Orienting My Professional Life

As I finish my 1L year, I can’t make my response to the “in order to change the world you have to know what you want and how to get it” mantra much more precise than "in general I want to do satisfying work that helps others and at some point I’d like to be in a position to help musicians". So in this paper I’d like to assess what I need to do in order to have a more precise answer to that question, so that I can plan the rest of my time at Columbia. I feel that what I’m missing is sense of where I will stand as a lawyer in relation to large-scale social problems. I need some way to orient myself and my work. In my first paper I tried to get a grasp of the type of thinking lawyers do from an ethically neutral position. My second brought back an ethical perspective – concluding that I need to have actual clients and to be able to see the effects of my work on actual people. Now I’d like to explore what I need to do in order to make my work fit into an overarching strategy that is adequate to large-scale social problems.

A Strategic Perspective

In the past I oriented myself either religiously or politically. If thought that if I did unto others as I would have them do unto me, then the big picture stuff would all work itself out. Politically, if I was voted democrat then I was a good liberal, and eventually the world would realize its mistakes and “progress”. But I’ve gradually lost faith that if I do the right things on a micro-level the larger things will fall into place naturally.

My first paper explored an alternative to these smooth and teleological ideologies by embracing the irreducible complexity of the real world. There’s a certain nihilistic joy in bathing in chaos – “complexity so intricate, none can fathom it” as Wylie puts it – but while necessary for creativity, such aesthetic disorganization can become impotent and aimless when taken to the extreme.

Rather than burying my head in facts or steering by faith alone, I need to learn how to see things strategically from a global perspective. I need some way to structure the flood of information from the outside in order to orient my work in the world. How can I do this in a livable way, so that I’m not a martyr to the real? How can I avoid just sticking my head in the sand and plowing ahead with whatever practice I end up having – hoping in the end that it will serve a good purpose?

I need to develop my ability to read large-scale events. Let me try to use the methodology of this class by applying different disciplinary approaches in a conciliant manner.

A Collective Event – Cannibalism and the Common Law

The trial of Dudley and Stephens, reconstructed in Cannibalism and the Common Law provides ample material for such an analysis.

The trial of Dudley and Stevens was an inflection of the application of the public force. It was an orchestrated clash between what a subgroup of the English people thought the English people should be, and what they actually were. On the level of social psychology, we can understand the trial as an effort of a collective super-ego to reconcile the harsh reality of what happened in the dingy with the English imperial self-image. The historical reality of the situation is that this event takes place in the middle of European colonial exploitation of Africa. In the end, the government succeeded in reinforcing the notion that the English are different from the cannibals that they were killing elsewhere.

What if Dudley & Stevens v. Regina came out the other way? On an individual level, two individuals would have been spared the collective opprobrium of the English People. Some pompous opinion writing would have been avoided. More importantly though, the acquittal of two English cannibals would have poked a hole in England’s conception of itself as a superior race. It wouldn’t reveal a pretty part of reality (cannibalism), but it would work in a small way towards a people having a more just understanding of who they are. There would be no drastic or immediate change, just a small release of the grip of a damaging ideology on the collective mind.

A defense lawyer could have knowingly brought about this outcome. He would have had to orient himself in the political context – making the connection between the killing of “mere cannibals” and this trial. He would have needed to have correctly read the forces he was up against and what they wanted. He would have needed to have understood the real “legal problem”, in Robinson’s sense of the term, that was driving the actual trial. If he would orient himself in this way, and if he was as skillful a defense counsel as Robinson, then he would stand a chance of opening up a crack in the English self-image – a significant accomplishment.

Going Forward

So it is possible for lawyers to consciously and strategically affect collective thought, so long as they can correctly read social events. What do I need to learn, in addition to simply more law, in order to understand my world? Looking at the layers we saw the first day of class, I’m weakest on history. While I’m at Columbia, I need to learn how to place legal events in a historical context, so that I can do it on my own later. I should take some history courses both in the law school and at Columbia. I should talk with professors about the how their practices (if they have them) fit into a larger strategies of social change. If I can do that, I think that I’ll be in a much better position to know what I need to do with my license when I get it.