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JusticeForThePoor 13 - 08 Aug 2012 - Main.RumbidzaiMaweni
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| | Hearing about the Trayvon Martin case, I can't help but think about a past Moglen discussion. His observation that the criminal justice system
is just to the poor and kind to the rich can also be applied to how races are viewed in the court system and in public opinion. I was baffled in a recent Matt Lauer interview of Trayvon's parents. At one point he urged the family to not "jump to conclusions" and pass judgment on Zimmerman. Ummm...what?? Some cases are murky. Some have grey areas and nuance. What is so striking about Trayvon's case is the lack of nuance. I don't think there's been a case so public in recent years that has in fact be so void of complexity. | | | -- DavidHirsch - 30 Mar 2012 | |
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< | I think AJ's post is largely correct. In my first paper, I wrote about how despite all the evidence Professor Moglen has tried to present to us to the contrary, I still adamantly believed that the law is a powerful form of social control. But the Trayvon Martin case, as well as the cases we've been reading recently in Criminal Law that AJ succinctly summarized, has forced me to consider otherwise.
My question now is just how effective public interest lawyering can really be on its own- and how much I can do for the Trayvon Martins of the world by merely going to work for an NGO upon graduation. As a former humanities student, I used to feel ambivalently towards peers who would- with no self-consciousness, whatsoever- say things like "art is not a luxury." Adrienne Rich, one of the thinkers who has inspired me most, likened a society's need for socially conscious and transformative art as being on a par with a society's need to provide its citizens with affordable food, shelter, and healthcare. But as much as I believed in the arts, I simply could not bring myself to believe that a novel, a poem, a film, or any other socio-cultural artifact could be a more practical way of effecting social change than "the law."
I think I'm starting to realize that it's not enough to be an uncreative lawyer that merely "does law" because the the law doesn't do any of the heavy-lifting at all. The uncreative lawyer merely facilitates the only power the law really has, that is, to impart a veneer of legitimacy to what much of the populace already deems legitimate. Perhaps being a creative lawyer, then, requires doing more than just law, finding out what other disciplines can teach us about the society we live in, and seeing the law as merely one more tool to be used in conjunction with others.
-- RumbidzaiMaweni - 01 Apr 2012
RumbidzaiMaweni? , I love your last point about what it means to be a creative/uncreative lawyer: the idea that an uncreative lawyer merely does law, which is inherently weak. I want to compare it to the "bad man" idea that we heard a while back. I may be using it wrong, but as I understand it the idea is that bad men / bad lawyers / uncreative lawyers focus very narrowly on their work. | >
> | I love your last point about what it means to be a creative/uncreative lawyer: the idea that an uncreative lawyer merely does law, which is inherently weak. I want to compare it to the "bad man" idea that we heard a while back. I may be using it wrong, but as I understand it the idea is that bad men / bad lawyers / uncreative lawyers focus very narrowly on their work. | | | They merely do law, and they do it for the paycheck (like Wylie and Cerriere and the narrator in Bartleby, assuming I understand those readings correctly). This renders their work unimportant and weak. Unimportant because they're not using the law to it's fullest extent (like, say, Tharaud) and weak because their work relies solely on the malleable law and not on stronger social grounds.
Anyhow, to bring us back to the Trayvon Martin case, I actually disagree with MalaikaJabali? (sorry Malika). I think that this case is murky because we don't know what happened. Who struck first? Did Zimmerman actually have injuries? Who was the person screaming on the phone? Unless I'm oblivious to some recent developments in the case, these things are all unknown. Of course, this isn't to say that the actual result (no investigation) is okay. An investigation would help clear these questions up and bring clarity to what is a murky situation. Maybe it'd turn out that Trayvon was beating Zimmerman up before he was shot. Maybe it'd turn out that Zimmerman shot Trayvon from a distance without any provocation. At this point, I can't say for certain. I probably would like to see some sort of investigation, though. |
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