we first have to know how to fix law school before we can go to it. The whole "personal myths" strain isn't an idea of Arnold's: his point has to do with how organizations work, not how individual human psyches are constructed. One can of course ask about the creeds, habits and attitudes of law school as an organization; in my experience that gets overasked by my students, if anything.
 
 
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Revision 5r5 - 12 Feb 2009 - 16:16:30 - EbenMoglen
Revision 4r4 - 12 Feb 2009 - 15:57:13 - PetefromOz
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