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CamilaTapernouxSecondPaper 7 - 02 Sep 2012 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | Enter Eben Moglen. This semester, we received a raging heads up about where this conveyor belt we are on is headed. Would my life be simpler right now if this had not happened? Certainly. I would not be thinking twice about the implications of my first summer assignment, one that provides support for the defense of a patent held by a large pharmaceutical company. But is the resolution to these moral concerns ambiguous or difficult? Not even a little bit. I could easily write 1000 words framing this decision as one involving trade-offs and compromises, gray areas and complications, but it boils down to a very straightforward choice, and I'm not going to try and convince myself or anyone else otherwise. The primary limitation for me is the uncertainty and risk of deviating from the safe and predictable career path I am currently following. So I would also like to utilize the revision process to formulate an alternative plan, to the extent possible, or at least to become more comfortable with the idea of not having a concrete and stable ten year plan. We law students are a risk averse bunch, which is perhaps one reason the current system has worked so well for so long. But to allow such a character trait to become a liability is no better than allowing oneself to become a cog in the corporate law machine; the only difference is that the former involves being a slave to internal forces, the latter external. | |
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All right, don't let me stop you. I can't give you an alternative to
a ten-year plan, because I don't know anyone who actually has a
complex career who could give you a ten-year plan. On the one hand,
I have tenure, which enables one to have a forty-year-plan in early
life, if that's what one wants. Or you can use the base it provides,
if you're a law professor, to learn continuously and to respond
adventurously to what comes up.
Any law practice can provide the base for such an effort, because any
law practice can afford a living at whatever level it is you choose
to design it to produce. If you let the sum of money it must produce
choose the composition of the practice, you'll be sorry about all the
other compromises. But in your own practice, they're under your
control.
If you're going to bust pharma patents, you need another specialty
that pharma hostility won't interfere with. You could do
pharma-specialized consulting in med mal practice, for example. But
you could also be providing continuing legal education for pay, or
doing consulting practice, or twenty other things, for which you can
(now or later) train yourself, as you adapt your practice to ongoing
conditions.
The requirement of a ten-year plan is nonsense, for any entrepreneur.
If you plan to be someone else's bossee, you can make such a plan,
unless you lose the job. If you plan to join an army, you can make
such a plan, as long as you don't mind going where the army chooses
to put you. But if you want to do your own thinking, why not be
realistic about how the doing your own steering business really
works?
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