Poets and Lawyers

-- By DianaSidakis - 27 Feb 2009

Holmes and the Universal

Holmes’s defense of jurisprudence in the final paragraph of “The Path of the Law” echoes Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry.” To study law well, in order to become a good reader of sibylline leaves, Holmes wants his reader to stop confounding law with morality and to stop relying on the illusion of logic. The study of history and economics can better inform the ends we should seek to attain through law and why we desire them. Holmes ends his essay encouraging his reader to find happiness; happiness that will not be satisfied by an impressive title or salary. Instead, Holmes encourages finding happiness and satisfaction through jurisprudence. He describes a movement from the particular to the universal- to catch a hook in the universal law. To this end, philosophers of law are like the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Universal Law?

What is universal law? As Holmes describes it, universal law is something infinite, unfathomable, grasped by the lawyer who connects her work with something greater. I would be taking Holmes too literally if I could transpose human rights law for universal law. The rights protected in instruments like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are the products of power. The rights articulated and protected are no more universal than one society’s leaders pronouncing what is necessary for their continued existence. Using the word “Universal” in the title or in the body of the instrument draws down the universal to political spheres of power. Property, social security, privacy, and marriage, to take a few examples from the instruments, are intensely cultural elements of personhood that could not articulated universally.

The Universal that Holmes speaks of seems at once more individualized and more general than the concept of universal human rights as embodied in law. Perhaps that is a necessary trade off in turning a personal philosophical exercise into a political-legal document. I can write of human rights as a movement out of compassion and equality, yet that movement will end with me. I do not want to be a politician or an acknowledged legislator; I came to law school so I could learn to use the tools that already exist and that do change the world. The “Universal” of Universal Human Rights attracts me, even as I am aware that like all legal instruments, these rights are the products of power, politics, and exclusion.

Tiresias, Cassandra, and other Prophets of the Ages

As Holmes writes of lawyers, Shelley also writes of poets as prophets. A lawyer will predict the application of law to her client and help her client structure his choices accordingly. A poet writes of the beauty, tragedy, and life of her time. The poet experiences the present intensely and participates in the eternal and infinite in the moment; making her conceptions, time, and place irrelevant. Maybe I am stretching too far in connecting Holmes to Shelley but I like to imagine that when I become a lawyer I could also be a poet. “A Defence of Poetry” parallels “The Path of Law” in values and in how the authors instruct their fellow lawyers and poets to live. But I wonder if the prophetic and unacknowledged legislator qualities of lawyers and poets have more to do with the properties of words, rather than the properties of the profession. Words make social change. Lawyers, poets, teachers, bankers, and possibly anyone using words, can create social change.

Language and Social Change

I came to law school to learn how to use words to make social change, but maybe I should put the pressure in reverse. Instead of learning the magical incantations that will create social change, by perpetuating a system of illusory logic and unequal justice, maybe I should study social change. What is social change? What type of social change would I seek? What type of social change could I create as a student, a lawyer, a poet, a daughter, or a friend? The ability of language to make social change is a property of language. This property is amplified in lawyers by the force of the state. This property is drained from poets who have limited audiences, resources, and power. As a friend or as a daughter, my ability to use words to create social change is limited and granted by trust and love. In any of these roles, the personal (friend, daughter), the professional (lawyer, student), or imaginary (poet), I have difficulty with manipulation. I feel guilty and uncomfortable when I lie; I do not want to go through life feeling that way. Neither would I want to become numb to those dark feelings. To draw back to Holmes, if my universal law moves out of compassion, manipulation seems a counterforce, a concession to playing the game as it already exists.

This theme remind me of “Lapis Lazuli” by Yeats:

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep. 

On the personal level, manipulating those around me makes me uncomfortable because it shreds the veil of equality and compassion. If the system is predicated on equality and compassion, manipulation would be unnecessary. Yet for now, manipulation may be necessary to win, to have a good career, and a good reputation. It is as inevitable as Ophelia’s and Cordelia’s deaths. Like the actresses, the compassionate lawyers must be worthy of their prominent part and not stop the action to weep. But this poem, or this illusory reasoning, only address what is and not what could be. Is that beyond the power of a lawyer or a poet; or perhaps beyond the power of the individual?

• The topic encourages a certain looseness of structure. So it would be wrong, I think, to complain that there is not a clear movement through the transitions in the track of a single idea. Resonance, on the other hand, you do achieve, at the expense of some possibility of being thought naive. Perhaps the way to make the essay just as evocative but not as ethereal would be to ask a little bit more, as you propose to do, about the meaning of "social change." Correctly voiced, it seems to me, you have a chance to show why it is that such a reach will not too far exceed one's grasp.