Law in Contemporary Society

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AmmarMonawarSecondEssay 3 - 22 Jun 2018 - Main.AmmarMonawar
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I don’t think there is answer I can give that’s both honest and satisfactory to the question of what kind of lawyer I want to be. I can’t fathom how I could honestly say what kind of lawyer I want to be after spending a year taking black letter law classes. If my classmates were able to wring some meaning into what they wanted their legal careers to look like by sitting through contracts, property, civil procedure, and torts, then I must have wholly missed the point.

I wasn’t able to find out what I want my legal career to look like while reading case after case for contracts or property; I can remember perhaps one time in this past semester where a case really resonated with me when discussing the questions it brought up and the implications of the decision- Author’s Guild v. Google. But by the next day we were already moving on to estates and trusts and other topics that were important for the examination, but not for what I wanted out of law school.

All we received was exposure; the planting of these vague notions of what an area of law COULD be should we choose to pursue it. But this doesn’t translate to what a specific day in the life actually entails. There is no choice given to experience the reality of working as a lawyer; that comes later. Right now, we must learn rules and standards and various doctrines that I am nearly positive I won’t remember when I receive my license.

This may seem like a terrible system for many of my classmates, but I found this a very comforting approach personally; it seemed almost tailormade for someone like me. That is, someone who knew nothing about the law prior to taking on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to learn about it. I was unprepared to even consider the question of what kind of law I wanted to practice, and the first year showed me WHY I wasn’t prepared to give an answer.

My knowledge of law was incredibly limited coming into law school; during a meeting at work following my acceptance to Columbia, my boss jokingly referred to me as “Counselor” while assigning one of our ongoing projects. I didn’t even realize I was in charge of the project until a colleague asked for a progress update the next day. I had never met a practicing lawyer until I came to law school. I really knew absolutely nothing about the law.

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During our first year of law school, all we received was exposure; the planting of these vague notions of what an area of law COULD be should we choose to pursue it. But this doesn’t translate to what a specific day in the life actually entails. There is no choice given to experience the reality of working as a lawyer; that comes later. Right now, the curriculum has been set.
 Initially I came into law school hoping to be an “entertainment” lawyer- I didn’t really know what this meant, but I came to the conclusion that if I was going to law school and was interested in the music industry, that’s what I should be doing. But what did that phrase even really mean to me? It basically boiled down to the idea that I spent too much time listening and reading about music and felt I knew too little about any other field to be competitive in them. There may have been some interest in artists’ rights to their work or other aspects of producing, but very little understanding of what exactly was being done. In retrospect, it made absolutely no sense to want to go into a field without knowing what the actual day-to-day work entails.
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I was told by a professor earlier this semester that if I wanted to work in an entertainment field, I should focus on copyright and employment law. He stopped to consider whether labor law would be important but decided it wouldn’t be; that would be for a field where collective bargaining is involved. But why shouldn’t the music industry involve that? Isn’t it exactly the kind of industry that we should be concerned about public bargaining? Perhaps collective bargaining could be the solution to many problems we see in the industry, it may even be especially suited for the type of workers in that field. There’s this general perception that if we are to practice law in a certain field, there’s only one way to do it. Types of lawyers shouldn’t be set into premade categories of what type of law (or even general knowledge) is applicable in the circumstance. If music has gone digital, then how that data is transmitted is crucial. And that may require knowledge of telecommunications that lies outside the law school. It may also not be helpful at all for what I want out of career, but no real thought is going to be put in to these issues if I study only along the lines of what every lawyer before me has studied.
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I was told by a professor earlier this semester that if I wanted to work in an entertainment field, I should focus on copyright and employment law. There’s this general perception that if we are to practice law in a certain field, there’s only one way to do it. Types of lawyers shouldn’t be set into premade categories of what type of law (or even general knowledge) is applicable in the circumstance. If music has gone digital, then how that data is transmitted is crucial. And that may require knowledge of telecommunications that lies outside the law school. It may also not be helpful at all for what I want out of career, but no real thought is going to be put in to these issues if I study only along the lines of what every lawyer before me has studied.
 
