On Friday night there was a dinner for PopTech speakers and organizers. I asked one of them to give me a thumbnail sketch of his talk and almost immediately started challenging him. We had a friendly but fairly probing back-and-forth. It took the form of me questioning him, and him answering me, and me finding fault with his answers, and asking him to try again. It was a bit like a professor grilling a law student with the Socratic method. I liked what he had to say, and agreed with it at core, but thought he was being imprecise with his language, and wanted to push around to find the edges of his philosophy. The topic was property, and I was trying to get him to drill down into the rights and obligations he thought were appropriate, and those he wanted to reject. You can't just dismiss the concept of "property," after all. It's a bundle of rights, and all that. He was gracious about my challenges, assuring me he enjoyed being pushed, and although the subject matter was fairly abstract, the tone was warm and friendly.
There was a small group involved in the conversation, although the primary back and forth was the two of us. One of the fellows in the circle was a first-year law student, listening with big ears. (Another was my friend S, who pulled me aside afterwards and said, "I love your mind. I just love to watch you think." That compliment, along with the conversation itself, was one of the highlights of my weekend. I haven't gotten to think, where other people could watch and join in, for a long time. I enjoy it.) Partway through the conversation I began to wonder if I was being a legalistic ass. Still, I didn't want to let go of my questions. I didn't think his answers were clear. I also began to notice that I found him very attractive. I realized the attraction was distracting me, and I couldn't be sure whether I really liked his ideas or just his eyes. I had to concentrate on what we were saying, while fighting the urge to reach out and touch his arm.
At dinner I turned my attention to a different speaker, asking questions about things he hadn't covered in his talk. Much easier. And fruitful -- one of the biggest ideas I'm mulling over from the conference came from that exchange. My crush was at our table, and from time to time I got pulled back into their conversation, a couple of seats away from me. He would nod or gesture toward me when saying something about "the legal system." By this time I was frazzled and self-conscious. 'But I'm not a lawyer!' I protested. 'I'm a sailing coach.' "Yes, but you think like a lawyer," someone pointed out. It's true. And it's really fun, sometimes. I found myself feeling pretty glad about my law training. I tried to distinguish between legal concepts and language, the framework for describing rights and obligations, which I think can be enlightening and helpful, and the functional bureaucracy and expense of the process of settling disputes through legal means, which doesn't work for a whole lot of the population. Just because legal dispute resolution sucks doesn't mean disciplined, principled distinctions, clearly articulated, aren't useful. I turned to the law student and shrugged. He's still being indoctrinated, but already he knew what I was getting at.
Later, at a party, I stood on the deck overlooking the water with the law student and my crush. The law student told me he really liked seeing people who'd been to law school and weren't working as lawyers. I was still backpedalling, not wanting to be seen as someone who fusses over technicalities. I kicked the acorns around on the porch, and we talked of other things, and I wondered about my self-consciousness. Am I happy about my law degree? Yes. And I'm happy about having practiced law. I enjoyed it. Law school is a really fun kind of thinking. I know I'm sharper, and a clearer thinker, because of law school. Law practice is a whole different set of skills, and I'm glad to have sampled it. Still, I'm even happier to be a recovering lawyer. I feel boxed in if people think of me as a lawyer, first and foremost. It's such a pejorative label.
S- Your thoughts are interesting on law school. I myself never went, but did consider it up to the point of taking the LSAT. When I did an internship my boss (who had her law degree but didn't practice directly) encouraged me strongly to attend law school even if I never practiced, she said the majority of law school graduates don't practice law as their career. I wonder if I'd gotten my JD what would be different.
Posted by: Nicole | October 25, 2005 at 02:31 PM
You really can't escape being a lawyer. You've had the training, you have the tools, and even in a social setting you can't help but bring the mode of thinking that is particular to the law into operation.
It's not an altogether bad thing-- clarity of thought is useful, and one of the nice things about law is that it has a human quality-- as Holmes pointed out, it's not merely logical.
People act as though "lawyer" is a pejorative, but they also trust lawyers-- and with good reason, for the most part. I suppose they trust sailing coaches, too, but they don't seek sailing coaches out when they are looking for someone to hold the money from the sale of their house in escrow. (Prob'ly a pun in there, but I don't want to work it out.)
Posted by: Bill Altreuter | October 25, 2005 at 02:50 PM
Well I hope at some point you reached out and touched his arm! It was a dinner/social conversation, not a cross-examination. Wasn't it?....
Posted by: bill | October 25, 2005 at 03:25 PM
Socratic flirting is the best . . .
And there are very few true "technicalities." If you're worried about something, it surely has a substantive component.
Posted by: The Happy Feminist | October 25, 2005 at 03:32 PM
Wow, Professor: interesting label to assign to yourself. Unless of course, you were the student? I'm sure that's what you meant. I cannot possibly picture you being so pompous as to call yourself a professor.
