"Installation" meant "installment." You can't write a 2,000 word essay. Each of these pieces has to stand or fall on its own merits.

I take it that the capitalization indicates an idealization, too. But I'm not sure whose stereotypes are involved. I don't think the activists I know are "notoriously selfless," or that everyone I know with a corporate practice is primarily concerned with self-preservation. So this feels like a false dichotomy being constructed.

However, on closer examination, the Attorney and the Activist are closely related, like two sides of the same coin. Despite their differences, Activists and Corporate Attorneys confront similar personal and professional challenges. The Corporate Attorney accepts a life unlived on the wrong side; the Activist risks dying in vain at the hands of his very cause.

I'm not sure I recognize these people, either, unless we are in both cases talking about a vanishingly small splinter of the groups supposedly represented. Why is this quite unreal presentation necessary, and where is it supposed to be taking us?

Their similarities arise from the fact that they are each products of the same system, and their survival is dependent on their ability recover from splitting.

This seems like a large conclusion based on nothing you've shared with us so far.

As he expected, Malcolm X was murdered young and violently.

As opposed to being murdered non-violently? You did re-read this sentence, surely?

The fiery redhead had long anticipated such a fate, dispassionately regarding it as somewhat of a family tradition. Malcolm’s father, a Black Nationalist, watched three of his brothers die at the hands of white men before he was beaten and laid across railroad tracks.

Actually, there was a streetcar accident. No public record said that there was any foul play involved in the death of Earl Little, and the story Malcolm later told rested on gossip at the funeral, or so he said.

Before his fortieth birthday, Malcolm X, the feared ex-spokesman of the Nation of Islam, finally followed in his father’s footsteps. At thirty-nine, Malcolm had lived a full life, reaching national notoriety for his fierce dedication to the political and social unification of brown and black people “by any means necessary.” However he—in a significant break with tradition—was not murdered by white men, but by brothers.

Which "tradition" do you consider this to be a break from?

A rather far-fetched comparison, involving a fictional character whose life has not been cut short when we last see him, and an assassinated public figure. What's the point of the comparison? We still don't know what the unifying idea is here.

What "coin" are they two sides of? You've used this metaphor twice, but you haven't shown any direct relationship of any kind between them.

This is unsourced information: where does it come from? According to the public record, he was incarcerated in 1946 at on an 8-to-10 for burglary, at Charlestown State Prison in Boston, which was neither experimental nor intended for "white-collar criminals." His contact with the NoI? , he apparently told the sometimes-untruthful ghostwriter of his autobiography, came through letters from his family, particularly his brother Reginald, while he was in jail.

The best source now available, at last, is the late Manning Marable's extraordinary biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011).

This paragraph does not make sense to me.

What is this "beholden"? To whom?

Whose psychology is this? Where does it come from? On what are you depending for these insights?

Malcolm X died at thirty-nine because he had unwittingly become beholden to the wrong client.

What does this mean? Is this your description of the intrigue within the NoI? that led Louis Farrakhan to order and direct his murder, or do you have another narrative in mind? Who was his client?

Despite his intelligence and curiosity, he was able to unquestioningly accept the ideas of Elijah Muhammad because his mind had split under pressure. He recovered too late to save his life. Likewise, Carl Wylie, a millionaire, is inexplicably beholden to Big Law. Despite his unhappiness, he has not considered early retirement as an option. Instead of trying to repair his mind, he dulls it.

Apparently the only thing left from the last draft is an idiosyncratic use of the word "beholden" that I didn't understand then and don't understand now.

The present draft appears to contend that Carl Wylie and Malcolm X are related to one another because they both engaged in some dissociation. This they have in common with the entire rest of humanity, so I don't see how it makes them "two sides of the same coin," or adequate types of "the Activist" and "the Corporate Lawyer" for some generalized comparison that discovers these two archetypes are also somehow connected.

What the connection is, aside from the insight that human psyches dissociate in order to reduce experience of conflict, is never stated. Even assuming there is a connection between the historical figure and the fictional character in a prose poem, we are never told what the connection means to us, what idea comes out of it that we might use for some other clarity in some other situation.