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The bottom line is that everything that I need to know about how I want my professional career to play out can’t be learned in just the law school; the multidisciplinary approach needed to work creatively isn’t something that an institution focused on job placements can provide. Not that I have problem with that model either; it would be facetious to say there’s no value in learning to work hard for long periods of time. But there’s diminishing returns past a certain point. You have to know when to stop.
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I want my practice as lawyer to center around how we value art right now and how we can change that to a more sustainable model that involves as few parties as necessary to get the product, whatever it may be, to the consumer. The problem of finding a way to get the potential audience for a work to care about the work is important because the disconnect we see in the cultural value versus the monetary value we see in what we consume; we constantly hear reports on all types of media outlets about music and television and give it great weight in our discussions on significant cultural moments. But when the time comes to actually pay for the services, we’re content with not owning our copy of the content and instead paying for the license to enjoy the works so long as we have a subscription, be it tv shows, music, movies, or even digital copies of books. This system poses problems in two ways; first, it fundamentally undervalues the work but allowing access to immense quantities while paying practically nothing. Second, this places the onus on creators to court the favor of these gatekeepers of the industry, be it streaming services or record labels, instead of focusing on the audience directly.
 
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So, at the end of the first year, I still don’t believe I have a proper answer to the kind of lawyer I want to be, but I am now much better equipped to tackle that question. I’ve learned how a legal career is traditionally set up, but I have also gained a grasp of other directions I can look in to create something new for my own career. I have two years to figure this out, and this is the first time I have the knowledge to properly consider the question. I have no doubt I’ll come to a satisfactory answer in that time; I have absolutely nothing more important to do.
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The greatest discouraging factor for myself when trying to find a solution to this topic is that I see very few lawyers doing what I want to do. Working for a record label or clearing deals for them isn’t really something I want to be a part of because it leads to poor outcomes in the music industry; it incentivizes a zero-sum mentality that an artist’s featured placement is necessarily detrimental to others. As of now, there are too many factors at play here affecting how music is distributed and consumed when the focus should be on the music itself and the audience for it.
 
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Other models have found success, however. Just over in Brooklyn, Anibal Luque is a lawyer that works from the ground up with various artists in creating unique approach for to succeed given their talents and constraints. From the admittedly small amount of information I’ve gathered on him, I can see at the very least an outline of what I would want my own practice to look like. Whether or not this method has proven successful is beside the point; Mr. Luque presents a system where he becomes indispensable to the artist by providing services that can only be done through a partnership with a client rather than simply taking care of their paperwork. Although I can’t divine his intentions or the motivations behind his approach, it nevertheless at least seems to care more about the individual needs of the client.
 
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This draft has a point to make, which it makes pretty well. If one doesn't know anything about being a lawyer, how could a year of learning the basics tell one enough to shape a practice? The point is real, though it doesn't take 1,000 words to make it. But the draft assumes that if this point is valid—if any speculation about a future practice is necessarily uninformed for someone in your situation—it's also unproductive.

That's the difference between knowledge tests and imagination tests. Law school—I want to say again—is a challenge of the latter kind. Using your imagination on the possible futures of your practice is important regardless of the plausibility of the outcome, let alone of the accuracy of the prediction. It doesn't matter whether you are going to wind up being a labor lawyer for musicians. What matters is thinking about which musicians presently are unionized, which aren't, and why. That leads to questions about how production is funded, about what any musician could easily have called the "gig economy" a generation before Travis Kalanick, about why banks don't make loans to musicians, and other subjects directly germane to the future you are hypothesizing. What's important isn't whether that future comes true, or whether you have drawn it in correct perspective. The important thing is learning how to imagine what you then learn how to draw.

So the best route to the improvement of this draft, I think, is to keep the point you make, make it in a quarter or a third of the draft, and spend the rest thinking about the problems that interest you as though they were going to be your practice. It doesn't matter whether you're right. It matters whether you show up for the set.

