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< | I had a cousin named Anushka who was finally engaged to be married. She was twenty-five and just finished with pharmacy school; not quite a medical doctor, but close enough to be a good catch in the Russian-Jewish dating world, even if she was a little on the heavy side. She and her boyfriend had been dating for a good year and a half when he finally made the proposal and together they set out on a grand tour of the continental US where she paraded him in front of her relatives, showing off in equal parts her ring and her catch. Their wedding invitations came in the mail the same week that Anushka and the fiancé made their stop in California before heading off to spend a long weekend with his family in the mountains. By the time of this long weekend, the hotel for the receptions had been booked, the Rabbi hired, the chuppah dusted off, and the grandmothers were already exclaiming to their single grandkids, “Now Anushka is settled and it is your turn next, if only I live to see the day.” (Cue big sigh and hands pressed to the heart). | >
> | On the eve of the last night of my internship, looking at this paper, I realized that the distraction technique of the tangential story wasn’t necessary and the fears that I had attempted to articulate, although ones I had genuinely identified at the time that I wrote the paper, are not valid any longer. I am not afraid that I won’t learn the skills necessary to be a good lawyer; at most I am afraid that I won’t be self-motivated enough to pursue the opportunities to become the lawyer I want to be amidst the constant institutional indoctrination of what is “right” or what you are “supposed to do/be/pursue”. | | | | |
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< | But the week after the ski trip, uneasy ripples began traveling through the family newswires: with only a month to go, the wedding was rumored to be off. What had happened? What could possibly have gone wrong? Then my mom got the phone call. Anushka’s mom called to lament and to share her heavy burden. Although it was hard to get much out of an inconsolable Anushka, the story that was cobbled together was that after the weekend in Colorado, the groom-to-be’s family had been so aghast at my cousin’s table manners (combined with a foot on the table incident) that instead of wedding bells, it was the death knell for the affianced couple. Personally, I always thought she was the one that dodged a bullet, escaping the shmuck and his family, but nevertheless my family now has a running half-joke/half-cautionary tale about cousin Anushka whose engagement ended over poor table manners. | >
> | Perhaps law is a weak form of social control, but the lawyer who navigates the legal system, can be very powerful. Being back in a workplace with a lawyer who is also a teacher and who enjoys his job and is good at his job and who wields his law license powerfully, reinvigorated me and I wanted to set down in writing some of the lessons I learned and conversations I had with him as a reminder for when I feel the way I did when I wrote about jilted fiancés and the power of table manners. | | | | |
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< | In class we have often heard it repeated that law is the weakest form of social control. And in response to the query of what is a strong form of social control, I remember one answer being, table manners. And even many years later, now that Anushka is married to someone else with two kids, I think she would definitely agree, table manners have certainly been a stronger and more impactful form of social control than any laws of either this country or the country of her birth. | >
> | Working at Orange Law Offices this summer showed me that being the type of lawyer I want to be requires courage (you have not been forgotten Sandra Fluke), requires precision, requires skill, and requires knowing exactly what you want to do and exactly how to do it (to paraphrase a personal introduction). Discussing being a lawyer and the legal profession with Mr. Orange himself, Olu told me this: “I will always see law as this beautiful tool with which you can remake society to the extent that you are good enough to use it. All those people who don't think law is a way you make or reshape society are either not good enough to use it to do so or people who don't have the courage to try to use it to do so”. And he is right. I know he is right because I have seen him do so. I’ve seen him help people, and fight for justice, and set the wheels in motion for changing society. And while on a more theory based level of thinking that was important for me, it was also a relief to to feel again that being a lawyer is important, interesting, and fun. | | | | |
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> | Learning about wills and trusts in Property may have been one of the most painful experiences of law school. But working on a probate case in which a trustee breached his fiduciary duty by embezzling funds from the estate to a corporation held in his and his mother’s name in order to avoid tax liability and to avoid paying out assets and royalties to the other heir, who happened to be his sister, was one of the most fascinating cases I got to work on. It is interesting because it involves people, it involves a very personal family dynamic, a painful time where there is a death in the family followed by an even more painful betrayal. Over the course of this case, we helped our client, the sister, find a new job, enroll in counseling, and of course to a greater extent reassert her rights to the estate. But it was more than just painful poring over accounts- there was a story and the story made the work interesting and worthwhile in a way I could never have imagined as I sat in Property. | | | | |
