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JessicaWirthFirstPaper 4 - 15 Apr 2012 - Main.JonathanBrice
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| | | Functionalism Sheds some Light...
Most friends, acquaintances, and family members who ask me why I might want to work at a law firm accept as an answer some combination of the following: I need to earn a salary reflective of the effort and expense I’ve incurred attending law school; I seek to do interesting, intellectual work; and I hope that a prestigious law firm position will provide the training and legal seal of approval necessary to ultimately do the work I came to law school to do. I find these responses increasingly lacking when I view them through the functionalist lens propounded by Cohen. | |
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< | I have tried to ask myself what each justification above actually does, not what it purports to do. For example, what is the significance of the fact that I will graduate law school with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt? It purports to be a limiting factor in my career trajectory: because I owe money, I must choose a path that will allow me to pay it back. What it actually does is nothing more or less than force me make a choice about whether I will pay this debt back and if so, on what time table. The choice I make may trigger numerous outcomes, and I may have a higher or lower preference for each that I will try to estimate in advance of choosing what I will do. That I owe money doesn’t tell me what I have to do or what I should do, it only sets out a decision tree whose branches I define. | >
> | I have tried to ask myself what each justification above actually does, not what it purports to do. For example, what is the significance of the fact that I will graduate law school with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt? It purports to be a limiting factor in my career trajectory: because I owe money, I must choose a path that will allow me to pay it back. What it actually does is nothing more or less than force me to make a choice about whether I will pay this debt back and if so, on what time table. The choice I make may trigger numerous outcomes, and I may have a higher or lower preference for each that I will try to estimate in advance of choosing what I will do. That I owe money doesn’t tell me what I have to do or what I should do, it only sets out a decision tree whose branches I define. | | | And not even that,
really. Your practice will have a larger nut, by the amount of your |
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