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Law in Contemporary Society
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Who Cares About The Law Anyway?-- By JabariMatthew - 26 Feb 2021Introduction: My Journey to LawWhen I was three years old, I began learning ballet dance at Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York City. As such, I regularly classify that age as the one in which I began my long journey of figuring out how to best empower both myself and others through different forms of expression. I began to discern what societal issues truly bothered me in the world and sought to expose them. I did ballet regularly from three to 18 years old, and throughout that time, used it to tell a multitude of stories concerning my experience as a Black male from the Bronx, as well as the stories of others as it relates to societal inequities. In college, I majored in Theatre to circumvent the heightened risk of ambiguity inherent in dance when attempting to tell important stories. Through theatre, I similarly told stories regarding issues of mass incarceration, economic inequality, and police brutality. A particularly noteworthy event during that time was when I performed in the play, Detroit ’67, by Dominique Morisseau, which concerned the 1967 Detroit Riots. Days after seeing a performance of the play, I spoke with an audience member who told me that she would think about the issues brought up in Detroit ’67 regularly. I remember having two thoughts about what she said: One, there is a great opportunity through performance art to inspire thought, provoke conversation, and raise awareness; and two, I hope you are doing more than thinking. I hope you are also taking action to change society. In short, these moments leading up to these thoughts are part of the reasons why I came to law school. I wanted to be able to inspire change and also have the tools to help both myself and others effectuate change.The Problem: Do People Care About The Law and How Do We Make Them Care More?When Carl Wylie stated in Lawyerland, “I really don’t care what the law is” I was struck by his blatant dismissal of a discipline I view as very much about people, for people, and affecting people. If lawyers do not care, why should a non-lawyer? Throughout the monotony of extracting blackletter law from cases, I have found it easy to forget that underneath every case is a story, and underneath every story are people. I want to always care about the law, but more importantly, I want people who are non-lawyers to care about the law. The issue I seek to tackle then is figuring out how we effectively create that genuine care.The Solution: Recognize the Strength Between Creative Expression and LawWhile this is by no means the only way, I posit that creating that care requires truly recognizing and strengthening that link between two worlds filled with people too often classified as belonging to opposite sides of the spectrum – Type A risk averse lawyers, and Type B creative artists.People Come FirstIf I argue that the law is about people, then that must mean that people should come first. Art and creative expression are some of the most powerful forms of doing just that. Bryson Stevenson of EJI has stated that artists have a way of expressing truths about the human condition in a compelling and influential way. In his commitment to visual truth telling, he utilizes a memorial recognizing the history of lynching in tandem with his efforts to better the criminal justice system. Similarly, a project at Bedford Hills empowered inmates to tell their stories and obtain ownership over their identities through the opportunity to both write about themselves and their experience with the criminal justice system, and then to have their writing performed in front of an audience by an actor. Such empowerment is not only one that I have experienced myself through creative expression (though obviously under very different circumstances). It is the kind of empowerment that should be actively sought after and utilized in law to get people interested in the experiences of others in the legal system. It is also the kind of empowerment that should be used to get people interested in engaging with the legal system in the first place, because they will at least know that they have a voice that will be heard.Black Lives Matter is Cool and People Are FickleBlack Lives Matter became effectively became “cool” to say in 2020. I must admit that even I was mildly shocked by the amount of people and companies unapologetically stating Black Lives Matter. My shock was rooted not simply in my self-preserving tendency to expect a certain degree of a lack of genuine care for the death of Black bodies. It was also rooted in the fact that I was confused as to why now? Black bodies have died as the hands of police officers for generations, and there has been plenty of footage and/or images depicting recent police murders of Black bodies, including that of Philando Castille, Alton Sterling, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner. I consistently heard that there was something different about the death of George Floyd. To see the image of a Black man being choked to death by a knee on his neck for approximately ten minutes was a different way in which to see police brutality for a large segment of America. The only deduction I have been able to make from the response to George Floyd’s death is that people are fickle and in order to stay engaged, perhaps they have to see old things in a new way to feel as if they are re-experiencing something for the first time again. It is a human condition that I find relatively unfortunate, particular in this circumstance where such brutal acts of murder have been happening in many ways for decades. Nevertheless, I was reminded of the power of media and the great potential for creative expression to depict these stories in novel ways in order to inspire genuine concern for the laws that allow such lack of police accountability, and particularly, to inspire this concern without death.Resulting QuestionA resulting question is exactly how these two disciplines can be most effectively used in tandem. That is something I am still piecing together, and I intend to devote much of my career to that. Above all, law must be accessible, empowering, and rooted in people.I think this draft served very well the purpose of a first draft, to get ideas onto the page, so they can be refined there. What the next draft needs in order to become better is a focus on conveying the central idea to the reader. I'm not sure how to state the central idea. It may be what is presently the "resulting question." Or it might be something about the role of drama in getting people to grapple with the most important moral issues in their society (which certainly has a long history, stretching to the ancient Mediterranean, at least). But whatever the idea is, you need to give it to the reader at the front. You don't need the autobiography to state the idea, though you may well want to keep at least the essence of it in close relation to the concept you're trying to get across to the reader. Personalizing an idea is one method of teaching that can work, but turning ideas into personality is not effective for our purposes. Once you have stated your idea to the reader, explaining how you came by it is important, and you do it in the present draft effectively, though probably using too much of the space you have for everything else. Because you also want to meet the reader where she is, anticipating the questions that will matter most to someone coming to your idea for the first time. Then you can offer a conclusion that is less a question for you and more a question for the reader, who can take your idea further in some directions you suggest, on his own. You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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