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This sort of client-facing approach is how I would want to practice; understanding that for each artist, the way to create their art and still meet their financial needs is different. Finding the right audience, coming up with a plan of attack, and linking up with other creators in mutually beneficial arrangements are all methods of engaging with the artist in nonstandard ways. These alternative approaches can provide a way to succeed both creatively and financially for those artists that are not suitable for thriving in the current market for music. There is indeed a current pathway to success for musicians that exists and can lead to incredible amounts of wealth and fame, but only if you can fit into the mold of what a label deems profitable. The majority of musicians that play to smaller crowds or more niche tastes ultimately can’t succeed in that manner. But there are frameworks out there for how to find other routes to success, and I want to work on building upon those frameworks and creating an example of nontraditional paths to success through my work with clients.
 
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AmmarMonawarSecondEssay 2 - 31 May 2018 - Main.EbenMoglen
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 I don’t think there is answer I can give that’s both honest and satisfactory to the question of what kind of lawyer I want to be. I can’t fathom how I could honestly say what kind of lawyer I want to be after spending a year taking black letter law classes. If my classmates were able to wring some meaning into what they wanted their legal careers to look like by sitting through contracts, property, civil procedure, and torts, then I must have wholly missed the point.

I wasn’t able to find out what I want my legal career to look like while reading case after case for contracts or property; I can remember perhaps one time in this past semester where a case really resonated with me when discussing the questions it brought up and the implications of the decision- Author’s Guild v. Google. But by the next day we were already moving on to estates and trusts and other topics that were important for the examination, but not for what I wanted out of law school.

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 The bottom line is that everything that I need to know about how I want my professional career to play out can’t be learned in just the law school; the multidisciplinary approach needed to work creatively isn’t something that an institution focused on job placements can provide. Not that I have problem with that model either; it would be facetious to say there’s no value in learning to work hard for long periods of time. But there’s diminishing returns past a certain point. You have to know when to stop.

So, at the end of the first year, I still don’t believe I have a proper answer to the kind of lawyer I want to be, but I am now much better equipped to tackle that question. I’ve learned how a legal career is traditionally set up, but I have also gained a grasp of other directions I can look in to create something new for my own career. I have two years to figure this out, and this is the first time I have the knowledge to properly consider the question. I have no doubt I’ll come to a satisfactory answer in that time; I have absolutely nothing more important to do. \ No newline at end of file

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This draft has a point to make, which it makes pretty well. If one doesn't know anything about being a lawyer, how could a year of learning the basics tell one enough to shape a practice? The point is real, though it doesn't take 1,000 words to make it. But the draft assumes that if this point is valid—if any speculation about a future practice is necessarily uninformed for someone in your situation—it's also unproductive.

That's the difference between knowledge tests and imagination tests. Law school—I want to say again—is a challenge of the latter kind. Using your imagination on the possible futures of your practice is important regardless of the plausibility of the outcome, let alone of the accuracy of the prediction. It doesn't matter whether you are going to wind up being a labor lawyer for musicians. What matters is thinking about which musicians presently are unionized, which aren't, and why. That leads to questions about how production is funded, about what any musician could easily have called the "gig economy" a generation before Travis Kalanick, about why banks don't make loans to musicians, and other subjects directly germane to the future you are hypothesizing. What's important isn't whether that future comes true, or whether you have drawn it in correct perspective. The important thing is learning how to imagine what you then learn how to draw.

So the best route to the improvement of this draft, I think, is to keep the point you make, make it in a quarter or a third of the draft, and spend the rest thinking about the problems that interest you as though they were going to be your practice. It doesn't matter whether you're right. It matters whether you show up for the set.

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AmmarMonawarSecondEssay 1 - 30 Apr 2018 - Main.AmmarMonawar
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I don’t think there is answer I can give that’s both honest and satisfactory to the question of what kind of lawyer I want to be. I can’t fathom how I could honestly say what kind of lawyer I want to be after spending a year taking black letter law classes. If my classmates were able to wring some meaning into what they wanted their legal careers to look like by sitting through contracts, property, civil procedure, and torts, then I must have wholly missed the point.