The road to improvement is a little obscure to me, because I don't know what the essay is really about. If it is indeed about Malcolm X and Carl Wylie, we need accuracy (and sourcing for that accuracy) about the life of Malcolm X, and we need a clear, concise introductory statement of the nature of the connection. The development of the essay should then allow the reader, at your conclusion, to see what this connection means in some broader context. More likely, I think, the essay is about an idea still obscure in this draft. Malcolm X and Carl Wylie are merely illustrations of this idea, whatever it is, that could be illustrated by reference to other individual lives, or by some other form of description altogether. It is this, the central idea of the essay, that the next draft needs to put front and center.

Activists and Attorneys

“Logicians sometimes talk as if the only function of language were to convey ideas. But anthropologists know better and assure us that “language is primarily a pre-rational function.” Certain words and phrases are useful for the purpose of releasing pent-up emotions, or putting babies to sleep, or inducing certain emotions and attitudes in a political or a judicial audience. The law is not a science but a practical activity, and myths may impress the imagination and memory where more exact discourse would leave minds cold.” –Felix S. Cohen

It's hard to say that the guy who writes first answers the question of the guy who writes second. How about, "Cohen asks a question Holmes already answered succinctly: law's vital basis is not logic, but experience"?

It is experience that governs the legal decision process. Judges draw from their own ideas of right and wrong, from social context and social activity, to make decisions. Court opinions, written in the key of transcendental nonsense, are merely the justifications for decisions that were made long before a protracted analysis of “Where is a corporation?”

"Justification" and "rationalization" aren't synonyms. It's important which you mean here for everything that follows.

Demonstrated what?

Between mouthfuls of cheap Chinese food, in sentences littered with profanity, he told us the truth.

Saying that Noodle Town sells "cheap Chinese food" is like saying that India manufactures cheap textiles, or that the Metropolitan Museum is a cheap way to look at art. Not everything that is perfect is expensive, but perfect things that are not expensive are not therefore "cheap."

His advice was bereft of the type of language that we respect, and he offended us.

Which us? He delights me.

“Don’t be a dumb fuck…Don’t pig out on cash.” And perhaps, most importantly, don’t be beholden to anyone.

Common Knowledge

Realistic perspectives allow valuable predictions

This wasn't the best sequence of tenses to use, which is why you botched it. You could have used the perfect subjunctive less awkwardly: "Had we talked to more people below, had we taken the time to read their stories, ..." but that would have led to "we might have thought [or "begun thinking"] more realistically about the law."

I've always wondered why people started their property courses with this case, which I myself chose never to teach at all. Understanding both its formalisms and its realisms requires history that few if any property teachers are actually prepared to offer. The impression left with you, that this is an important de novo result, a moment at which "brown people, none of whom were in court" lost something, is utterly comprehensible given the context in which it was presented to you, but is almost entirely false.

Suppose you did not "unconsciously" accept that outcome. What would be the alternative that you would find consciously considerable? Natural right?

I don't know whether that's a Holmesian dismissal of logic, or a statement that INS v. AP seems wrong to you. If you consider it to be wrong because it only seems logical, instead of being logical, what holding would be logical instead? If you consider it to be wrong because it is wrong whether or not it is logical, what is wrong about it?

The Trouble with Becoming Beholden

Transcendental nonsense is only valuable to lawyers and those like us—most of the people on the street know better. Transcendental nonsense makes our job easier, it allows us to pretend that we aren’t doing what we are doing and it makes us feel better about what we’ve done because “…myths may impress the imagination and memory where more exact discourse would leave minds cold.” The trouble with transcendental nonsense, however, is that eventually, we become beholden to our own bullshit. Our belief in it makes us act like dumb fucks and diverts our energies to meaningless inquiries while the real decisions are being made.

This isn't the form of being beholden that Robinson was talking about, so this is a metaphor you've constructed, and it's not clear to me why you think it is doing useful work here. "Trapped" or "misled" seems more to describe how our habits of thought coerce us than the material or moral indebtedness denoted by "being beholden." Ideas or reasoning habits can possess us, but you're not talking about obsessional ideation.

Nor can I say that this conclusion leaves me any further along than I was halfway through Cohen's article. The idea I believe was your animating contribution was the assertion that working-class thinkers are automatically legal and social realists, that only privileged people can afford the self-deception of formalism. I don't know whether the sociology is right (it strikes me that many working-class thinkers are religious formalists, for example), but you don't actually argue for it: it's a rhetorical posture more than a conclusion based in argument or factual demonstration. It strikes me, however, whether right or wrong, as useful or not useful depending on where it can lead us. By leaving us pretty much where Cohen left us, you haven't shown the idea's utility, which is what I think improvement in the next draft should be primarily devoted to showing.

