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CourtneyDoakFirstPaper 3 - 22 Apr 2012 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | And so perhaps the key to improving our legal system so that it is synonymous with justice, so that it truly does reflect my childhood conception of it, is for lawyers and judges to speak and write as if informing a child, as my attorney did for me so many years ago. After all, children do not revere meaningless legal principles – children seek functional answers. Their inquiries are outcome-based. A shift to this outcome-oriented functionalism in conjunction with a disregard for hollow, amoral legal principles is the only way I can see to bring my childhood perception of the law into accord with reality. A transformation of this type will make room for ethical appraisal of our legal system, and in turn, perhaps someday it will be guided by human values and conceptions of morality. Only then will our legal system actually be worthy of my childhood reverence for it. | |
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> | A strong and very compelling draft. Well done. | | | | |
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> | It seems to me that the most interesting direction in which to go
would be to consider what besides functionalism contributed to the
experience of the law which you urge with such strong emotional
conviction we should return to.
Your lawyer seems to have done an ideal job in communicating with
you, as well as in the proceedings, but she was fortunate in having
an unambiguous case. "The best interests of the children" had been
clearly expressed, and the confirmation of the rightness of your
express wishes was compellingly visible in the record of your
parents' parenting.
A legal system can explain as to a child what it is doing in such a
situation. But the complexities of human affairs are sometimes
greater, cases are harder, and the simplicity with which such a
standard can be implemented in a situation such as yours eludes the
wisest and most lucid of us at such times. How your ideas bear on
the full range of legal experience will have to be different than
their consequences in relation to your epiphany. Which by no means
implies that what you call cynicism is any more completely sufficient
than the child's clarity of emotional vision. | | | | |
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