It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

I was born to be a lawyer

-- By JonathanCoaxum - 4 Jun 2024

What I believe

I believe that I was born to be a lawyer. It feels like it is something that I have always been destined to become. It was the thing I wanted to do when my friends wanted to be the first person on mars, president of the United States, or professional athletes. None of them have accomplished those dreams and most have fallen into the rat race and will push paper for the next forty years . To me, being a lawyer is not just an aspiration because it means success to others but because it means success to me. In the same way Max Weber talks about living a life of politics, I want to live a life of law. I view being a lawyer as a vocation rather than a job.

How I want to practice

My practice will be in Washington D.C. with travel whenever necessary to meet with clients and try cases. I choose DC because it is a city where relationships mean everything and information freely flows. From my own experience, it is a town where everyone loves to talk and rub elbows with those they deem important. Being a great listener in a place like that can make me a powerful and great lawyer. Another benefit is that many esteemed lawyers pass through which presents the opportunity to connect and build the relationships I need to accomplish the goals of my practice.

I will provide services in matters of civil rights, liberties, and racial justice. It will be a practice that protects marginalized people and ensures accountability for the harms that are done against them by both public and private entities. My goal is to continue the unfinished work of Reconstruction and fight for a society that truly equally protects everyone with privileges that are enjoyed by all. There is a rolling back of protections of some of our most fundamental rights and it needs to be fought against every step of the way. I want a practice that takes the strategic and incremental steps to have successful impact litigation. The current political climate and composition of the highest courts requires a well-thought out method to slowly reverse the current conservative trend that is curbing the political participation of some of the most vulnerable and underserved members of our society. I will use the methods of John Roberts to beat him at his own game, using a case to crack open the door for a dramatic legal change and then a subsequent case to blow the door open.

To have a successful practice, I need to work with people that are smarter than me from a diverse set of legal backgrounds. I need someone from a prosecutor’s office, a defender, a government (ideally DOJ) attorney, and finally I will bring my experience and resources from big law. It is important to work with people that have strong ties with people that can provide financial resources for the practice to help with operational costs. These connections can also help with finding clients for our impact cases by leveraging relationships built with minority communities through our previous work. By having a team with a diverse set of experiences, they will have perspectives on cases and issues that may supplement possible blind spots of mine and ensure the best possible arguments are being made which will give our position the highest chance of success.

My practice will need to earn a reasonable amount of money to ensure the retention of the best minds from the previously described fields and have access to all of the necessary intellectual resources to do the work. By having a lean team and collaborating with other attorneys working pro-bono, I can substantially cut-down on operational costs. To cover the necessary expenses, we would take on tort claims against public and private entities for various forms of discrimination and injury. In many of these cases the defendants will settle and we will be able to recover attorneys fees, which can go towards cases of constitutional matters that will not ensure a payout.

I want my legacy to be the man that got qualified immunity struck down. I view it as one of the greatest barriers to justice in our time. It blocks any true form of accountability for the most egregious infringements on basic human rights and autonomy. This judge-made law does not have any true legal grounding in our country and protects bad-faith actors in law enforcement which only perpetuates the issue of police brutality and results in the loss of life for countless innocent people. If you believe in the basic premise of American tort law, then you can see that qualified immunity does not comport with the aims of justice and equality in our society. My practice will meet my needs as a lawyer because it will enable me to accomplish my goal of fighting the injustice I see in the world. I have learned that my disdain for injustice is more powerful than a love for justice. This is especially true when that “justice” often comes at the expense of my community and often leads to their further oppression.

Only my fear is standing in the way of me making this practice real, which is no small thing to overcome. I must learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable and taking big risks. I hate that I learned to be so fearful and feel like I can lose everything in a single moment. I hate that I let small things such as grades and what other people say I can and cannot do have so much power over me. To realize my vision, I need to learn to be bold and be confident in the lawyer that I can be and learn to be less afraid. I know that this is not something that will happen overnight. This is going to take the rest of law school and maybe even longer to make it happen but I am willing to dedicate myself to this task.

---

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:

• #Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, JonathanCoaxum
• #Set DENYTOPICVIEW = TWikiGuest

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list.