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SoWhatShouldWeDo 6 - 06 Apr 2009 - Main.SoeJungKim
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| | To be honest, I sometimes feel uncomfortable when Professor Moglen mentions that his former students were fired from law firms. Today, I was once again intimidated by the number he wrote on the board, but at the same time, I thought that just because people are losing their jobs, doesn’t necessarily mean that they made a wrong choice. After all, lawyers aren't the only people who are losing their jobs these days. It’s the economy that cut the number of jobs the employers can provide. Public interest organizations are laying off lawyers too. So what should we do?
Today in the class, Professor Moglen gave us an answer: establish your own organization and find people who are willing to invest for the work you want to do to help people. But didn’t he also emphasize the importance of training and mentorship that most law firms apparently don’t provide? Even if we could find the right professors and role models while we are at a law school, I don’t think training at school will be sufficient for us to set up our own business right after graduation and survive in the real world. I also don’t think people who are willing to offer money for a cause would trust any inexperienced graduates. Are we all supposed to turn ourselves into entrepreneurs and sell our ideas? | | | This is a novel plan, but I am afraid of taking the next step. Maybe this means I have failed to live up to Eben's expectation. Maybe, as he suggested briefly in class, I am afraid because I lack the knowledge about what could happen. For a law school to break away from traditional norms is not only bold, it is somewhat counterintuitive (although admittedly, my knowledge of the history of the institution of law school is shallow). It is counterintuitive because it suggests that the institution for learning about the very foundation of society is fluid, and that suggests that maybe the law is not the firm grounding that greater society embraces, but something dynamic. Here's the kicker. For a law school to take this bold step, it would take a united student body. Assuming change was (perhaps reluctantly) embraced, the law school would be laughed at. Perhaps a parade of blog postings scoffing at crazy XYZ Law School. Then the other schools would fight it. They would levy criticism in scholarly publications, perhaps even devote a journal note to asserting how unrealistic such a system would be. But ultimately, and this is crucial, if the entire school from faculty to students to donors persisted on a course based on human values, they will succeed in producing lawyers, who affect change with their words, not simply crates canned meat.
-- JonathanFriedman - 01 Apr 2009 | |
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> | Jonathan: Thank you for sharing the insight on what to take away from the course. I guess a part of the reasons why I was intimidated by the gruesome numbers is because I don’t really know yet what I want to do with my law degree. Like you said, at law school it is very easy for those without a clear objective to be swept away by the school’s curriculum and the goal it wants to achieve: providing what’s in demand in the market. Your idea of internally initiating change in the school system is bold and intriguing but it’s hard for me to conceptualize the change in a concrete way. How should our curriculum and grading system be changed not to produce canned meat? Can we do this without the change of practices in the market? Is it why Professor Moglen repeatedly told us that we are lucky because the jobs that big firms provided are not there any more in this economy?
Michael: Maybe I understood Professor Moglen’s suggestion in a narrow way. Your interpretation seems more plausible and could be one nice option to think about.
Molisa: I think lawyering takes significant responsibility because it can directly affect our client's lives. Even though I strongly believe that I would learn a lot from classes, clinics, summer internships and externships throughout the school years, I still want to have some guidance from people who have more experience in the field because I don’t want to make any mistake. Maybe I should have said "me" instead of "us" because I spoke for myself. |
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