Writing about thinking about thinking about life, death, the law, and law-studentry

-- By MattBurke - 02 Mar 2015

1. In which the law and law-studentry are discussed

First, in the casebooks, that is first-in-time: The law student finds the law first-in-time in the casebooks in the bleary hours of the night. Or, since the law student prefers the ritual of falling asleep with his wife to that of reading late into the night, he finds the law first-in-time in casebooks in the bleary hours of the morning. He learns, in a red book about Civil Procedure, that casebooks do not contain law, they contain “evidence of the law.” Swift v. Tyson.

Second, the law student, for a class called “ConLaw,” reads a case about abortion. In a dissent, the law student reads:

The dissenter connects a decision about abortion to a decision about the citizenship of “the unhappy black race.” Since he was a slave, Mr. Dred Scott was not a citizen, and therefore he did not have “the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution.” Dred Scott v. Sandford. Inspired by the austere logic, the law student re-imagines Casey:

Conceive, from “com-,” intensive prefix, and “capere,” "to take.” The mother who conceives is taken with child. The fetal child is the actor that takes. We rule that the ability to take, that is, to have a discernable effect in the world impossible but-for the presence of the actor, constitutes life.

Life is not synonymous with citizenship. The word “citizen” means a person of the United States. The question before us is, whether the class of lives described by petitioners are constituent members of this sovereignty. We think they are not. On the contrary, they are a class of potential citizens subordinate to those beings who have entered into the polity of the United States. Although lives, therefore, they are a class of lives worthy of protection only as potential citizens.

Third, the law student visits an old friend, who, regarding the student’s newfound studentry, asks: “Have you learned meaning of justice yet?” They laugh. Next, the friend asks: “Then what have you learned?” The student tells his friend about a sad old judge whose sadness became a symbol to some—a symbol for meanings both that the judge foresaw and those for the judge unforeseeable. He tells his friend about a portrait. The friend interrupts. “Like Goya,” the friend says. The friend explains—a Spaniard artist who refused to flatter his patrons, painting instead their ugliness, but so painting so deftly that the aristocracy patronized him all the same.

“Yes,” says the law student. “The law can be in that regard very much like Goya.”

2.

First, old memories visit the law student. With his mother at her office, he’s bored. A man offers to shake his hand. They shake. After, the man gives the law student a piece of candy. The law student’s mother explains: “He’s a partner.” This is the law student’s earliest memory of that word. When the law student hears the word again—this time in its general usage—he experiences the disorientation common to learning children: “Partner” means “man with authority and a distant affect.” How can it also mean “companion”?

Second, before the law student began practicing law studentry, he was a teacher. He taught high school history. His curriculum contained a lesson about a Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board, which he later read for “ConLaw.” After explaining to his students things they already knew, he would ask a question whose answer was already known. He would ask: “Why, at this school, are the only white people teachers?”

Third, the student recalls a trial, the boy who shot up the student’s high school. The student remembers his parents’ divorce proceedings and his great-grandmother’s will—the two silver bars devised to the student’s mother when the student was four years old. Those, he thinks, are not the law. They are alternating weekends, silver bars, and an incarcerated boy, who, many years ago, was my friend, and who, when last I saw him, wore an orange jumpsuit, now an incarcerated man.

3. In which life and death are applied to the law and law-studentry

Thinking about thinking about the law and law-studentry is useful in this way: he who understands me easily recognizes these thoughts as senseless, when he has read through them, on them, over them.

First, Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” dedicating a cemetery for some of those who died in Dread Scott’s “consequences for the Nation,” was 27% of the length of this writing. When he finished orating, Lincoln said: “That speech won’t scour,” as a plow baked in Illinois mud won’t scour.

He was right. But not every tool is a plow, and not everything we work with is a rail needing to be split. He knew that too. He was turning mud into marble, which requires what he brought to the task.

Today, Lincoln is in a vault buried 10 feet into the Illinois mud.

But he is also Father Abraham, the statue in our most beautiful and humane temple of democracy. He does not lie only in the mud of Illinois, but sits also on a chair of wisdom, ennobled by Daniel Chester French as he ennobled the men buried in the mud at Gettysburg, in mud turned marble by the endlessness of time, with elegance and power, as he deserves.

Second, the law student imagines the pile of words, words about life, death, the law, and law-studentry, he’ll write before he meets his mud. He hopes at least 27%—or 27% of 27%—of them are any good.

Third rate analysis of the analysis of first rate minds. That describes, thinks the law student, the practice, if not of law, then of law-studentry.

Except that not all the minds analyzed are first-rate?

I think you are intentionally wrong in saying this is a bad first draft. (Sorry, you will not get quite that much boost for improvement.)

You are right that the economy could be improved, mostly by shortening your imagined judicialism: you're right again that the conventional judicial style of the present has no respect for economy, but you cannot afford to imagine the error at your own expense. A. Lincoln possessed economy, as he possessed many other skills as a writer, in perfection. Nothing ever is harmed by imitating his effort to use only the necessary words.

Conceptually, your only weakness here is a need to explain the jokes, and also the serious parts. If you can present them without feeling the need to comment on them, they will scour. Well begun.