A Boating Betabilitarian

-- By NonaFarahnik - 18 Feb 2010

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

One Does Not Speak of a Successful Trial Lawyer as a Great Scholar of the Law.

For Arnold, social institutions are a necessary corollary to human sociality. Though we are all empirically related, our social organizations and institutions can work to suppress our kinship and to separate us from them. As I see it, every organization--from a little league baseball team to a paper office in Scranton to Goldman Sachs-- operates with a unique institutional culture furthered by self-fulfilling propaganda. An easy way to see the functioning of these orders is when Potential New Members choose between competing institutions: fraternity rush, admitted student days, law firm happy hours, etc.

Coupled with our sociality (and perhaps developed alongside it), is our desire for a narrative with inherent meaning and order. Our need for order stifles our ability to recognize how more pervasive and ordering institutions might manipulate public attitude and sentiment to a calculated end. Thus, we recognize these forces only when the context of the institution's functioning is benign (Santa), or so blatant as to make us uncomfortable about its effectiveness. Otherwise, we operate as if these forces do not exist. This is reflected through the purposive content, but underlying irony of the New York Times’ Where Fear Turns Graphic.

We ignore the less identifiable and more difficult ways by which powerful institutions bombard us with particular attitudes and creeds. This ignorance perpetuates the separation borne of institutional identification, and leads to moral rationalization grounded in institutional folklore, not in reality. A simple experiment to witness this phenomenon can be performed by watching the Fox News Channel during prime time. Journalism today mostly serves to help obfuscate what is actually happening in the world around us (particularly from 2:45).

If institutions unconsciously move us by creating some notion of a general will whose furtherance demands the suppression of the particular, we should be focused on improving the frameworks of society's most basic structures so they are more just. My license will also be a membership to one of the world's most powerful institutions-- the American legal system. How can I use my membership to increase the share of justice in a world devoid of ascertainable moral standards? I will seek to be Holmes’ betabilitarian: I cannot measure my choices against a normative standard, but against my predictions on how people behave. The only choice I have is to measure risk and place my bets.

Tzedek Tzedek, Tirdof

The Sea

On one hand, Law in Contemporary Society is a class like any other— it has a slot on our schedules, we get credit, and there will be a grade on our transcripts. On the other hand, this class is a holistic thinking exercise that fosters our personal goals and our relationships with one other. Eben achieves this is by designing this class to appeal to our human sociality and by harnessing the forces that led us to choose to attend law school. Eben is a master institutional architect.

The rituals of the classroom--the music, the lively debate, Eben’s knowledge and war stories, the crowded office hours where students spill out into the hallway-- reinforce Eben's mythology. The wiki adds additional dimensions to the institution's reach and gives us time to play with how we might organize our own institutional efforts. Someone can reroute the wiki's pipelines with a new folder scheme tomorrow, or with little effort as to the how, someone can just participate in this collaborative community. The Changes page is the intellectual version of the Facebook newsfeed (and the bios, our profiles).

Eben uses the larger mythology of Columbia Law School to give us a logical structure as to why we must seek more and the ways we might do so. Eben and his class inspire me to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

My Feet on the Street (or Marble). Where Do I Start?

Professor Wu used this metaphor to illustrate something he experienced in his work as a Supreme Court clerk: we put our best and brightest into surgery when we need people in preventative care. We have court-appointed defense lawyers who sleep during a capital murder trial, and a pro-bono firm partner taking the case at the appellate level when the client is already on death row. I want to go into preventative care.

* My Legal Education. I go to faculty and industry lectures, interact in student groups, participate in student government, and make use of office hours. I won't bemoan the cost of my tuition until I take full advantage of its possibilities. I plan to wring out the educational value of every dollar I put into this place, and then some.

* My Legal Institution. I want to contribute to shaping Columbia while I am here so that it brings out the best in us as students, as colleagues, and as future advocates.

* My License. I want to continue use the time before I have my license to learn how to be a most effective advocate and representative for others.

Building My Boat(s)

This class cultivates my desire to build my own fleet so that in the future I can tack in every direction. Right now, I am building a simple Sunfish that can sail--even if there is little room aboard and it cannot go very fast or far. I want to build a racing trimaran that can cut through the water at ridiculous speeds. I will build a motorboat for when the wind dies down but I still have somewhere to go. I want to build a yacht where I can enjoy the fruits of my labor. And I want to be so good at building boats that I engender trust from my clients, and inspire others to build on their own.

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