Posted by: | October 25, 2005 at 05:38 PM
Ouch: Anonymous at 5:38, you got me. But I meant the comparison to be more about the doggedness of the questioner, not the wisdom or authority. I wasn't trying to lead him to any conclusions, because my own grasp of property is pretty foggy, and I respect the real-world experience he had. I just wanted to get my head around the ideas he had, with precision, so I could figure out how different the scheme he was proposing was from the existing one. No, I'm no law professor.
But I was pushing, the way my favorite Torts professor used to. With that professor, everything you said was tested, gently, and if it wasn't clear it was handed back to you to articulate again. By the comparison I meant that our conversation was more interrogatory than your usual conversation. If I'd been a litigator when I practiced I might have made a deposition analogy, but that was never my field, so the law professor as questioner was what occurred to me.
I do feel like the one whose brain got stretched, though. In a good way.
Posted by: Scheherazade | October 25, 2005 at 07:05 PM
My experience having just begun law school in England is that much of the analysis is frustratingly informal, coming as I do from a software engineering background.
In any case, I still don't understand why you feel that the label "lawyer" is pejorative - all political ideologies imply a legal framework, and the biggest problem with most ideologues is that they don't know this, and have no idea of the kind of legal framework they have in mind. This is almost certainly the number two reason why most ideologies go nowhere (the number one reason being that adherents couldn't sell a bar of gold for a fiver). Without lawyers, social reform is quite literally impossible - be proud of that.
Posted by: Marcin Tustin | October 26, 2005 at 12:01 PM
So you want precision? It's a noble goal. But the world, or at least much of what's interesting about it, resists. This makes the law important, yet always fallen. A good thing, I think.
Posted by: rn | October 26, 2005 at 01:00 PM
RN, that's another thing about the law that I found frustrating. It's always behind. The law looks backwards, and is descriptive at best, never predictive. It assumes that the world of tomorrow will be modelled on the world of today. Maybe that's right -- I struggled a lot with that assumption in law school, before coming to accept that there's some soundness in that frame. But it misses innovation and new kinds of relationships, if it can't describe them in terms that are already familiar. The most interesting work of lawyers is in finding new metaphors, I think. Finding ways to link something fundamentally new to something a judge is already comfortable with, that's already been bounded and described and made a part of the legal firmament. But it's a plodding process, too slow to keep up with the things people actually adopt in a changing world.
Posted by: Scheherazade | October 26, 2005 at 02:16 PM
I was just reading a critical edition of The Sound and The Fury and much of the commentary on Faulkner's style focused on his attempts to understand/portray how the past affects the present and is carried into the future. Seems to me that most people attempt that synthesis, consciously or unconsciously, in their own lives. It doesn't shock me that the law attempts the same for the life of a whole society. But hey, it was just a dinner conversation, right?
Posted by: bill | October 26, 2005 at 06:34 PM
Sort of a tautology, no: the law describes what people do and then we hope that people (past, present, or future) obey the law.
Reminds me of Borges: "A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face."
Posted by: rn | October 26, 2005 at 08:28 PM
My sister gave me The Aleph and Other Stories by Borges when I travelled Greece and it was a perfect read for that trip. I was surrounded by incredibly beautiful physical landscapes and Borges was telling/warning me that I was creating my own universe.
Posted by: bill | October 26, 2005 at 08:45 PM
Which is why people trained in the law often wend their way into the political sphere to introduce new law for lawyers and judges to adjudicate.
Posted by: sidhra | October 26, 2005 at 09:32 PM
But it misses innovation and new kinds of relationships, if it can't describe them in terms that are already familiar.
Perhaps this is why you have been drawn to writing, as well. A more creative way to try to describe the world than most legal writing affords. And yet I think it is the challenge of all fields to have to use the known to create the unknown.
It also reminds me much of early pre-feminism, in the way conscribed language and roles were used as a foundation for the arguments for greater equality.
Build from what you know.
Posted by: a | October 27, 2005 at 11:23 AM
I am trying to order the article or the book "Diary of a Young Lawyer", by Maine lawyer Scheherazade (Sherry) Fowler, originally appearing in the March 2005 issue of the ABA Law Practice Management Section's "Law Practice Today" e-bulletin.
Please communicate with Me Karine Boivin Roy to inform me of the price for the book and I would like to obtain that book at my personal address, 713 - 6th Avenue in Lachine, Montreal H8S 2Y6. Thanks to you in advance.
Posted by: | November 09, 2005 at 02:52 PM
I think that this lawyer does not quite get it. The recession decreases potential job opportunities for law school applicants. This drives their opportunity costs for attending law school down and makes them more eager to attend law school.
In fact now may be the right time for them to invest in a legal education and some of the candidates who have decided to attend might be better qualified than the usual crop of law students.
Posted by: r4 | February 06, 2010 at 02:53 AM