I wasn’t able to find out what I want my legal career to look like while reading case after case for contracts or property; I can remember perhaps one time in this past semester where a case really resonated with me when discussing the questions it brought up and the implications of the decision- Author’s Guild v. Google. But by the next day we were already moving on to estates and trusts and other topics that were important for the examination, but not for what I wanted out of law school.

All we received was exposure; the planting of these vague notions of what an area of law COULD be should we choose to pursue it. But this doesn’t translate to what a specific day in the life actually entails. There is no choice given to experience the reality of working as a lawyer; that comes later. Right now, we must learn rules and standards and various doctrines that I am nearly positive I won’t remember when I receive my license.

This may seem like a terrible system for many of my classmates, but I found this a very comforting approach personally; it seemed almost tailormade for someone like me. That is, someone who knew nothing about the law prior to taking on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to learn about it. I was unprepared to even consider the question of what kind of law I wanted to practice, and the first year showed me WHY I wasn’t prepared to give an answer.

My knowledge of law was incredibly limited coming into law school; during a meeting at work following my acceptance to Columbia, my boss jokingly referred to me as “Counselor” while assigning one of our ongoing projects. I didn’t even realize I was in charge of the project until a colleague asked for a progress update the next day. I had never met a practicing lawyer until I came to law school. I really knew absolutely nothing about the law.

Initially I came into law school hoping to be an “entertainment” lawyer- I didn’t really know what this meant, but I came to the conclusion that if I was going to law school and was interested in the music industry, that’s what I should be doing. But what did that phrase even really mean to me? It basically boiled down to the idea that I spent too much time listening and reading about music and felt I knew too little about any other field to be competitive in them. There may have been some interest in artists’ rights to their work or other aspects of producing, but very little understanding of what exactly was being done. In retrospect, it made absolutely no sense to want to go into a field without knowing what the actual day-to-day work entails.

I was told by a professor earlier this semester that if I wanted to work in an entertainment field, I should focus on copyright and employment law. He stopped to consider whether labor law would be important but decided it wouldn’t be; that would be for a field where collective bargaining is involved. But why shouldn’t the music industry involve that? Isn’t it exactly the kind of industry that we should be concerned about public bargaining? Perhaps collective bargaining could be the solution to many problems we see in the industry, it may even be especially suited for the type of workers in that field. There’s this general perception that if we are to practice law in a certain field, there’s only one way to do it. Types of lawyers shouldn’t be set into premade categories of what type of law (or even general knowledge) is applicable in the circumstance. If music has gone digital, then how that data is transmitted is crucial. And that may require knowledge of telecommunications that lies outside the law school. It may also not be helpful at all for what I want out of career, but no real thought is going to be put in to these issues if I study only along the lines of what every lawyer before me has studied.

The bottom line is that everything that I need to know about how I want my professional career to play out can’t be learned in just the law school; the multidisciplinary approach needed to work creatively isn’t something that an institution focused on job placements can provide. Not that I have problem with that model either; it would be facetious to say there’s no value in learning to work hard for long periods of time. But there’s diminishing returns past a certain point. You have to know when to stop.

So, at the end of the first year, I still don’t believe I have a proper answer to the kind of lawyer I want to be, but I am now much better equipped to tackle that question. I’ve learned how a legal career is traditionally set up, but I have also gained a grasp of other directions I can look in to create something new for my own career. I have two years to figure this out, and this is the first time I have the knowledge to properly consider the question. I have no doubt I’ll come to a satisfactory answer in that time; I have absolutely nothing more important to do.


Revision 3r3 - 22 Jun 2018 - 18:21:11 - AmmarMonawar
Revision 2r2 - 31 May 2018 - 16:20:40 - EbenMoglen
Revision 1r1 - 30 Apr 2018 - 20:50:46 - AmmarMonawar
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