BLACK EROTIC LAWYERING

-- By DayoAdeoye - 21 Feb 2025

INTRODUCTION: The Inseverable Part of the Unimaginable

On his 90th birthday, a journalist asked Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “What is the secret to your success?” He replied, “Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age, I discovered that I was not God.” I find this quote ironic in two ways. First, judges are ostensibly put in the position to “play God” by deciding an individual’s fate. Holmes may have discovered that he was not God, but it did not preclude him from a career where he mimicked God. Secondly, despite being “deeply agnostic,” Holmes’s writing feels proximate to theology. He was, as his biographer Catherine Pierce Wells describes, “an almost religious man…whose deep spiritual impulses resisted articulation.” Though he may have believed he was not God, he viewed himself, and man generally, as a “cosmic ganglion” inseverable from the unimaginable.

On my mission of becoming a successful lawyer, I am interested in what role “God” could have in my success. I am not the “young man” that the Great Dissenter was addressing, but as a Yoruba-American, Black woman, my presence in the legal field embodies Dissent herself–since only 2% of American lawyers are Black women, my existence goes against the majority. Further, my desire to be successful in law takes on a new urgency in light of America’s renewed embrace of fascism and the widespread political rejection of critical race theory and DEI. The contemporary legal landscape is riddled with insecurity. Ideas that were once taken for granted by the law are being undermined by sensibilities who hope to “drain the swamp” but refill it with fracking oil.

My Blackness means that I am a threat to Western sensibilities. My Yoruba-ness means that I am guided by a multitude of divine forces and spiritual traditons, traditions that deify femininity, artistic development, and beauty and do not reject/trivialize/disqualify it. The Yoruba call this force Osun. In the most basic sense, Osun is the goddess of femininity, love, sexuality, and water. Osun is thus an articulation of the unimaginable that I am severed to. As such, what would it mean to advance a lawyer’s theory of success that calls lawyers to be more like God? That is a God like Osun, who can embody erotic feminine power amid a Western patriarchal paradigm. Therefore, by utilizing Audre Lorde’s theory of “erotic power” in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” I argue for aspiring, successful lawyers to be more like the divine feminine rooted in erotic power, which offers a secret to success that stands up against the patriarchal, racist impulses of the contemporary legal landscape.

Legal Uses Of The Erotic

According to Audre Lorde, the erotic is a resource within each of us “that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” Oppressive forces aim to suppress this type of power, particularly in women, because of the erotic’s ability to facilitate change. Lorde says, “For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect, we can require no less of ourselves.” Once one gets a true taste of the erotic, there is no going back to a status quo that encourages mediocrity and unintentional feelings. The erotic is both a call to action to make work “a conscious decision” and an invitation to celebrate the erotic in all our endeavors where the end is joy. Like all first principles, the lawyer’s task is to make it actionable. Therefore, what I am proposing is Black erotic lawyering.

Rejecting Legal Pornography

The opposite of the erotic is pornography. Pornography is the suppression of true feeling that contributes to a capitalistic impulse to relegate connection to consumption. Lorde is clear that the principal horror of any system is one that defines good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need. Legal pornography is thus a legal practice that suppresses feeling and merits profit. At its worst, the lawyer becomes what Lorde calls an “ascetic.” Ascetism is marked by fear, immobility, and self-abnegation masked as self-discipline. To be clear, erotic lawyering recognizes human needs, including financial ones, yet money is merely a means, not an end.

The first step is to reject the places and spaces that require the suppression of self and incentivize asceticism. This can seem radical, especially in a law school context that is literally and figuratively “buttoned up.” The goal is to find feeling, whether in a private fund or private prison. The litmus test for the “work cultures” she should seek are the ones that won’t require her to self-abnegate.

Knowing Joy

The erotic underlies an open and fearless capacity for joy. Therefore, the charge is simple: do the law that brings you joy. The writing, questioning, connecting, and exegeting that wakes you up in the morning. For example, my erotic mandate propels me toward beauty. I find joy in (1) feeling beautiful, (2) experiencing beauty in all its artistic forms, and (3) theorizing Beauty as a source of political thought. I enjoy writing about how Black Beauty is a new frontier of political formation or how guns act as political cosmetic accessories (Guns are a Thing of Beauty). I likewise find feeling in my hatred of the American criminal legal system, our modern capitulation of slavery, that feeds on the Black body.

CONCLUSION: Other Food Besides Success

In “The Path of the Law,” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. encourages the audience to utilize the more general aspects of law to master one’s calling, connect with the universe, and “catch an echo of the infinite.” In this way, Holmes and Lorde sing a similar song, and I feel called to hum its tune. Perhaps being a lawyer means you are never too far from God. Then the question becomes, which God? What if she’s the god of water, femininity, beauty, and the erotic?

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