| 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.
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