The Pursuit of Wealth and the Justice System

Introduction

“Most lawyers are like most everyone else – they don’t take the trouble to learn anything other than what puts money into their pockets.” – Tharaud in Cerriere’s Response

This is a damning condemnation of society in general, but especially of those who are entrusted with the pursuit of justice. Most lawyers enter the profession saying they want to help people or make a difference, and they are counted upon to do so. However, the majority end up working for firms where their only concern is to win whatever case is put before them regardless of the social costs of winning that case or the opportunity costs of not taking on others. Individual goals and notions of serving the common good are exchanged for making money for the firm and enjoying a share of the profits. How do lawyers find themselves in this position? The answer seems to be that this is what successful people do. It’s hardly a stretch to say that those who become lawyers have an interest in being “successful.” It is a career that requires a large initial investment of time and money, and which ultimately rewards its professionals with status, prestige, and affluence. But is there any reason to believe that the actions which the profit motive incentivizes necessarily coincide with those that further justice or benefit society? If not, then these successful lawyers may be viewed as part of a thriving commercial enterprise, but neither they nor their prestigious films should not be mistaken for symbols of a successful justice system.

The Draw of the Big Law Firm

The Columbia law student on the eve of EIP will most likely decide to participate despite the fact that the employment opportunities available there bear no resemblance to the goals and aspirations in their personal statement. One factor influencing this decision is the mere fact that this is what most people do. While this is hardly a solid reason for any course of action, this is familiar motivation for students at a prestigious law school. After all, you don’t make it to a top 5 school without being an expert in doing what you’re supposed to do and doing it well. These are the kids who followed directions and colored inside the lines: the kids who led the way, but only down the well-trodden paths of student government and debate teams. If the possibility of going against the grain enters the mind at all, it’s far too unsettling to sustain.

Also influential is the glittering promise of an impressive career. All those years of straight As and extracurriculars and community service will finally be rewarded with a hefty salary and business cards your parents can be proud of. When your designer heels step out of your porche and click down the marble hallway of the firm, you’ll feel important, successful, and satisfied.

Then there is the fear. Casting the widest net of all and scooping up even the most devoted would-be environmental or human rights lawyers. The massive debt of law school drives so many of us straight through the firm’s door with that common explanation “I’ll work for a firm for a few years to pay off my loans and then do what I really want to do.” The problem, of course, is that sometime before that 3rd year the golden handcuffs are silently slipped on your wrists and sure they’re a bit snug, but they look good and besides, you’re used to them now. It’s time to leave but do you remember what you really wanted to do, and if so, do you still care? Or has that firm job, which was meant to provide a means of paying back loans and a means of earning a comfortable living, replaced the ultimate end of helping people or making a difference and become the end in and of itself?

Consequences and Alternatives

Herein lies the problem when a lawyer takes a firm job in order to pay back loans, or because it’s what successful people do, or because it’s what most people do. A career at a standard big firm is good for all these things, but it will not save the environment or your civil liberties. A firm will not deploy its army of lawyers to fight for any cause that isn’t overtly profitable, and if this is how the brightest minds and greatest legal resources are used, there are serious consequences for the justice system. As a result of this phenomenon, one of the most important and potentially influential professions is stripped of its best players and power to do good. The pursuit of justice becomes an afterthought or a side project, completely eclipsed by the career at the firm, or burnout and exodus from the profession altogether. The lawyer who went to law school in order to help people or make a difference is instead looking at the career as a comfortable living or a prestigious job title and nothing else. Such a result is perfectly acceptable for those with MBAs, but a JD cannot be for this.

To be a lawyer is to take on a responsibility and along with that diploma comes a duty. You join the ranks of those trusted by the public to ensure that the truth is sifted out from somewhere between two sides of an argument and that justice is done. This is justice for all, and for all equally, regardless of power or wealth. Lawyers must find a way to solve the problems that need solving not just those that fill out the payroll. Justice is a common good in the same way that police is a public service, and any other concerns must be secondary. For lawyers, the pursuit of wealth can be a means to that end, or it can be an additional end, but it cannot be the only end.

The Cost of the Pursuit of Wealth for the Lawyer and the Justice System

The Pursuit of Wealth

• The so-called "Easterlin paradox," that improvement in material conditions does not produce additional happiness, is under current attack by behavioral economists who assert that the evidence adduced in its support has been defective. Veblen, of course, would say that it's a trivially-true outcome of the importance of relative rather than absolute pecuniary strength.

