Law in Contemporary Society

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PatrickCroninFirstPaper 4 - 31 Mar 2009 - Main.IanSullivan
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 The idea that justice requires lawyers to be creative each time is disquieting. We don’t like the idea that justice doesn’t have a drama and a logical inevitability of its own. We like roles and we like drama because we want to be part of something larger than ourselves. Justice should come from on high. There should be people above us who know what is just. This is why it is difficult for lawyers to be constantly outside of the drama, to be moving onstage and offstage like conmen. The space between two conflicting dramas can be dangerous because the clash calls the logical necessity of both dramas into question and opens up a space of contingency. And people don’t like contingency.

So how does a lawyer who wants to create justice by posing actual legal questions survive? We can’t live without some dramatic conception of ourselves. Arnold, Holmes, and Leff agree on this fundamental fact of human nature: the tendency to create stories, to think logically, and to adopt the creeds of institutions is inevitable. So we can’t survive entirely between perspectives. We have to come up for air from time to time. We need some drama of our own. But the storyline of the lawyer fighting for justice wont make justice happen all by itself. So we need both to have enough money and time to construct a storyline of our own, and we need to keep in touch with the creative space in between dramas. Balance is essential.

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  • I thought this was a very interesting essay, which neither fully convinced nor completely lost me, until I got to the conclusion and found that the payoff was a platitude. I think your conceptual structure has got to produce more than "balance is essential," if it's going to repay the investment.
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Revision 4r4 - 31 Mar 2009 - 16:15:54 - IanSullivan
Revision 3r3 - 03 Mar 2009 - 17:31:57 - PatrickCronin
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