I'll bite, and put forward the proposition that the morality of pawning one's license or working for a firm is somewhat besides the point. If law is transcendental nonsense, so too is morality. Both are post-facto ways to rationalize reality.

To paraphrase Sartre, people use morality to justify their choices, but clothing one's choices in morality doesn't remove personal responsibility. Whether or not working for a firm confers 100% of bad karma, or 80%, or just 20% if you leave within three years, isn't really resolvable. Ultimately, what matters is that you are able to live with the choices you make.

As I understand it, Eben's point is not so much that one should avoid a firm because of the danger of moral corruption, but because it's a lazy and wasteful choice that squanders your potential and freedom. It doesn't serve your own interests. There are things that we'd all like to do and achieve before we die, and sitting in an office for decades as a well-paid servant isn't high on most lists. While many people, myself included, find the proposition of doing unsavory things for money unpalatable, I don't think the major issue that's motivating Eben is how to help us keep our souls clean. It's the tendency for the majority of promising lawyers to grow complicit in a job that restricts individual agency and sharply curtails potential, thereby eliminating the very people who could create change and institute meaningful reforms on a multitude of issues.

For the record, I could be very wrong regarding Eben's motives. As the class progresses, I'm finding that I'm fairly bad at figuring out what he's thinking.

-- RonMazor - 06 Feb 2010

Re Moral Complicity:

Having worked for a short while, I think in many work environments you see situations that make you wonder, a little bit, about the 'rightness' of what's going on. Then again, it takes a certain measure of confidence and perspective to be able to fully judge these situations and ascribe a moral value to them, save for the most egregious acts (I think Amanda's anecdote from Morgan Stanley may qualify).

In my opinion it's difficult to be morally right in a Kantian, motive-based sense in these situations, since it often requires knowing more, or asking the right questions. People often do the best they can under the circumstances, and try not to 'rock the boat' too much. After all, there's an entrenched culture in the organization that works.

I don't think most people intend to be morally complicit, and rather they fall into that state through a process of complicity. I guess that's one of the points Professor Moglen is trying to make clear to us. There's a tension between often our vague goals and dreams, and what seems to work for other people. To abandon the well-trodden path I know would put me on another that is potentially filled with even more anxiety. That is, until I figure out exactly what I desire to make of my life.

-- JeffKao - 05 Feb 2010

Re: Andrew/Prof M's discussion about temporarily pawning one's license...I just want to say that this was always my plan (in so far as I had one, which isn't saying much). I always figured that I'd work for a few years at a firm and make some money...but more than that, I'd learn how such a firm operates in order to work most effectively against it in the end. This might seem totally convoluted (I think it does now). But I truly had decided that in order to be a successful lawyer, I would have to know how the law firms worked, because either I'd be working with them in a transaction or against them in some capacity. That, and the idea that having worked at a big firm would give me a certain amount of clout in whatever I chose to do next. I looked to lawyers who had "done their time" at a big firm and were out doing what they truly wanted and imagined that I could easily be like them. I guess this view relates to Andrews' taking the firms down from the inside. I'm thinking my money-making, ultimately happiness-bringing fantasy is totally unreasonable now.

-- JessicaCohen - 05 Feb 2010

• I would agree that a firm cannot be "taken down from the inside" because of the client obligations you've mentioned. But I interpreted Chris to be asking whether you are morally complicit in the work of a company or other organization in ANY situtation. Certainly there are organizations in which you can appear to be a member but in truth act contrary to the purpose of the organization. If this were so, I think that you would then be operating in a different "moral direction" (that's kind of a stupid term, but I hope that conveys what I mean) than the organization.

-Andrew Cascini