Law In Contemporary Society Outline

Professor Moglen, Spring 2025

Mike Steinthal

“The course has one single point in it. One basic fact. The only thing that matters is the lawyer” ________________________________________________________________ Author's Note

Law in Contemporary Society is a course unlike any other. A course without a syllabus, light on reading assignments, and without a final exam. These attributes distinguish the course from all others offered to 1Ls at Columbia Law School.

In other classes, the ordinary course of conduct between the final class session and the final exam is to create the Outline, an easily searchable PDF digestion of all course material encountered throughout the semester. The process of outlining facilitates reflection on the course material and can be when the law student discovers, perhaps for the first time, what they actually learned after all those hours spent in lecture halls, office hours, and reading.

Throughout the semester, I tried to write down all thought-provoking propositions and poignant turns of phrase used. That said, I am no court reporter. The course was not recorded or transcribed. I missed a number of sessions. And, perhaps most importantly, I only wrote what I found interesting. This document is by no means a complete encapsulation of the course.

I recognize that creating an outline for this course is ironic, as on its own terms the course disparages final exams and grades. But, as far as I can remember, this course has not weighed in on the merits of the Outline itself, as a reflective exercise. I couldn’t help but feel that an attempt to digest and organize some themes of the course would be a thought-provoking exercise.

Ideas were drawn from disparate moments spanning the entire spring semester, across its fraught circumstances. I took creative liberties with organization and editing. And yet each section, to me, creates an eerie and imaginative poetry.

I would love to hear other people’s thoughts and welcome any additions. ________________________________________________________________

PART I. CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

THE FLAWS OF LAW SCHOOL

Law school is not “just” anything. That’s the problem with the word “just” in law school. Almost never about justice, almost always about oversimplification.

That said, let’s see “just” a few issues with law school…

(i) The Atmosphere.

The possession of time is the gift of the young scholar, who has the time to read. But the system wipes the time away. To be in law school is to be busy, to have so little time, to be so committed to a certain kind of interaction. And only that kind of interaction. The tension machinery of law school has a tendency to ramp up, not down, throughout the spring semester.

So much time is spent around here inducing insecurity. Law school marinates in fear of change. You’re being debilitated. You’re learning helplessness. I credit most of the inaction on campus to the fact that the way we teach is debilitating.

That’s the funny thing about teaching in law school. I spend all this time helping people to join a profession where they do not expect to be happy. I really care more that you like the profession than you like the first year of school.

(ii) The Grades.

Grades are a measure of speed of language acquisition. The first half of the first year of law school is a language learning exercise. Learning law talk by immersion. This embodies the fallacy of mensuration that what can be counted is what counts. What is measured by first semester grades is never measured again.

There have been proposals to remove grades entirely. But students don’t support those ideas. Your investment in your inequality is deeper than anyone else’s.

Transcripts only matter to systems that don’t care about people. And why would you want a professional life with people who don’t care about people?

(iii) Inadequate Institutional Governance

The greatest of all questions about universities: why are the tenured cowards? This university is perfumed with fear. Bureaucratic cheese-ary has ruined things.

There are no strangers in the building. Columbia used to be the Grand Central Station of the legal profession; everyone walked through here. You could meet almost anyone in American Law just by standing still. That’s been gone for a while now. Soon there will be turnstiles at the entrance.

THE FLAWS OF LAW FIRMS

“You get to be highly remunerated debt peons if you come here. Please do.” The law firm is a complicated machine and it builds cogs to keep itself running.

Joining a law firm has become the “traditional trajectory” for Columbia students. Let’s discuss some shortcomings of these institutions…

Transactional Law

What do transactional lawyers do? They issue comfort. They tell the lender that the deal is safe. Transactional lawyers are transactional people. If you ever stopped to think about it, you’d realize that your work hurts thousands of people. But you never stop to think about it. The endangerment is part of the story. They endanger associates. To show that they can.

Litigation, by Cravath

Aggression is the love language of the Cravath litigator. Cravath does Napoleonic scale litigation. But it’s read by 4 eyes. One law clerk, and one judge. That’s why working at Cravath is worthless. In the end, it was all just ways of wasting money. You can’t actually make anything happen that way. That’s why they never ended up trying any cases. It’s an education in futility. Burn up enough money to prove that you’re tough.

To Work at a Law Firm

Employment is the key drama of every theater in our lives. The real end goal of law school is to earn a license. The touchy subject is what to do with your license once you have it. The default is to take it to a very expensive pawn shop. I would hope that your integrity is not for sale. But if it is, you better know the price. If you don’t value yourself I guarantee you you’ll be undervalued. How are you coercible? That’s what really matters.

Here’s the thing about social class ~ it has to do with how much control you have over your work. When you work at a law firm, they control everything.

It might be a good question to ask the people at these firms you interview with: what training? What have you actually learned billing thousands of hours?

Law Firm Pay

Money is a psychoactive substance, and you must treat it that way. It changes how you think and what you feel, and there is a dose response curve to it, a tolerance. You have to know how much is enough. If you do, you can handle it safely.

But the law firm’s are motivated otherwise. There is a very significant effort to keep you from knowing how much is enough. The currency that matters is freedom. Don’t forget that.

DISTRACTION

Resist the conscription of your attention.

Much technology in our contemporary society is operated for profit. As it turns out, it's quite profitable to distract people from what matters…

The only free cheese is in a mousetrap. We live in a world with technology that can take freedom away, or provide it. A chaotic, complex, screwed up world. There are forms of influence operating on minds outside the reins of consciousness.

Knowledge should be freely available. Ignorance in a world where we have connected every mind, everywhere on Earth, is unjustifiable. The frictions are gone. The marginal cost of transmitting information is zero.

