Law in Contemporary Society

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StevenRaphanFirstEssay 8 - 05 Jun 2024 - Main.StevenRaphan
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 The dual legal culture, if well developed, nevertheless has the advantage of fostering open-mindedness and the development of intricate and innovative juridical thought patterns. Having been exposed to different ways of doing, whether in substantive law or methodology, can enable you to think differently and arrive at solutions that others may not necessarily perceive. In this sense, diversity is a strength that enriches your legal acumen by bringing forth a multitude of perspectives, approaches, and solutions to legal issues. However, the challenging tension between being slightly innovative and straying from the framework of law and legal thinking inherent in the country where law is practiced persists, making the use of plural knowledge a difficult exercise.
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The underlying assumption of this draft is that law school is about "the law." On that assumption, "the law" is either learned by inferring generalities from the specifics of cases or deducing the outcomes of hypothetical situations from general principles given by authorities.

If that assumption is relaxed, however, and the subject of law school is lawyering, then the draft asserts that "lawyering," which is assumed to be about corporate control transactions for some reason, is pretty much the same everywhere because there are always term sheets and "data rooms," no matter what local regulations require.

I think none of that is true. So the "complex path" set forth here is a midway between a multidisciplinary education in understanding social process, active listening, mind reading and artistic creation on the one hand, and a bureaucratic, sterile, non-dialogic proclamation of the legal principles evolved in the system of large-scale commercial slavery we call the Roman Empire, on the other. These aren't "two systems"—they are fundamentally conflicting understandings of what it means to be a lawyer and to do lawyer-things, as well as to be a teacher or a student, and to do learning.

The primary task of the draft, from this point of view, is to dissociate these fundamental differences in order to print a bilingual business card. I recognize that these two outlooks are difficult to square. I think acting out the difficulty rather than ignoring it would be an even more important improvement. It might then be possible to decide which of the two law schools to drop out of. One of them is clearly inadequate.

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It remains that, as this essay shows, there is a fundamental opposition in both systems regarding what it means to be a lawyer and how to shape the law and interact with it. In this sense, the complex path might be a dead end. One might rather make a decision on what type of lawyer one wants to be and fully commit to the path one chooses. In the end, the positive aspect of having experienced two types of legal education may not lie in the ability to make a midway between both without really knowing where you belong as a lawyer, but rather in the opportunity to have experienced two understandings of what it means to study law and be a lawyer, and to choose with complete knowledge what is most adequate. As for myself, this year, filled with new legal knowledge, each as intellectually stimulating as the other, and this rediscovery of learning law from a new perspective that made me eager to discover more, has sealed where my commitment belongs.
 

Revision 8r8 - 05 Jun 2024 - 01:00:17 - StevenRaphan?
Revision 7r7 - 20 May 2024 - 16:20:17 - EbenMoglen
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