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LawSchoolAsAnOrganizationAGroupDiscussion 11 - 24 Feb 2012 - Main.CamilaTapernoux
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| | Based on my question in class today regarding the applicability of Arnold's analysis of organizations to our experience in law school and Eben's subsequent answer that law school is likely no different from other organizations in society in that it coheres because of shared creeds and ceremonies, I thought it might be interesting if we as a group collaboratively brought to light some practices and ideas where we think we see the Columbia Law School creed manifest. If a business organization's creed is "rational business judgment" then what is ours? I think such a discussion is valuable because one of our (or maybe not, but my) goals in law school is to do some creative thinking while I am here, and awareness of the way our law school sustains itself might enable more creative thinking then if we engage the law school institution as if it was a "person" to which we can rationally appeal. So what does everyone think? What is our creed? What are some of our ceremonies? And how do they inform who we become as law students and how we go about practicing law in the future?
Arnold makes the argument that organizations take on personalities, the content of which depends both on accident and environment. The accidental features of CLS's personality will depend mostly on the personality of those who first assume control, after which the personality is very difficult to change because the same type of person succeeds prior leaders. In what ways do people find themselves influenced by the personalities of their professors either through personal interaction with them or through the way/style/bent in which they introduce legal concepts in class? One of the ways I see this happening is when professors cut off certain lines of analysis in classroom discussions. In my contracts class, in a dialogue between a student and the professor, the student articulated argument for why courts should compensate defendants for breach of contract on fairness grounds, to which the professor responded that it in his class, "fairness" is a "bad word" and that we should not use it when we construct arguments. He also interestingly noted that this was a rule that his contracts professor enforced when he went to law school. This seems to highlight Arnold's point that personalities, once entrenched, are difficult to remove because the individuals in power are succeeded by people with like personalities. | | | I believe Wylie's (Wylie is the corporate lawyer from today's piece from Lawyerland - "Something Split") description of working on a case is an apt description of this process of pointless reductionism - "That painful kind of fastidiousness, attentiveness. Details. How many details? 27 years - trillions of details! You ask me a month from now what the deal I've just done was about - I won't be able to tell you." Wylie can spout off the title or potential income of fellow lawyers, but confesses that he would not be able to remember the details of a deal he dedicated a ton of brain power and time to. He has been trained to care about the end, and not the means. As Professor Moglen said in class today "He uses his brain as a tool and gets little satisfaction out of it." Is this practice in reductionism to the point of destruction a method of training us to use our brains as tools and ignore what that does to our brains in the meantime; to care about the ends instead of the means?
-- SkylarPolansky - 23 Feb 2012 | |
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> | I think this comparison is useful because it encompasses many of the themes of this class and gives us a single framework under which to analyze them. To start with, one of the first things Arnold says is that a principle of human organization is "that when new types of social organization are required, respectable, well-thought-of, and conservative people are unable to take part of them." For me, this pretty much sums up the subconscious assimilation encouraged by attending Columbia. I once told someone I thought in all honesty that it would easier to succeed in pursuing a career in public interest at Columbia because there would be less competition, and a public-service minded student would thus stand out more. Little did I understand the strength of the "moral and economic prejudices," the "desire for the approval of other members of the group." And indeed, while I would love to claim that I do not need nor wish to have the approval of others, I can't say that I don't derive any satisfaction from feeling that I have succeeded according to an unsubstantiated rubric prescribed by our administration and subscribed to by myself and my fellow students. I am not introducing a novel concept here, but perhaps drawing this parallel can at least provide an additional perspective from which to consider the conformity our school promotes.
The parallel for me, however, was weakened upon reading Arnold's second element shared by all social organizations: "A set of attitudes which makes the creed effective by giving the individual prestige, or at least security, when he subordinates what are ordinarily called 'selfish interests' to those of the group." While the first half of this statement probably rings true for most of us in that assimilation in this environment begets prestige, I think it is interesting that what we are asked to subordinate is not our 'selfish interests;' if anything, we are encouraged to seek prestige and fortune, two inherently ungenerous goals. I suppose that this is, if anything, a glimmer of hope in that a revolution in this sphere would therefore be able to rely on moral, selfless rhetoric and therefore attain a noble quality...
So about that revolution. Arnold speaks in Chapter III of "paralyzed organizations," referring to the inertia preventing any such movement. The anecdotes regarding the bankruptcy of the railroads or the (dis)utility of new medicines points to "mystic idealism" as a primary factory, but it sounds a lot like fear. Regarding the introduction of quinine, Arnold says it could not be adopted without also adopting non-conforming Jesuit principles any more than the US could "develop national power without becoming like the Germans under Hitler." Which raises the question: what are the parallel threats to a law school considering abandoning the current pervasive creeds? There are certainly many, but Arnold points to one in his observation that NY firms grew "to supply the infinitely complicated logic needed to keep the separate individuality of parent and subsidiary or affiliate corporations apart" and that the 'real nature' of a corporation "was assiduously studied in law school." Are so many seemingly useless/ignoble/injurious creeds and ceremonies perpetuated in law school (one example of many being that my Torts professor began our first class by asserting that no one in the room would ever practice the law he was to spend--waste?--the next four months teaching and we learning) simply for the existence and survival of the corporation as a "person?" Is it a reduction (pardon my word choice) to say that corporate America is dependent on loopholes and legal fictions generated by attorneys in biglaw, and that biglaw is dependent on law schools continuing to churn out unquestioning junior associates, and that any threat to this current system in the form of changing the way law schools operate is thus essentially a threat to corporate America?
-- CamilaTapernoux - 23 Feb 2012 |
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