AUTOCRACY

A little repression goes a long way. The cruelty is the point. I do not understand why it was so important not to fight. We must all hang together or we shall hang separately.

They’re gonna need some pretty fancy cameras to see what’s in your head. May you give your speeches on the graves of radical unfreedom too. The freedom begins by knowing that another future is possible

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PART II. VISIONS OF CHANGE

FREE WILL

There’s way less free will than you think there is.

Many people are much more likely to commit murder than to eat spaghetti with their hands in public. Our sense of convenience, and our sense of obligation, are way more powerful than we are inclined to believe.

But the psychological structure that ties you to the wheel of pain doesn’t exist. And all those bullets you feel you’ve been shot by were invisible, they don’t exist. When you start out in the world, doing anything, you have a tendency to believe that you’re a character in other people’s stories. But you don’t have to be.

The thing to wonder is if the hunger is there. The need to make it happen. The sense that the train of living is leaving, and you need to get on it. That sense that there are things you have to do. And the people who know how have to teach you.

Free will is the feeling that you’re at the wheel. Doing something to show everyone it can be done. The thing that stands in the way is the fear that you can’t do it.

We live, and we face what we face, and we make the choices, and we live with the choices all the way along. And at the end, you ask yourself, did I live what I meant? What I intended? What you decide to do is gonna matter an awful lot. You have a very precious set of chances. Please don’t throw it away.

HOW LAW SCHOOL SHOULD BE

Law school is about 2 things. (1) Learning to read minds. (2) Learning to press buttons.

You’re the only student in your law school.

You get to choose where it goes from here. You are now able to choose your teachers. Make the environment dedicated to the creation of awareness.

A law practice is made of two parts. (1) Your license; your right to a lawyer, your abilities, your tricks. (2) A network, people who help you find and build the ability to serve the clients

The reason a place like this charges the ticket price is the network, not the license. There are lots of people who can teach you to put things in your license. Law school is helpful at putting things in your network. The network of a thing like CLS is worth infinitely more than any law practice on the planet. In theory, that’s why you pay the high tuition

Imagine if we thought in that way for the rest of law school. Lists. People I want to meet. Tricks I want to learn. Books I want to read. Teachers I want to work with. Stuff I want to know how to do. Those would be tools for real liberation.

Ask yourself, who do you want to meet? Then maybe we think about where to meet them. Who is the crucial question. Who turns out to be the thing that matters. Think to yourself, I have Columbia law school at my back. Who do I want to talk to? You have to meet the people!

You can always learn more law. It’s written down somewhere. The real question is can you read the room. Can you read the minds of the people who have the power? Find ways to change things using words? Talk well and write well and think fast? So you can actually be relied on to make things better for the people who trust you?

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PART III. LAWYERING

ON PRACTICING LAW

“He did what he could with what he had”

The whole point of lawyering is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. You get paid to pay attention. Lawyers are spooky. When you know too much, your relationship to the truth is always complicated. Is that a contradiction, to have a complicated relationship with the truth and an underlying principle of being a person of your word? Controlling other people’s perceptions of your lawyering is part of your lawyering.

Over the long haul, there are only two reasons to become a lawyer that actually work. There are a ton of other reasons that peter out. (1) Because I love justice. (2) Because I hate injustice.

Become the lawyer you mean to become. Figure out what matters to you. You are always in the position of entrepreneur. You see the need, you occupy the spot where the conflict is about to occur. Will your life in the law become a way of expressing yourself? Do you want to be a dangerous person?

Power is building a small place, where you know every job on the boat because you built the boat. If you actually want to have a good law practice, then you ask about people. You want to work with lawyers who care about lawyers. You want to work with lawyers who care about you. It’s always about who more than it’s about what.

A law practice is easier to run than a taco truck. Both need to make money. The difficulty is that with the taco truck; food spoils.

You have to begin with prioritizing yourself as a lawyer. There will never be another. That means knowing yourself. Understanding what it is you want, why you want it, and what you’re good at. You have everything it takes. You have the ability to learn, you have wit, you have energy, you have time, you have commitment. Nothing stops you. And each one of you becomes the lawyer. When you speak, you have to have a purpose. Every word has to have a purpose. You always mean to get something done. As you gain experience, you get more done

The thing that really matters is discovering you really love some work. That there’s some part of putting yourself out there, having people trust you, and getting stuff done, that marks you happy, feel fulfilled in the work you do and the being you are. You’re looking for that. For the stuff you really want to do. It’s you people are going to depend upon. Not the cases, not the statutes. You.

-- MikeSteinthal - 29 Apr 2025

I enjoyed reading your iteration of Eben's powerful 'transcript' throughout this semester. Another line I'd include is as follows: "To go from the particular to the general, back to the particular, not because of the consequence of an algorithm, but because of who you have become--this is essentially lawyering."

-- KianaTaghavi - 30 Apr 2025

Thank you, I appreciate this! It was an interesting experience to read Eben’s spoken words as written ones. I assume that people fixate on different things in the class, and I think this could be a useful framework to see that.

The concepts that electrified me the most were clarification (“the key is to clarify inside so we can understand others”) and change (“change happening at gunpoint...Ovid/Augustus"). I also got excited about random metaphors used in class, like “crossing the Rubicon,” and the music Eben played (Waltz for Matilda, Billie Holiday - I’ll Be Around No Matter How You Treat Me Now...) So my personal "outline" mostly ended up focusing on those moments. Most of all, I would love to add the title of the jazz piece Eben played, "It Never Entered My Mind," as a sort of epitaph to the class.

-- KatherineOk - 30 Apr 2025