Law in Contemporary Society

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EldonWrightFirstPaper 5 - 27 Jul 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Trust Yourself

-- By EldonWright - 18 April 2009

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 My intuition is that the best marriage of personal life and professional practice can be achieved by representing a community you closely identify with, whether as a real estate lawyer in the hometown you love or as an environmental lawyer and avid hiker. This sort of arrangement seems like it might create meaningful opportunities for professional life to contribute to the personal, and vice versa. Even then, though, family relationships seem like they might be difficult to maintain.

-- MichaelDreibelbis - 30 Mar 2009 \ No newline at end of file

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  • Michael's point strikes me as worth more consideration than it seems to have been given in the course of your revision. The identification of your practice with "the way [you] make money," which is assumed in the first paragraph, colors the remainder of the logic. That one's practice might be a primary source of meaning in one's life, not in conflict with the rest of one's value commitments, hardly seems to depend on a theory of "otherworldly spiritual fulfillment." As I pointed out the first time around, the story would have been equally credible if the worldly positions of the grandfathers had been exchanged, and the temperaments remained the same. But your account continues to stack the deck against the lawyer grandfather. What you present as a discovery of equality continues to hold inside it a second persona's (no doubt emotionally justified) bias against a hurtful, emotionally crippled presence.

  • But if you can see the piece as it might have been on the other side of letting go, it would have fallen naturally into being about how the supposed dichotomy of money and meaning keeps people from looking for, and finding, ways to make money doing what they believe is not only meaningful to them, but to those around them whom they value and respect. The false dichotomy between money and meaning releases this "lawyer" we are becoming from the requirement to solve both the problem of doing good and the problem of doing well. Whether from the perspective of the "hired hand," or of the "respectable" professional man exclusively concerned with the welfare of his old father in the Vale of Taunton and his three daughters at home, the lawyer succeeds in numbing the pain of some truth or another—either that he has neglected his commitment to his loved ones or that she has elided her commitment to the attainment of justice—by dissociation, by splitting aspects and personalities from one another, in a damaging way.

  • The dissociation and its consequences hover round your essay, perhaps as a consequence of the psychic distress in which your grandfather found himself. But not acknowledged, which I think is the beginning of seeing with sufficient clarity to transcend. That, in my opinion, is how to begin to lift your "plague of disenchantment."
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Revision 5r5 - 27 Jul 2009 - 23:40:41 - EbenMoglen
Revision 4r4 - 19 Apr 2009 - 00:32:23 - EldonWright
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