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SarahChanFirstEssay 8 - 19 Feb 2025 - Main.SarahChan
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | [start a new section?] | |
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< | I recently read the New York Times article “Who Gets to Kill in Self-Defense?” The author ponders how many of the 12,000 women incarcerated in the U.S. killed in self-defense after enduring years of abuse. Anita Ford, sentenced to life imprisonment, exemplifies this dilemma. Her case highlights how legal narratives reduce human experience to rigid categories: victim or perpetrator, justified or unjustified. While the law is designed to recognize immediate danger, it struggles to account for the slow, cumulative violence of coercion and control in the private sphere. There was no room for Ford’s reality. | >
> | I recently read the New York Times article “Who Gets to Kill in Self-Defense?.” The author ponders how many of the 12,000 women incarcerated in the U.S. killed in self-defense after enduring years of abuse. Anita Ford, sentenced to life imprisonment, exemplifies this dilemma. Her case highlights how legal narratives reduce human experience to rigid categories: victim or perpetrator, justified or unjustified. While the law is designed to recognize immediate danger, it struggles to account for the slow, cumulative violence of coercion and control in the private sphere. There was no room for Ford’s reality. | | | My takeaway is that law is not merely about what is argued—it is about who has the privilege to speak and who does not. The deeper truth often lies in what the law refuses to acknowledge. Ford’s case reveals a systemic legal failure to address lived experiences that do not fit neatly within formalistic structures. | | | Law, at its core, is an attempt to impose logic onto primal experiences that defy formalization. It is a manipulation of words, an elaborate system that gains legitimacy not because it is inherently just, but because enough people believe in its authority. | |
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< | Perhaps this is why Moglen introduced this course as an extended exercise in active listening. To challenge the law, one must first identify who it excludes, where its gaps lie, and what is being rationalized—all of which exist, but in silence. Creativity then steps in to expose blind spots and reimagine what the law could become. Hence, a law student’s goal should not be limited to mastering the language or learning how to operate within the system, but also knowing when and how to break rules. It is to understand that legal structures are not fixed, universal truths but malleable constructs molded by those bold enough to question them. I am searching for this courage. | >
> | Perhaps this is why Moglen introduced this course as an extended exercise in active listening. To challenge the law, one must first identify who it excludes, where its gaps lie, and what is being rationalized—all of which exist, but in silence. Creativity then steps in to expose blind spots and reimagine what the law could become. Hence, a law student’s goal should not be limited to mastering the language or learning how to operate within the system, but also knowing when to break rules. It is to understand that legal structures are not fixed, universal truths but malleable constructs molded by those bold enough to question them. I am searching for this courage. | | | |
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