Listen Below.

-- By GechiNzewi - 16 Feb 2012

“Logicians sometimes talk as if the only function of language were to convey ideas. But anthropologists know better and assure us that “language is primarily a pre-rational function.” Certain words and phrases are useful for the purpose of releasing pent-up emotions, or putting babies to sleep, or inducing certain emotions and attitudes in a political or a judicial audience. The law is not a science but a practical activity, and myths may impress the imagination and memory where more exact discourse would leave minds cold.” –Felix S. Cohen

Advice about the courts from three great men

Courts talk about one thing while doing another

From our windowless ivory tower, Felix Cohen seems controversial. He informs us that courts use supernatural language while making practical decisions. Speaking in terms that he knew we would respect, Cohen reduced the language of the courts to “transcendental nonsense.” He cautions that, when we buy into this nonsense, we are likely to forget about “the social forces that mold the law and the social ideals by which the law is to be judged.” According to Cohen, transcendental nonsense exists because of our belief in it. When we make decisions based on the ability of abstract concepts to encompass values that are produced, not merely protected, by the law, we stop asking the real questions, like: how are cases decided? And perhaps more importantly, how should they be decided?

Courts write about one thing while deciding another

Oliver Wendell Holmes answers Cohen’s first question succinctly: experience. It is experience that governs the legal decision process. Judges draw from their own ideas of right and wrong, from social context and social activity, to make decisions. Court opinions, written in the key of transcendental nonsense, are merely the justifications for decisions that were made long before a protracted analysis of “Where is a corporation?”

Courts are corrupt, don’t be a dumb fuck

Finally, Robinson from Lawyerland demonstrated in painful, poignant color. Between mouthfuls of cheap Chinese food, in sentences littered with profanity, he told us the truth. His advice was bereft of the type of language that we respect, and he offended us. “Don’t be a dumb fuck…Don’t pig out on cash.” And perhaps, most importantly, don’t be beholden to anyone.

Everybody knows this except us

It is only in such a place as Columbia that the perspectives of any of these men are revolutionary, or even mildly novel. Perhaps, if any of us, at some time, had taken the time to listen, their words would only have brought the conscious knowing of an established intuition. Transcendental nonsense supports a myth that only we believe. It is an idea that can only be sustained in a windowless tower, one that doesn’t overlook a low-income street, where it’s common knowledge, and someone would tell us in fewer words than Cohen and Holmes, that judicial opinions are bullshit.

Common Knowledge

Past 125th street, most people know, or at least feel, that if law were really the result of abstract concepts interacting according to the indiscriminate rules of logic, black people would not, on average, receive 60% longer jail sentences than white people for the same crimes. They would say, in language that most of us would never respect, that transcendental nonsense is simply a smokescreen for something that we, as lawyers, do not want to confront.

Realistic perspectives allow valuable predictions

If we had talked to more people below, or took the time to read about their stories, we would have begun to think about the law more realistically. As a result, the holding of Johnson v. M’Intosh, which could not have been decided otherwise in the early 1800’s, would have surprised few. Most of us would have anticipated that America, a new nation, would quickly tire of negotiating with a subjugated people group, if transcendental nonsense--language that we respect--hadn’t lulled us to sleep. If we had known, we would not have been surprised when a dispute between two white men over a piece of land lead to the divestment of the property rights of thousands of brown people, none of whom were in court. The only uncertainty would have centered around how. Which words would be used? Which concepts would be summoned to interact?

Unrealistic attitudes divert valuable conversation and dull minds

Up here, at Columbia, rather than examining the practical reasons for America’s choice, and examining their merit, we dove into a discussion of “sovereignty” that ended with our unconscious acceptance of the idea that our government has the exclusive power to decide property ownership. And it was a good thing that we did, because this tacit acceptance made International News Service v. Associated Press seem perfectly logical the next day in class.

The Trouble with Becoming Beholden

Transcendental nonsense is only valuable to lawyers and those like us—most of the people on the street know better. Transcendental nonsense makes our job easier, it allows us to pretend that we aren’t doing what we are doing and it makes us feel better about what we’ve done because “…myths may impress the imagination and memory where more exact discourse would leave minds cold.” The trouble with transcendental nonsense, however, is that eventually, we become beholden to our own bullshit. Our belief in it makes us act like dumb fucks and diverts our energies to meaningless inquiries while the real decisions are being made.

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