It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

im still revising...

Paper Title

-- By JoshuaHochman - 16 Apr 2010

On the threshold of adulthood, just about every career appears to have a set of protocols that governs successes and failures. This makes growing into a career an extremely intimidating process. Law is the quintessential example: centuries of tradition meet contemporary ideas about justice and are played out in courtrooms or boardrooms or Dean & Deluca's across the world.

The weight of tradition that underlies 1L is extremely taxing to somebody who doesn't know what kind of lawyer they want to be just yet. The attorneys depicted in the excerpted chapters of Lawrence Joseph's Lawyerland provide a refreshing breath of blunt clarity to a profession that is too often shrouded in formalities. I argue here that this type of honesty is extremely useful to future attorneys, despite any friction with the formalities of being a law student.

Advocacy

When Robinson is called "vulgar" by the federal prosecutor, his defense incorporates enough dissatisfaction with the criminal justice system to reframe the term. A secondhand account of a secondhand account, the book's description here is largely depictive of misappropriated attention. Why is maintaining the appearance of justice and civility more important than talking about what’s really going on?

Robinson Breaks Through the Charade

A good advocate's path is a fine line to walk. If Robinson had dropped … 'the f-word' … in front of a judge, he would most certainly have been held in contempt, regardless of his clear conscience and righteous intentions. Meanwhile, keeping all aspects of an uphill legal battle bottled up to comply with empty formalities is likely to stifle creative legal thinking. Consider, for example, that Robinson lacked any perspective on the Department of Justice's practice of protecting informants or that the manner in which the cards had been stacked against his 'definitely dumb, not really bad' client. He would be less cynical, perhaps, certainly less prone to resorting to expletives. However, he would have traded away his effectiveness and livelihood. Which Robinson would you want defending you?

From this question I thus gather that the issues facing clients might, and probably should, affect their advocates in a powerful way. It would be hard to imagine an oblivious Robinson using the same language as the Robinson in Lawyerland, just as it would be hard to imagine him turning down clients that he believed to be dishonest. I read Robinson's vulgar language as a manifestation of a stronger personal connection with his casework.

Adversary

The snarky banter flying across the table at Dean & Deluca in "Cerriere's Answer" provides another redefinition of lawyerly conduct. Tharaud and Cerriere, two attorneys on opposite ends of labor and employment law disputes, provoke one another in an exchange of legal perspectives that follows a settlement of their case.

Getting Under One's Skin

The discussion between Tharaud and Cerriere represents two different career paths that are linked by not so dissimilar world views. It is clear that these two attorneys work and thrive in the same legal perspective (in contrast to Robinson and the prosecutor offended by his language). They both seem to know the repercussions of their clients' behavior and have chosen their sides accordingly.

These realities come to light through language that many would describe as 'unprofessional.' In reading their discussion, I am reminded of the subtle ways in which adolescents tease one another by revealing and exploiting sensitive subjects (like Cerriere's wife's job among the types of men he defends or Tharaud's lucrative paydays omitted from her history of advocating for the working class). This exchange humanizes the attorneys in a way that no school-sponsored Q & A or cocktail hour could. The fact that they become genuinely angry reveals that some truth underlies the criticisms put forth by their adversaries—that there is some semblance of self-doubt and ambivalence that may endure despite great commitments and successes.

---

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. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line:

# * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, JoshuaHochman

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of that line. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated list