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MilesGreeneFirstEssay 4 - 03 Apr 2018 - Main.EbenMoglen
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META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
| | The Final Circle: Treachery
The deepest circle of Legal Hell is reserved for those that used their legal minds and careers to advance values that go against the public interest. Those that fight commonsense reform and progress. Residing here would be the attorneys that fought tooth and nail for "separate but equal" in Plessy, for continued school segregation in Brown, and for the internment of Japanese Americans in Korematsu. This circle is home to our politicians who were converted into puppets for entrenched private interests like the National Rifle Association and the attorneys who helped draft Non-Disclosure Agreements to silence victims of sexual harassment. What would it be like to live in this place? Tragically, the twist: we may already be living in this hell. | |
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This draft is very clever. It is often humorous, occasionally
witty, well-designed and effectively executed.
But both Dante and Larry Joseph are poets. Their subjects are spaces people inhabit. Their ways of living and the meaning they give to them are contrasted with one another, and with external moral judgments. And yet, beyond the judgment there is always human recognition: Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?
I wonder whether all the literary mechanism is actually interfering
with that sensibility here; we are at the last sentence before that
recognition—that we are all here, lawyers and therefore never
far from the temptations of power or ability without moral
responsibility, sheltered behind clients, behind obligations, yet
hoping and trying to do something larger, that we can justly regard
as a contribution to justice—meets us. A draft that abandoned
all the cute parts, that took the premise straight and went directly
to the question the present draft raises only at the very last,
might be too much to ask of you. But retaining the part of this
which is play should at least allow, not as an apparent accident,
but inherent in the design, the serious issue that makes the play
worthwhile.
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