The Kind of Lawyer I Want To Want To Be

With this in mind, I am no longer confident in my previous plans—I am not sure that I will be happy pursuing a career in sports or entertainment law while real problems exist in society. In my view, to do so would render me a “sellout” to a certain extent; I would be operating within an unjust society to pursue my own economic, social, and material goals at the expense of making an important difference in the world. Rather, I believe my future happiness will stem from becoming a lawyer who is not afraid to question society, challenge the status quo, and start a revolution. But this new awareness has presented me with a number of concerns that I will have to overcome before I am able to commit to a career of effectuating change.

First, I do not know if such a career will provide me with enough money to be comfortable. While I realize that money does not buy complete happiness, I know that I will not be happy unless I acquire the wealth that I need to live my life as I have always envisioned it. This isn’t an exorbitant number, but it is significant enough to make me question whether I will be able to achieve it on my own. I know I could earn a great salary playing the corporate game, and I only hope to be able to earn that amount pursuing a career I am passionate about.

Moreover, I have realized that attempting to change the world will put me in danger. I am talking about being a lawyer who brings about justice by challenging dominant power structures to spark revolutions. My goal will be to uproot broken systems that support countless individuals who do not even understand the systems they are a part of. Average citizens will regard me as “the enemy” for challenging their potential sources of income, ideals, or insecurities and will want to do away with me in order to sustain the status quo. Leaders of these unjust organizations, ideas, and practices, will do whatever they must to remain in power. I will be as dangerous to myself as I will be to society.

I am considering trading a career of glitz and glamour for one as an outcast. While this is a bit unsettling, I would be willing to make this trade if it is for something I am truly passionate about. But I am not sure what I care about just yet. I am in a state of limbo. I will spend my remaining time in law school searching for the right opportunity, figuring out what I truly care about, and learning the skills to eventually make a difference in the world. In the end, it may be that what I care about most isn’t a particular problem in society, but rather the people around me. I wonder if I might be satisfied effectuating change for the people I most care about, rather than for society as a whole. This might be the only thing that I would risk my life for.

I think this rewrite improves the clarity and force of the statement, at the expense of realism. You're not actually considering life as an outcast, Elie. Nor should you. You're asking how you can add an acute sense of social outcomes, maybe even a commitment to social justice, to the work of supporting yourself in the style to which you want to become accustomed.

Your current draft says, basically, that if a world-moving passion showed up, you'd follow it anywhere. But that's not the temperament you consider yourself to have. Anyone could say that the world is well lost for love, and that in response to a Grand Passion they'd abandon it all for life on the beach with the object of their adoration. But in general the world adopts satisficing monogamy and finds itself living, Babbit-like, with gentle but ultimate disillusion.

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In theory, I am okay with all of this. For something I truly care about, I would be willing to put myself in harm’s way. But, I am not sure if I care about something that much yet. For the time being, I am in a state of limbo. I want to want to make a difference in the world, but it is hard to commit to doing so at the moment. While it makes me uncomfortable, I know that it’s alright to feel that way. I have at least two years before I have to commit to my first step, and will spend that time figuring out what I truly care about and learning the skills to eventually make a difference. If I don’t find such a thing, I know that I at least care about the people around me. In that case, perhaps starting my own practice and working for people I care about in order to make their lives easier would satisfy me.

How to Change the World

Systems in Society

Why Don't Changes Occur Often?

Changes don't occur often because change is constant. Your question would benefit from refinement. I think you are asking "Why Do the Powerful Win Almost All the Time When They Struggle with the Weak?" But perhaps that was not the question you meant to ask.

Or was this not the system a little while ago? Perhaps the internship is a relatively recent development in the labor market? Perhaps the women with high school educations who used to be the poorly-paid literate administrative workers of the business world are being replaced, because of technology-driven change, with a much smaller number of tertiary degree-holders working in unpaid apprenticeships? Perhaps the right-wing economist is correct that people are presently paid zero who would be paid below minimum wage if we had no minimum wage laws, or had "youth wage" exemptions? Perhaps the left-wing political economist is correct who says that whether we call it apprenticeship, slavery, child labor, or internship, whether we pay it wages or withhold them altogether, is a detail of the underlying truth of exploitation, which is universal and remorseless, and which can only be slain and replaced, but which cannot be reasoned with or restrained? Could you be realizing by now the cumulatively negative effect of piling up rhetorical questions?

My Background

Before coming to law school, I was part of a system like this. Throughout college, I worked as an unpaid intern at a prominent sports agency, with the goal of working my way up within the organization. For a long time I was naïve. I did not realize that I was being taken advantage of and I was happy to operate within the system because I enjoyed the prominence and the perks of what I was doing. But when I finally figured it out, my attitude didn’t really change. I understood that I was part of a system and that there was nothing I could do to change things. All that I could do was threaten to quit if they did not start paying me. Knowing the departmental budget as I did, I knew that the company would rather hire another intern than pay me to be a full time employee. So when I was ready to leave, I presented an ultimatum to the head of the department: hire me full time or I have to quit. As I expected, he passed on the opportunity. As much as I had become a part of their business, there were a hundred people in line ready to replace me. But what if there weren’t?

