General Introduction

This course explores two questions it's important to begin asking in the second semester of law school:

1. How can I be creative in law school?
2. How can I be creative in thinking about the types of work and the career paths that will make the most fulfilling life for me in the law?

Unfortunately, there are no other courses that put these questions at the center of their inquiry.

Law school's first semester, as you now know, consists of intensive language-learning by immersion. At the end, all students are fully capable of conversational lawtalk. The second term, building on that new linguistic basis, begins the process of the student's legal acculturation. But because the mode of instruction and evaluation do not change, students are left to conclude that their creativity in the new culture is unimportant or impossible. Dissuaded from imagining at all, students are by definition not reinforced in imagining their own future paths as seekers for and creators of justice. Career counseling is conducted as a bureaucratic process, divorced from the "intellectual" activity of feeding on doctrinal regurgitation supplemented by the vitamins of professorial brilliance.

This course was designed long ago as a remedy. Created originally in a moment of curricular reform by my friend and colleague Mark Barenberg and me as the required course "Perspectives in Modern Legal Thought" in 1990, and continued by me thereafter—once curricular retrogression and fragmentation returned to fashion—as the 1L Elective "Law in Contemporary Society," the purpose of this course is to put our preexisting creativity to work on the twin goals of succeeding in law school and building vibrant, fulfilling careers as lawyers, rather than ending up as canned meat bought by the crate for consumption in "Big Law" practice.

We don't read cases. statues, or regulations here. We are caught sidling through the law reviews only when they have something to say to our purpose, which is almost never. But we do read the literature of psychology, anthropology, philosophy and history, and we read the literature of lawyering—for, by, and about lawyers—for the purpose of thinking and drawing out of the box. We write together, in the course wiki, which also contains all the reading. There's formal writing: two essays of not more than 1,000 words on topics you choose, in at least two drafts. There's informal writing: the journal each student keeps, that only you and I can read, in which we can write about your learning exclusively, one to one. There's in-between writing in which we discuss the readings and our own writings collectively, commenting and rewriting and re-commenting and "refactoring," to come to consensus about what our reading leads us to. There is no exam.

Because this is the epidemic, all our work is conducted in the mode of VirtualInstruction, supplemented by hybrid in-person instruction—for those in NYC—under appropriate infection control, outdoors. The course I have built up over thirty years I started adapting in 2012, for the inevitable moment when climate crisis or pandemic forced us to abandon in-person law school. Having spent all those years building the Ark, I know how to sail it now that the flood is upon us. There is absolutely no Zoom here, or in any of my other courses; you can read WhyNotVideoConferencing to understand why I gave up early in those seven years on the practices my colleagues now depend on for their epidemic improvisations.

By looking around in this wiki as a guest you can get a pretty good idea of what it's like to be enrolled. If you look in the Index under Archived Material, you can find years of student writings, along with my comments and others comments on my comments and each successive version, for hundreds of essays reflecting the creative efforts other students made. I change readings on the fly from week to week, depending on how I think the conversation can next be improved by new voices; all the readings are available through the wiki so you don't need to buy anything. You can see in the PossibleReadingList some of what I expect we might read together, given what I've used in the last few years. You should read the EvaluationPolicy so you understand how you and I will deal with the Occupation Forces. I recorded an audio trailer for you, so you can hear what the weekly class audio component sounds like. You can also find at ClassAudio all the full-length podcasts I made for my students last spring after the epidemic began and our class ceased to meet. If you have any questions, please email me.

Note on Privacy

Without the anonymity of reading and strong privacy protection against spying on learning, freedom of thought is impossible and all civil freedom is in danger. Canvas, the system that delivers your other courses, spies on what you read and how you read it, measures your learning activity and analyzes it for whoever has power over the software. Google and Zoom and all the other helpful centralized platforms that "serve" you violate the sanctity of your privacy in learning. It must not be this way.

All the technology that we use in this and my other courses is made of free software, assembled and controlled by me, mostly running on computers I built from loose parts with my own hands. It does not leak any information about your learning to any third party, including other organs of the university. What you want to make public is visible to the world. What you want to restrict to your classmates is so restricted. That which is for only you and me to know will not be seen ever by anyone, no matter how good their listeners are. Even if you think you don't care, you benefit. Regrettably, no other teacher and no other courses in this fine establishment can under present conditions say the same.

Until we meet, stay well.