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Law in Contemporary Society
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I've Seen the Other (White) Shoe Drop...In December, 2009, my brother, then in his 3L year at another New York law school, got a terse email from a partner for whom he had worked the previous summer. The email doesn’t require an “in a nutshell” summary because the email was itself a nutshell: the partners were defecting; the firm was dissolving; his offer of full-time employment had been revoked. I won’t demean him by attempting to reduce the past three years—his struggle to find meaningful work, our family’s fear and concern for his mental well-being—to a thousand words, even though it would be illuminating. Rather, I tell his story to provide context....But I Persist in DisbelievingLike many in this class, I am still considering working in “big law” after graduation. Perhaps this admission is shocking given what I’ve just disclosed, but I can’t see why it should be. Every person in this law school knows, at least on an abstract level, what I know personally from watching my brother twist in the wind: the associate cogs in the big law machine are cheap, expendable, and apparently not even worth a five minute phone call when the other (white) shoe drops. I am interested in understanding the following: why do I continue to consider pursuing a career path that I rationally understand is harmful?Functionalism Sheds some Light...Most friends, acquaintances, and family members who ask me why I might want to work at a law firm accept as an answer some combination of the following: I need to earn a salary reflective of the effort and expense I’ve incurred attending law school; I seek to do interesting, intellectual work; and I hope that a prestigious law firm position will provide the training and legal seal of approval necessary to ultimately do the work I came to law school to do. I find these responses increasingly lacking when I view them through the functionalist lens propounded by Cohen. I have tried to ask myself what each justification above actually does, not what it purports to do. For example, what is the significance of the fact that I will graduate law school with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt? It purports to be a limiting factor in my career trajectory: because I owe money, I must choose a path that will allow me to pay it back. What it actually does is nothing more or less than force me make a choice about whether I will pay this debt back and if so, on what time table. The choice I make may trigger numerous outcomes, and I may have a higher or lower preference for each that I will try to estimate in advance of choosing what I will do. That I owe money doesn’t tell me what I have to do or what I should do, it only sets out a decision tree whose branches I define. This analysis, which holds when I look to the kind of work I want to do and the training I need to do it, is not liberating as one might think. Rather, it is anxiety-inducing. Whereas previously I could convince myself that I at least had good reasons for persisting in my belief that pursuing a job in a law firm “made sense,” I now do so absent any justification I can provide to myself that I find sufficient. This is psychologically perplexing because I consider myself a rational person....But not Enough to Overcome Cognitive DissonanceEben mentioned cognitive dissonance once briefly in class, and I looked it up because I do that in law school classes to understand the words professors use so that I, too, can learn law-speak or at least how to fake it. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory is that people are motivated to eliminate dissonance by altering conditions or adding new ones to create consistency in their internal belief systems. There are several ways of doing this, including changing one’s behavior, changing one’s moral judgments of one’s own behavior, or adapting one’s sense of self to make room for the discordant behavior. My cognitive dissonance is that I consider myself a rational person, yet I am making an irrational choice. To make this gel, I first attempted to make the behavior (my choice) seem rational via the justifications I discussed above. These did not hold weight when I considered them fully. More recently, I see myself attempting to change my judgment of my own behavior. I do this in several ways, most notably through comparing myself to my law school group (everyone I know is thinking about firm positions), comparing myself to my broader social network (I know people at firms, and they are still functional adult people with families and degree of happiness), and comparing myself to a conception of myself that I have generated over the course of my life (even if the preponderance of people who work at firms are unhappy and unfulfilled, I won’t be because it is not in my nature). What I have not done is changed the discordant behavior by deciding not to pursue the irrational choice. The only explanation I can provide is that making such a decision requires confidence, which I lack.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. 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