As Eben so quietly pointed out in class, it is easy to damn Joe Stack. Flying an airplane into a building and killing someone is wrong. Was Joe Stack a bad person? That is an easy question to answer and does not lead to anything that I don't already know. A better question is: What does Joe Stack teach me about being a lawyer?

Who was Joe Stack? He was an engineer. Joe Stack was also person who saw injustice and tried to correct it as an engineer would, at least originally. He tried to hack the system. Similarly, John Brown attempted to make change by using his skills as a surveyor and quartermaster. Martin Luther King preached to organize, motivate, and persuade people. David Walker sewed pamphlets into the suits he tailored. All these people used their profession in a creative way to try to correct what they perceived as injustice.

Whether their tactics were effective is of little interest to me as a future lawyer as they were not legal tactics. Studying their strategies is more helpful but only as far as they can be applied to the legal profession. Judging them as good or bad people is of no use to me at all. What is helpful, and admirable, to me is that all of these men refused to crank or listen to the bullshit machine that rationalized the injustice that surrounded them. What caused them to stop the crank varies but they all did it and tried to do something about that injustice.

As a future lawyer, I am in a position to change injustice in a manner that is accepted by society. A lawyer's job, to paraphrase Eben, is to make change through the use of words. A lawyer has unique access to and influence on those who control the use of the state's power. Unlike Joe Stack, I will be able to affect change in a way that was not available to him. But in order to do that, I will first need to stop listening to the bullshit machine. That is what I learned about being a lawyer from Joe Stack.

-- JohnAlbanese - 26 Feb 2010