| | |
|
ChangingSocietyUsingWordsTalk 16 - 06 Apr 2009 - Main.KeithEdelman
|
| | Prompt: (1) In terms of effecting social change with words, what can lawyers accomplish that novelists or journalists cannot? (2) If lawyers possess a unique ability to effect social change, does it stem from their knowledge of, and proximity to, power structures?
Authors and journalists effected grand-scale change by laying the groundwork for many prominent social reforms and by successfully shaping American public opinion | | |
Little law – the professional tasks we tackle as lawyers – and language-law – affecting change in society with words – both operate in the same medium: language. To separate the two is impossible. Thus the initial fascination with Joseph’s book: it contains something very close to the real language lawyers speak in. What is most obviously troubling about some of the characters we see depicted in Lawyerland (here I think of the lawyers at the end of “Something Split”) isn’t what they do for a living, of which we learn little, but how their own speech reveals who they are (abusive, callous, obsessed with money) and how we realize that must shape their professional lives, or, alternatively, how their professional lives have shaped who they are, i.e. how they speak. | |
<
< | Especially as our time-commitments to the profession of the law increase, it seems natural to want to transform life into the law and everything else. Thus, the characteristics of law limned in this thread: lawyering is what we do with law in connection to our licenses, lawyering is an activity that is more intimate with society’s intricacies, lawyering is more legitimate, more in the public eye. Some of these statements may be true of little-law. But these separations, I fear, only alienate us from our ultimate powers and responsibilities. Law becomes a very narrowly defined idea, and we begin to ignore multiple opportunities to define ourselves as verbal actors; we limit ourselves to the little law’s reduced vision of change ("splitting hairs"). Our capacity to affect the world through language should not be confined to what the profession of lawyering presents, popularizes, legitimizes. | >
> | Especially as our time-commitments to the profession of the law increase, it seems natural to want to transform life into the law and everything else. Thus, the characteristics of law lined in this thread: lawyering is what we do with law in connection to our licenses, lawyering is an activity that is more intimate with society’s intricacies, lawyering is more legitimate, more in the public eye. Some of these statements may be true of little-law. But these separations, I fear, only alienate us from our ultimate powers and responsibilities. Law becomes a very narrowly defined idea, and we begin to ignore multiple opportunities to define ourselves as verbal actors; we limit ourselves to the little law’s reduced vision of change ("splitting hairs"). Our capacity to affect the world through language should not be confined to what the profession of lawyering presents, popularizes, legitimizes. | | | -- ScottThurman - 31 Mar 2009 | |
>
> | I agree, Scott, that narrowly defining "lawyering" will only hinder us and limit the tools that we think are appropriate. Like Eben and others have said, a good lawyer should know a little about everything, from body language to social psychology. Trying to constrain a lawyer's role into a descriptive box reminds me of one of our first realizations: things are not what they are called, but what they do.
Lawyers can and probably should use everything to help their client. Perhaps the focus should instead be on what lawyers do, i.e. what social changes we can achieve.
-- KeithEdelman - 06 Apr 2009
|
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |