Good Start

"There is never a deed so foul that something couldn't be said for the guy; that's why there are lawyers." —Melvin Belli

For Christmas my mother bought me a "Lawyers Jokes Quotes and Anecdotes 2004 Calendar," from which I took the above quotation. Excerpts from the calendar may become a regular feature. We'll see.

But this quote is appropriate for the moment, since I've been thinking a bit about what it would be like to be a criminal defense attorney. Another Christmas gift (I had an incredible Christmas), this one from L, was How Can You Defend Those People? by James S. Kunen. The book details his experience as a public defender in DC for 2.5 years in the late 1970s. So far, it's quite compelling and makes me think I'd fit as a PD better than I would in many other types of practice. One thing I certainly seem to have in common with Kunen is a lack of respect for law school. Here's how Kunen describes it:

School is school. You sit in chairs that are attached to the floor. You write down what the teacher says (or borrow the notes of someone who did). When the time comes, you memorize it and spit it back out. . . . Law school is not, contrary to the mystification heaped around it by people who have done time there, difficult. Boring would be a better word, but not tremendously or profoundly boring, just boring in the ordinary, everyday sense, which leaves room for the occasional peak of interest by which the valleys of torpor are defined (25).

I'm not sure about the boring part. It's hard to nail down what it is I feel sitting in class with a hundred students, watching the time tick by and knowing that there's absolutely no way we're going to talk about more than one (if even that) of the interesting questions I thought were raised by the previous night's reading. It's boring, but it's also frustrating, disappointing, discouraging, even aggravating because it seems destined to end up doing a disservice to society by producing lawyers who think well in terms of the formal and technical aspects of law, but not necessarily so well in terms of people and reality. Kunen has something to say about that as well, noting that the reading in law school covers every kind of human behavior, but does so in a horribly detached way:

No one seems to suffer in all these tales of woe, the pain having disappeared with the people who felt it. One gets the impression that human life is like nothing so much as an unending Saturday morning cartoon—woops! pow! oof! (26)

I'll get you, you wascally wabbit!

But really, the failures of law school and the law are almost infinite. One of my goals for this semester is to watch for the brighter moments and make the most of them, and after the first two days of class, I remain very hopeful that ConLaw will provide plenty of bright spots. It certainly started off well. Here's how ProfConLaw introduced the course:

The guardians of our liberties are lawyers. There's always been some kind of crisis (right now it's terrorism) and liberties are placed under pressure. The reason liberties withstand this pressure is because of lawyers. Learning constitutional law is almost a duty, an obligation you take up when you become a lawyer.

It's an obligation I'm glad to take up. Can you think of a better epitaph than "Guardian of Liberty"? Yeah, probably, but you could do worse.

Outside the mystified halls of law school, tonight is 2004's first Meetup for Dean, and as Jim Moore says, if you haven't done it already, there's no better time to pick a campaign and get involved. If you don't, the choice will be made for you, and why would you want that?

Also, don't miss the 15 final contenders in the Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest. They're all very impressive and I can't wait to see any one of them on national tv, but my favorites are probably "In My Country," "Polygraph," and "Gone in 30 Seconds." And, of course, the absolute minimalist, Mac-loving best: "Desktop"! (All links are to "high bandwidth" versions; lower bandwidth versions are available at the Bush in 30 Seconds page.)

Posted January 7, 2004 06:52 AM | election 2004 law school