Law in Contemporary Society

Professor Eben Moglen
Columbia Law School, Spring 2009

As of July 1, many people are still writing or revising third papers. Unfortunately, the system is applying pressure for the release of grades. These grades, as I have mentioned before, are actually just meat grades: you are supposed to be labeled "choice" or "prime," right now. Aside from all the usual stupidities with grades (see EvaluationPolicy), putting a meat-quality stamp on you is not only undignified this year, it's absurd, because the carnivores in the system are at present toothless. Although the law school is insisting on going ahead with the disgusting theater of humiliation that is the Early Interview Program (and which I again remind you that none of you should attend as a mere mental health matter), the parties who usually benefit from their swaggering and preening opportunities are functionally if not financially bankrupt: they will have no real jobs to offer in the end, in return for their condescension and unwarrantable interference in the education you are trying to get.

So the current attempt to work the usual substitution of meat grades for real mentoring is particularly threadbare. But just because the world is different doesn't mean law school will change. As you will have seen, I am actively editing papers and providing comments. Now I will stop doing useful work in order to guess what your meat grade ought to be. Thursday, 2 July, I will submit provisional grades.

These grades can and will change. My own editorial process will probably make some modifications in ranking necessary: at the margins, that may change a grade. Revisions you are doing on your own work will undoubtedly produce changes in some cases to the "effort, commitment, improvement" ratings of your work overall. So provisional grades are, well, provisional.

In order to prevent the psychic distress of having a provisional grade lowered, the grades initially submitted will be conservative, leaving room for adjustment during either my editorial process or yours.

Our wiki embodies the principle of continuous revision, as our course does. I will be finished commenting on all present work by the end of next week, and the provisional grades will be updated when I am done. Students who continue to revise their work will receive updated evaluations, which may also necessitate grade changes.

Meat grades had apparent importance in relation to an employment system that was bad for young lawyers. That system is now suffering the initial infarction that will over the next five years lead to a well-deserved death. Please don't spend too much time over the next weeks worrying about your meat grades. Your job is getting an education that will prepare you to succeed in the new professional organization of law practice, where expertise is sold instead of time. What you need is mentoring, not meat grading. Take no substitute and keep your eyes on the prize, which is freedom.

Be well. See you soon.

I have open office hours Tuesdays and Thursdays 11am-1pm and Fridays 9am-10am. If you need to see me outside those hours, please email moglen@columbia.edu for an appointment, or consult my assistant, Ian Sullivan, at 212-461-1905.

In addition to web-based materials, we will be discussing Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), available in numerous cheap editions. If you prefer reading that too on-line, you can have the entire text at your fingertips here. (We still have some remnants of a public domain).

A Word on Technology Old and New About the Word

This course is centered in the experience of classroom dialog. Everything we read and write will be intended to help us understand better what we learn from listening to one another. I say "listening," because in a conversation with so many voices, we're all going to be listening much more than we are talking. So this is an extended exercise in active listening.

It turns out that wiki is a very good medium for active listeners. Below you will find an introduction to this particular wiki, or TWiki, where you can learn as much or as little about how this technology works as you want.

For now, the most important thing is just that any page of the wiki has an edit button, and your work in the course consists of writings that we will collaboratively produce here. You can make new pages, edit existing pages, attach files to any page, add links, leave comments in the comment boxes--whatever in your opinion adds to a richer dialog. During the semester I will assign writing exercises, which will also be posted here. All of everyone's work contributes to a larger and more informative whole, which is what our conversation is informed by, and helps us to understand.

Please begin by registering. I look forward to seeing you at our first meeting on the 12th.

Introduction to the LawContempSoc Web

The LawContempSoc site is a collaborative class space built on Twiki [twiki.org], a free software wiki system. If this is your first time using a wiki for a long term project, or first time using a wiki at all, you might want to take a minute and look around this site. If you see something on the page that you don't know how to create in a wiki, take a look at the text that produced it using the "Edit" button at the top of each page, and feel free to try anything out in the Sandbox.

All of the Twiki documentation is also right at hand. Follow the TWiki link in the sidebar. There are a number of good tutorials and helpful FAQs there explaining the basics of what a wiki does, how to use Twiki, and how to format text.

From TWiki's point of view, this course, Law in Contemporary Society, is one "web." There are other webs here: the sandbox for trying wiki experiments, for example, and my other courses, etc. You're welcome to look around in those webs too, of course. Below are some useful tools for dealing with this particular web of ours. You can see the list of recent changes, and you can arrange to be notified of changes, either by email or by RSS feed. I would strongly recommend that you sign up for one or another form of notification; if not, it is your responsibility to keep abreast of the changes yourself.

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r79 - 01 Jul 2009 - 14:21:22 - EbenMoglen

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