Then you would be a temporarily advantaged worker, with a market anomaly working in your favor.

What Can be Done?

There is a way to change this system. For instance, if someone could unify all the college and graduate students of the world to go on strike against unpaid internships, the practice would end one way or another. Either organizations would begin to pay their interns for their work, or they would realize that they didn’t need their services and would adjust their business models. Then schools would not be able to force their students into unpaid internships. To most readers, this might seem like a completely ridiculous idea. But why?

The best way to develop an idea is not to argue in its favor against someone who dismisses it as completely ridiculous. Such a conversation is unlikely to bring out the best in any participant. The way to develop an idea is to respond to an imagined interlocutor who shows the places where the idea is undeveloped.

Here, for example, an economist interlocutor will object that your economic model of the employment market is too simple to account well for the consequences of imaginary collective bargaining by interns. He would suggest you model, for example, the possible effect in moving those jobs inside the vast business outsourcing world that used to be "temp agencies." They want to take over all forms of office-park apprenticeship. Many companies that had to compete with very worker-positive job terms in order to get skilled workers in a labor-constrained market, like Microsoft, responded by outsourcing every other possible job in the organization, so that their very costly employment policies affected only the high-value non-managerial employees.

The strategist will object that you are postulating an enormous organizing effort among workers who are for many reasons traditionally very difficult to organize. No one knows how plausibly to perform that effort, even with far more than anyone's best guess as to available resources. Having assumed into existence an immensely complex and far-flung organizing effort, you are then using it to demand as an objective that workers be paid. This is not a plausibly sufficient demand. Paid how? The whole point of the employer's effort is to deny these workers the status of employee. They will acquire protection under the Fair Labor Standards Act. They cannot possibly be managerial employees exempt from overtime pay requirements. If they are full-time workers, they are entitled to minimum benefits, including employer contributions to Social Security and Medicare. If performing work in represented bargaining units, they are within the scope of collective bargaining agreements. Of course the employer would not have created those jobs under those terms. No employer ever voluntarily will.

But your actual original complaint had less to do with the wage, which apparently you were willing to do without, than the security of employment that you weren't ever going to have. You wanted the right to be considered for promotion on the basis of seniority. A union contract might have given that to you if you came within its terms.

Is it because people don’t care about this particular “problem”? Perhaps it does not have enough support to stage a revolution. Is it because, practically, this is an admittedly bad plan and would never work because it would be impossible to rally an entire nation of interns? Maybe. Is it because there is no better plan that can be devised? Possibly, but I would imagine that a creative lawyer could figure out a way to take on the system by going after certain companies for unfair employment practices. Are they afraid to upset established power structures? Probably. Or is it simply that people see value in existing within a given system rather than challenging it?

The Lawyer I Want to Be

I know that I want to be a lawyer who is not afraid to challenge the dominant system and start a revolution. But at the same time, I am unsure of its practical effects. A revolution cannot be started on a whim. It obviously has to be readily thought out and executed, accounting for every contingency, with every move planned out five steps in advance. Realistically, radical change is probably not feasible in a majority of circumstances. There will always be dominant power structures holding systems in place, and some will be harder to bring down than others. Additionally, it might not always be necessary to provoke and completely overhaul a system. If a goal can be accomplished within a system, there may be no need to uproot it just for the sake of doing so. But if my objectives are directly at odds with a system, or a cause presents itself that I am truly passionate about, I want to be able to change things. I want to be okay with the proposition of upsetting the power and to know how to do it without getting crushed. This will take a great deal of strategy and even more courage. I need to focus my law school learning on acquiring the skills and strategies to be able to operate both when revolution is necessary and when it is not, and to know when it is appropriate to employ either tactic.

To me, this is what it takes to change the world.

-- ElieT - 25 Feb 2013

As I've noted, the process of developing your idea was cut short by the form in which you interrogated it. Taken a little farther, by asking not whether the idea is ridiculous but rather where it is underdeveloped, we can see other possibilities. It seems clear, for example, that a union workplace would not tolerate unpaid internships preventing the formation of real entry-level jobs. The aggregate level of employment isn't necessarily going to be higher—though critics will no doubt accuse the union of multiplying workers to multiply dues—but the quality of the jobs will be a union priority. So why would one try to organize a far-flung, transient, young, low-leverage workforce with only a sprinkling of workers seasonally present in any business, instead of organizing the business' workers, who are geographically compact, and have preexisting networks of social engagement through common employment, residence, etc.?

If one realized, then, that the rise of the internship structure of white-collar unpaid apprenticeship grew up in the de-unionizing US of the Reagan Era, might one become a labor lawyer?