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FeliciaGilbert-FirstPaper 6 - 23 Mar 2008 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | -- FeliciaGilbert - 19 Feb 2008 | |
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- This is a valuable and important paper on the importance of recognition (and prestige as a form of boiled-down recognition concentrate, the bullion-cube equivalent in "reputational capitalism"). What you say is both emotionally touching and intellectually important. But I need to begin by talking about moot courts.
- There's no good reason whatever for using simulated appellate arguments as a form of competition for beginning law students: it's a little like making Rugby Union for five-year-olds. The bones aren't set yet, but you apply breaking force to the skeletons? Appellate briefing is difficult. It's a skill that requires, for successful practice, absolute mastery of a complex form along with deftness and suppleness in writing. Argument is still more difficult. But because the confined factual setting, small cast size and short time periods involved in appellate litigation make it easy to simulate, law students begin interacting in appellate simulations long before they are capable of turning out effectively. It's easy to break your back with work and have little to show for it, particularly if your most consistent assistance is a second-year student who knows little more than you do.
- That said, the question you are beginning to ask yourself about the motive of earned praise is extraordinarily important. Law school's indefinite postponement of reinforcement causes students (not you alone) to encounter their need for status recognition, which is on reason why the employers (who are often the only source of status recognition for beginning law students) appreciate and act to preserve the existing system, which ensures their power over recruits' minds. In the grossest sense, it rarely is as bad for lawyers as it is for law students: most have some way of ascertaining their place in the status pyramid, if nothing else. As you have probably observed, law students are not only disappointed to find they're not on top, they're even more acutely distressed because the top is so hard to locate, at least in the beginning. Litigating lawyers gain their sense of recognition in the crucible of competition, as you supposed yourself willing to do in the run-up to your first simulated argument. But that form of ego-food feeds better the fragile egos of men, who have been trying to survive on the basis of war results for eons. The actual product, as any Buddhist can tell you, is a deeper attachment to illusion that turns the wheel of suffering. And for women, all but the most competitive (whom you may be, of course) tend to find the news that someone else has been carried out of the battle on his shield less than fully satisfactory as a testament to their own value.
- Meaning in work and colleagues you respect are in the end the finest buttresses of a worthy sense of self. This is hard to see in law school, where most work is meaningless and respect for others depends on work that mostly we are not allowed to share. Law school as presently designed reduces self-esteem artificially, as part of the process of making vendible meat out of young bodies. That's one of the reasons I conclude law school is flagrantly broken. But too much artificial inflation of self-esteem happens elsewhere in the American educational system to the children of privilege who are the majority of law students. So finding an authentic way to the construction of a professional and personal self with which we can be humanly satisfied, without narcissism and without depression, is quite difficult. A commitment to justice helps. We, on the other hand, admit students solely on the basis of LSAT scores.
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