• Japanese executives weren't undertaking overwork in order to make more money. American job stress results in large measure from the difficulties of the two-earner household--which is only in part a result of a desire for higher living standards, being also about the liberation of women from uncompensated household and sexual labor--and the savagery of the American employment system, which is more savage at lower levels of compensation. You're just throwing the kitchen sink at your argument, not sifting your evidence carefully.

• How could you possibly consider it a sufficient citation to deTocqueville to link an uncredited video on the net that claims to quote from it? Did you bother to go and look, or were you too daunted by the idea of searching through a classic book you haven't read for an idea you weren't sure was there but which someone who put a TV-clip at Google told you existed? You might want to look at volume 2, chapter 19, where deTocqueville's actual argument (which is not what Alain de Botton thinks it is) appears.

Unlike their counterparts in Britain who accepted the level they were born into, Americans were meant to be equals in terms of rights and opportunities, and therefore any disparities in wealth led to feelings of stress and envy if anyone else should have more. As a result of this phenomenon, those who can afford what others cannot enjoy a higher social status, but one that is based on envy rather than the respect or admiration people actually desire.

• This is Alain de Botton's completely absurd (and characteristically politically wrong-headed) bullshit, not de Tocqueville's; he is far too careful an observer not to be aware of class antagonism in English society.

To equate these ends of envy, prestige, and affluence with success is to misunderstand what is of value to people and the conditions of their self-worth. The result of this is waking up one day in a “what-is-life-really-about” stupor and wondering why, if you’ve succeeded at the task, don’t you feel successful? This does serious damage to the individual’s self-worth, which presumably motivated the desire to succeed in the first place.

• I think you have fooled yourself into believing that this sequence formed an argument; you won't fool the reader so easily. You have said that some people may deceive themselves into seeking wealth under the impression that wealth is "success," but that "success" is really "satisfaction and self-worth." A reader who doesn't happen to share your anti-consumerist cultural biases is likely to diagnose this as an arbitrary assumption rather than a conclusion.

Redefining Success for the Individual

In order for success to resonate with people in a way that increases their self-worth, it needs to be based in things of real human value. After subsistence, what is it we need for happiness? Chilean economist, Max-Neef suggests that the modern economist’s view of the human psyche as a bottomless pit of material desire is grossly mistaken. Instead, he believes that there are 9 fundamental human needs (subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, recreation, creation, identity, and freedom) which are non-material in nature. Also, he says that these needs are nonhierarchical, and describes poverty as the frustration or lack of any one of these. More recently, Alain de Botton has argued that the pursuit of prestige is just a vain attempt to address concerns of one’s own worthlessness. If what people ultimately desire is to feel that they are worth something and their actions have value, then the pursuit of fundamental non-material needs will be far more satisfying. Relationships instead of possessions, and identity and participation based on meaningful contributions to a project of value, will lead to the respect and admiration necessary for self-worth.

This is pop-psych bullshit, right? We're not going to believe this unless we've already drunk the Kool-Aid, n'est-ce pas?

Redefining Success for the Lawyer

The successful lawyer, like the successful individual, is one who knows what they value and makes contributions toward those ends.

• Inability to get pronouns to agree in number is not a price we have to pay for avoidance of sexual discrimination, even if you feel that "he" is always a masculine pronoun. You should not commit grammatical failings for reason of carelessness or ideological conviction, because solecisms of the kind often set off unconscious prejudices in others against you.

The lawyer who values justice will feel successful when they actually work to further justice in some respect. Thus self-interest is only at odds with the pursuit of justice under a dangerously shallow and inadequate interpretation of human interest. The American legal system and even the university are culpable in the degradation of the individual and in the encumbrance of justice by promoting these mistaken conceptions of value and monetarily incentivizing an indifference to justice.

• You have not shown, or even argued, that the pursuit of justice needs to be materially less rewarding than the pursuit of injustice. You have not shown that happiness for smart people should consist in indifference to material rewards. I don't think you can show that, because as a general proposition it is absurd. Some people may be indifferent to material reward so long as their needs for meaning in work are met, but many people aren't. I am one who isn't: I prefer to have enough money. I do not choose to have not enough money in order to make justice; I do not even choose to have only enough money with which to make justice. I prefer to have a great deal of money paid to me in order to make justice, and to share that money with other people in order to make justice too, while keeping a large share for myself. What argument do you make to me?

Introduction

The Pursuit of Wealth

Redefining Success for the Individual

Redefining Success for the Legal Professional

-- ErikaKrystian - 06 Apr 2008

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