Future Conflict

-- By DianaAvila - 22 Feb 2024

Introduction

One of the first questions you are asked when you are young is “what do you want to be when you grow up?” And at that age, the sky's the limit. I remember hearing things like actresses, astronauts, and pro soccer players. And in all honesty, all of that seemed super fun and interesting for us. But yet that was never really my thing. Sometimes I thought maybe I could be a teacher or even the president. These careers just never seemed fulfilling to me. So I kept searching until it finally clicked.

Choosing a Path

For as long as I could remember, that said click led me to wanting to be an attorney. And that is what I have wanted to be ever since. It is intriguing to me that somehow by the age of eight years old, I knew exactly what to say when asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I never really struggled with the jumping from career to career although I did think of them. I just could not see myself doing anything else. But truly what did I know at that age? Once I set my mind on it and shared it with others I got a lot of “you have the attitude for it” or the typical “well you are good at arguing.” At first, wanting to be a lawyer was just a career choice, but that was for the younger and more innocent version of myself. That changed fast. As I started to grow, I began to understand the role of the criminal system in communities like mine. We were always being surveilled by the sheriffs that stayed on our campuses. As well as being searched randomly by these deputies and sometimes even their K-9s. It was like a part of my life was always being exposed to officers. This was only the tip of the iceberg. The older we got the more violent things got. A lot of my loved ones were affected by the system directly and these searches became arrests.Then officers turned into courtrooms. It was almost as if I had known what life was going to be like for me. And the more I lived these experiences the more I realized that younger me had a purpose in choosing to be an attorney. Everything I went through just reinforced my idea of wanting to be a criminal defense attorney. It was a way that I knew could help protect communities like mine whether it was through ardent defense or simply making the legal system accessible to those who did not understand it. Because aside from being criminalized my community was mainly composed of low-income households who oftentimes were Spanish speakers only. The process of hiring a private attorney was too costly or simply understanding legal jargon can be too difficult. And I have always wanted to be that bridge.

Life Choosing for Us

Yet I know this experience probably isn’t unique to me. I often think about how many of us have chosen our career paths from past experiences, traumas, etc. Many of the people who I have met that are pursuing “higher education,” have their reasons for pursuing their career. For example, many of the people I have met that are going to medical school, they chose this path because of lack of resources in their community or even their own experience with the inaccessibility of that specific system. Some of the people that I know that want to do education are doing it because they went into low-income education systems and saw how it impacted them. But there is always a very visible connection. Somehow, some way our career paths have been almost “chosen” for us. We have allowed for personal experiences or community based issues to sway our decisions for the rest of our lives. And we somehow carry that weight. Well at least I know I do. However, I would like to understand what sways those people who do not have these experiences. I would like to understand how they came about choosing their career paths. And if they follow through with them.

Inner Conflict

The issue with allowing my lived experiences to sway me and what may be a trend is this idea of “tunnel vision.” As soon as I decided what I wanted to do, I never took my foot from the pedal. Everything I did ranging from internships to jobs were catered to that. However, a very hard blow I took was actually coming to law school. This was one of my first experiences really understanding what I could do with a law degree that did not require me to relive my past trauma or even find other ways to impact communities like mine. And the more I grapple with different material, the more I contemplate my why.

The Now

And when I say that, I don’t mean I regret coming or that I do not want to continue, but more so thinking about the kind of attorney I want to be. In Law and Contemporary Society we are always grappling with what kind of attorney we want to be and whether following some kind of “standard” is even beneficial to us. I find myself thinking about this a lot, but a sense of guilt always gets triggered. Contemplating a different kind of law because it could give me the life I want to live or just because it seems intriguing, makes me feel like I am abandoning my community.

Conclusion

So I often wonder if this feeling of guilt is a collective one or if this specific feeling is unique to me unlike the first one. And for those that did not let life form their career paths, how is it that they manage or figure out what they want? My curiosity lies within how people choose what they want to do with their lives because what seemed to me in the past as very black and white, has now added the color gray to the picture.

This does well the crucial job of a first draft: it tells us what you want to write about and clears the ground. Now we can begin to make the building better.

One route to improvement is careful editing. The writing is unnecessarily repetitive. Many ideas are expressed more than once. So the task, once the substance is in place, is to make sure that every word in each sentence is pulling its weight: those that are not doing necessary work must go. Each sentence should express an idea that has not been expressed before, that builds on what has already been said, and that does unique work in the paragraph, or it too must go.

But our most important task in improving the essay is in its substance. The subject of the essay is the future, but almost all of what is in the first draft is about the past. So let's try a draft which is about its subject, in which the past is prologue. The autobiography is the right beginning, but we can do in six sentences what here takes 800 words. The essential points might be sketched roughly as follows (though I am not trying at all to use your tone or give them your personal resonance):

Since at least third grade, I have wanted to be a lawyer, a criminal defense lawyer in particular. I grew up in over-policed places, constantly exposed to the power of the cops, and even their dogs. As I grew up, my family, my friends and my neighbors were subjected to the random power of the criminal justice system: arrest, trial, imprisonment and ruin. I felt the possibility, and the obligation, to be their defender. All my choices in school and in work have been made to further that objective. But now that I am in law school, I feel a conflict between the work I feel I grew up to do and a broader sense of the possibilities that lawyering might hold for me.

I'm sure that those aren't the right 125 words. You would want to use more, and different ones, no doubt. But even if the introduction were twice as long as my cartoon, that would still leave three quarters of the space to use for your current ideas about your future, and about the learning those new ideas make you want to dive into. Writing i a mode of cognition, a way of knowing. Making such a draft, structuring carefully your sense of new possibilities and new doubts, would be very valuable for you. When you come back to that essay—later in law school and afterwards—you will see that it captured a precious moment in your professional development.

Lawyering is about the conflicts we experience when we represent others in the pursuit of justice. Obligation to clients; our own needs—material, intellectual, moral, political, social—our courage and our fears; what we owe and what we believe we are owed; our powers granted by the state and contained in our licenses as against our powerlessness in the face of systems of injustice: all of these conflicts, internal and external, are embodied in the lawyers we become. Your growing sensitivity to those conflicts is a new power, a power to shape yourself in adulthood, developing out of, but also leaving behind, what your childhood gave you. Together let us use it. There is so very much to gain.

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