Working within the Rigidly Ridiculous System

-- By Leyla Hadi - 25 Feb 2013

Questions and Answers at Interviews

I have been on a few job interviews for a summer position now. Why did you decide to go to law school? What type of law do you see yourself practicing and/or where do you see yourself taking your career? These questions require me to distort the truth when I respond, because the raw truth of those answers wouldn't be appropriate at a job interview. So, I say the truth, but in the best possible light.

Why did you decide to go to law school?

Distorted version: I wanted to do something challenging with my career, but, being twenty-one, I wasn't sure what that was, and I didn't want to force myself down a particular route. People I spoke with advised me to consider law school, where I would be in a challenging environment that would open many more doors for me. So, I took their advice and took a year off in between to work at a law firm and see if I could see myself in the legal world. Turns out, I could.

Truth: I decided to go to law school because I had no idea what else to do with my life. I knew that I wanted to stay in the US. I knew that I wanted to do something. A part of me wanted to do good/fight for issues that I care strongly about. Another wanted to get rich. Another wanted to act. The world was my oyster; but not really, because life puts a gun to your head and forces you to make decisions. Practical stuff gets in the way. A visa. Money. Stability.

If the world were my oyster, I definitely would not be in law school.

What type of law do you see yourself practicing and/or where do you see yourself taking your career?

Distorted version: I am actually not sure what I would like to do. I definitely find areas of practice interesting, including IP and labor law, but I haven't had enough exposure to really be able to say at this time.

Truth: I have no idea where I see myself taking my career; and I have no idea what type of law I see myself practicing. I want to figure it out, and the classes thus far have done little to help. Granted, there are a ton of resources here, from professors, to clinics, to courses. But how does any of it help me decide, help me with the choice? How will working at your firm this summer guide me? It won't. LGBT rights, immigration reform, criminal justice system reform, advocating against the death penalty, advocating for the legalization of marijuana, education reform, working with music leasing, bringing down evil corporations, working on US-Pakistan relations, representing the Lakers, representing celebrities, abortion… there is so much I am interested in but again, there's a gun to my head. I can't just jump from each area like I live in some kind of gargantuan legal rotational system. I have to go down a path. Even if I do end up working at a firm, how do I know where to go that will help me learn about any of the above?

How do we know this is "the truth"? It seems to at least one reader like defeatist nonsense. How can we bridge the difference or find out which view is more "true"?

What I Want

My career isn't the most important thing to me. I don't want it to be. But I want it to be important, and I want it to be meaningful, and I don't think I want to be "influential".

Why "shame"? Who's shame? Nothing for those people to be ashamed of for whom their work provides their lives with its most important meaning. Whether that's 51% of the meaning or 99% is nothing for us to be judging or for them to feel judged about: the issue for judgment, on all sides, is what that meaning is.

The people in my life are more important. And naive as it may seem, I believe I have found the person I want to walk through this ridiculous and magical and abysmal world with; and so for me, to deal with the practical, real world stuff, I want to be able to make money so that we can live well. That includes paying off debt, which is something I've never had to deal with before, and terrifies the crap out of me. I'll do what I have to do for a while. And then, I can do some of the more interesting stuff, when I can afford to. But I have realized that meaning in my life will also, necessarily, derive from work. So since I am here, and I have two years to go, I better do what I can to figure it out.

But the people we love when we are young we often do not love at all when we have grown and they have not, or they have grown and we have not. The divorce rate is 50% where happiness and self-development are cultural priorities, and if I had a penny for every marriage in non-divorcing cultures that turns sexless, joyless and oppressive the moment the first boy-child is born, I could support both you and me in comfort for the rest of our lives. Children grow up and leave, often having found the parents who love them neither interesting nor tolerable. You can say that the meaning of your life will be found not in work you value, but in the people you love. That's probably as naive and unrealistic a statement as to hold that only meaningful work matters, and that human relationships are irrelevant in a life well lived.

Why would we frame the question in these terms? First, why should we put meaningful work any less or more in the front of our ambitions than human relationships we value? (Second, of course, why should we put the pitiful illusion of the monogamous nuclear family forward as the ideal or desirable type of human relationship structure necessary for the living of a good life?) You should have a life filled with work that matters to you and suffuses your life with meaning. You should also have loving companions, exciting sex partners, and people to educate, care for, and share life with. Those should not be opposed poles; they are objectives, equally important, which the strategy of your life deploys all available resources to achieve.

Why

Maybe it is my general pessimistic attitude about the world and how forces of evil are more powerful than forces of good, even though the forces of good are still definitely forces, creating change, moving us forward as a civilization in which people are more important than the whims and fancies of corporations and governments.

Maybe what is? This sentence has no subject. As for the predicate, Manichean worldview, it's perfectly compatible with happiness and meaningful existence. As Ambrose Bierce joked in The Devil's Dictionary, the Manichean can always decide to join the victorious forces of darkness. Or one can do the other thing. I haven't the slightest idea whether the justice for which I'm working is going to triumph or be destroyed in my lifetime, whether the young people I teach are going to grow strong and determined for justice, or be pushed down and wiped out. I have no way of knowing whether my life's work will come to fruition or be reduced to ashes. But the effort is meaningful to me, for its own sake, every day.

Maybe I have realized that the structure of the way we exist as humans is totally absurd and mind-boggling, and we just have to do what we can to fit into it and play by its rules, and live in society, and go to school, and get a job, and have a family. Maybe I just don't think that it's worth my time to fight for a miniscule piece of change in this giant system of ridiculousness and wrongs right now, and that, right now, I need to pay off my debts, find a job that will sponsor my work visa, and try and learn as much as I can while I do it. Learn what not to become maybe – there's sometimes more value in that than learning what to become.

Maybe, but done at the start of one's adult life, it's not very informative, when so much else remains to be decided on the basis of so little.

I suppose the answer to what kind of lawyer I want to be is a happy one. When we first received the prompt for this assignment, I wrote down the various topic ideas that came to mind, either through reading cases or general observations. For example, I thought of manslaughter and how sad it is that someone can be thrown into prison for a pure accident,

Are you sure that's a fair characterization of the elements of a manslaughter conviction?

and why it exists and how to change it. But I'm sure thousands of people have had the same thoughts, and yet, it still exists. Change is hard. Right now, I can't worry about changing a world that might not exist tomorrow. I can just worry about me and the people I love.

I don't understand the two instances of "worry" in this sentence as synonymous. The way one thinks about a problem one is solving and the anxiety one experiences in an intimate relationship can both be described as "worry," but to do so is to confuse matters rather than illuminating them. As you will find when the time comes, the two forms of human interaction can be mutually-reinforcing rather than competitive. In particular, the presence of work that lends meaning to life helps one to reduce the anxiety that transfuses the intimate relationships, perhaps even allowing one to stop worrying quite so much about the people one loves, which is good for them.

The draft is valuable, precisely because we should now be able to move beyond it in the next one. The snowdrift of rationalizations that the language throws up will melt in the sunshine, or can at worst be carted away. That will leave us standing on a clean slate, damp at most. Having blown away the idea that personal satisfaction in relationships is opposed in any way to the search for meaningful work, we can begin to address the question as one of strategy, which is what it is: Possessed of certain resources, and given these two objectives, how should I structure my practice so as to attain as much of both my objectives as I can within the reach of my resources?

The immigration question, on the other hand, is a tactical question. A specific limited objective must be reached given particular resources specifically limited. As Robinson says, a lawyer is a person who knows how to solve a legal problem. You and I should talk about this one in the near future.