| | |
|
JohnDeBellisFirstEssay 5 - 29 May 2016 - Main.EbenMoglen
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
I came to law school to work with poor clients, help them navigate the legal system, and fight for their rights. I want to base my career on doing direct legal services, most likely as a public defender. I also admire Robinson of Robinson's Metamorphosis in many ways. He is an immensely capable attorney, with a strong knowledge of how the law works, and a creative way of applying it. At the same time, he does not lose focus on the social consequences of his actions and his clients' behavior. However, because of the way the criminal justice system is set up in America, I can neither completely meet my pre-law school expectations nor the ideal of Robinson. Yet I still have hope I can lead a fulfilling career as a public defender. | | | I unfortunately do not have a solution for the greater problem of overworked public defenders or for the fact that the justice system in many parts of the US functions to oppress poor, black, and brown people. But public defenders are not universally resigned to a passive fate. For example, the New Orleans Public Defender's Office stopped accepting cases because its staff is underfunded and overburdened. It is being partially-voluntarily sued by the ACLU, with the hope that Louisiana will have to better fund it. I also saw that office's chief defender speak a few weeks ago at Columbia, and he talked about the ways the attorneys in his office have been able to change court practices to better defend their clients. All of this is to say that I can at least try to practice public defense by being outcome-focused on the one hand, while at the same time keeping an eye towards who my clients are and how I can best serve their interests outside of their particular criminal case. | |
>
> |
The draft is much improved by the effort to check aspirations
against realities. You are now writing about what it feels like to
learn, at the broadest level, about the forms of practice you want
to have. You could ask how being a salaried public defender differs
from being a private defense practitioner with a substantial CJA
practice: whether a different socio-economic mix in the client base
and a different "business model" in your own practice would allow
you to do more of what you want, or not.
Of course you do not have solutions to the ills of "the system" of
criminal justice. Almost all rational well-informed observers of
the system I know would describe the things we should do and the
things we can politically and socially achieve as mutually
incongruent. You aren't in law school in order to make magical
policy choices that will solve problems those closer to the earth
don't believe can be solved given the realities with which we live.
You are studying the system, learning to get results for the people
it processes, building a network of people who can help you get
results, and the clients for whom to get them. You are considering
whether to begin as a salaried public worker in the part of the
system politics is least likely to resource adequately. This is a
good start.
| | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |