Imagine a practice. One part of your book is med mal. You work with established practices, taking advantage of your experience to offer them parts of their workflow with high efficiency, at predictable price and quality. The other part of your book is work that makes a difference, connects you to the people you need to work with and for, joins one to something much larger than oneself, tries to make justice. You learn, adding new capacities, finding new ways to support your justice-focused practice, developing a richer human network that opens more possibilities. Are you happy in that practice? Si, se puede.

Eben, I would like to continue to edit this paper.

Journey to Justice

-- By JuliaCatania - 28 Apr 2012

What is Justice?

I moved to New York and sought similar work. I ended up at a medical malpractice firm downtown. Even though the work was overwhelming at times and carried a stigma (ambulance chasers), in the beginning I was proud of the service the firm was providing. I was working with individuals and felt like I was helping them achieve justice.

Early on I was working closely with a partner helping him finish a Motion for Summary Judgment; the case was a botched kidney transplant of a donor – pretty gruesome, life altering. One day in the office, the Partner began to speak candidly about the client’s prospects. He broke down the possible settlement figures, subtracted the legal fees, the expert’s fees, etc. While I was still processing the reality of our client’s prospects, he turned to me very gravely and said, “Look, I think it’s important for you to understand that what we do here isn’t justice.” I felt as if the rug had been pulled from under me.

I spent two years at the firm before ultimately going to law school, and that piece of advice was with me everyday. I saw that financial compensation for injury met certain disposable needs, but after you sit-in with one grief-stricken client after another, or take a call for an attorney deliberately avoiding an angry client, you can’t help but feel profoundly that justice is not being served. The financial compensation did not make the clients feel like they had been made whole and the doctors and hospitals hardly held accountable for their negligence as insurance companies put on the real defense. I felt empty and frustrated; justice did not seem as clear a concept as simply helping people.

Justice (Re)defined

Is it the wanting to change something for the better institutionally that creates the justice? If this is the demarcation then it is easy to say that Martha does justice and the medical malpractice firm does not. The medical malpractice firm wants to get the most for themselves and their clients (not completely different from Cerriere’s self-protecting version of what Martha does – signs complaints). While on the other hand, Martha has spent her career fighting for change in employment standards. She wants to improve workers’ quality of life. More than that, she wants to change our society’s class structure – class being defined as “the amount of economic control you have over your work.”

Martha does justice by attempting to shift the current power structure of the employment relationship, dominance of the employer over the employee. However, one could view the medical malpractice firm’s practice as symbiotic to the negligence of doctors and hospitals. Their practice is stagnant, there will always be negligence and there will always be (or should be) the ability to right the wrong in the only way possible to do so, with money. But this does not mean it is justice. I was too naïve to see the difference. The difference is not in the type of remedy, financial compensation, or the focus on the individual, but in the goal.

It is difficult to define justice in terms of a larger goal because it is more complicated than helping people. To have an end goal that is to change or right some entrenched wrong feels like setting yourself up to fail, because this goal is unreachable and will surely bring disillusionment. This is fear and the poem speaks to it. The attainableness of the goal is not measured by one person’s lifetime, nor should attainableness affect the purpose to which you dedicate your life. To do justice is not to have a general solution to a grand problem, but to actively work towards the grand problem one person at a time. Martha makes sure people don’t get eliminated.

Reaching the Goal