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< | A cute story, told with your accustomed wit and grace. A little hard
on poor Anushka, I think, but in families we laugh at ourselves, I
hope, more than at one another. | >
> | The following are two of Olu's oft repeated mantras: “never seek external validation” and his personal motto, “the work never stops till the job gets done and the job must get done”. Those quotes really sum up what makes Olu such an excellent attorney, advocate, and teacher. He is excellent based on that work ethic encompassed in “the job must get done” and in his creativity as a lawyer because of his refusal to “seek external validation”. He gets the job done without paying any mind to naysayers or people who believe the job must get done in a certain way or, even worse, people who think the job can’t be done at all. That is not to say that he does not seek guidance or is arrogant- he is always learning, observing, and refining his skills, but he has the utmost courage and confidence of his convictions. | | | | |
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< | However, you can't use 435 words to tell a story that is at best
tangential to the purpose of your essay. I appreciate your solemn
demonstration of the social power of table manners. But if I say
"people who have committed murder to protect their business
would not slurp soup or eat with their hands in a fancy
restaurant," I can make the same point in two dozen much less witty
words. | >
> | As a final message, Olu emphasized that you can do anything with a law degree and it is the most ridiculous notion in the world that you would take a job that makes you unhappy when you have the skills to do anything. He particularly liked the Thurgood Marshall quote about changing the world and wanted to add his own flavor to it be adding, that in a general sense, in order to change the world, you need to have a strong sense of self, an understanding of the nature and depth of your intelligence, and an understanding of the responsibility that comes with that intelligence. You need humility. And you need to know that you have a job to do in this world because we all do, regardless of what we identify that job to be. But, that job is not to be miserable. And of course, it is of utmost important to use the right fork when in the company of your fiancé's discerning family. | | | | |
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< | But for a long time and perhaps still, I have believed that not only is law a strong form of social control but even more so that lawyers are important and influential masters of that social control and it is in law school that they learn this mastery. That it is in law school that they transcend the barrier of thinking like a “normal” person to “thinking like a lawyer”. I have often heard people saying that they want to go to law school to learn how to think like a lawyer, but unless it was on one of the days I overslept, I am not sure that lawyer-thinking skills have been imparted to us. Other than in this class, we haven’t been exposed to any lawyers actually thinking or acting or being.
Well, that's not quite true, is it? All those "official" sources,
the judicial opinions, the statutes and regulations, are also
exposure to lawyers thinking. But they present the thinking by
taking us to the funeral, after it's all over, when the corpse is
laid out so respects can be paid.
You have got lawyer-thinking skills you didn't have before you came
to law school. But they were being taught on all the days, including
the ones you overslept and the ones you didn't. It happened
gradually, the way learning a language happens, not suddenly, the way
an apple falls off the tree and hits you on the noggin, or a foot
falls on the table.
There are two quotes that sum up one part of the compendium of reasons of why I want to be a lawyer. The first by Jerry Seinfeld, “To me, a lawyer is basically the person that knows the rules of the country. We're all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there is a problem the lawyer is the only person who has read the inside of the top of the box.” And the second is from The Godfather, the book, which never made it into the movie, but was uttered by Don Corleone to his sons about why his consigliere, Tom Hagan, was so important, “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than one hundred men with guns.” Now not to say that I am interested in stealing any money, but these quotes both epitomize this notion I have of lawyers as having some sort of superior knowledge that other members of the population don’t. They think in a way that others don’t. I always imagine the lawyer and the doctor as having people’s lives in their hands. When someone is in trouble they think, I will call a lawyer and then I will know what to do. I watched an interview with Benjamin Brafman the other night where he talked about how often times clients who come to him have no one left, they are on the brink of suicide, and he is their psychiatrist, their confidante, their advisor, their support system, and at the end of the day he is the one person standing between them and the cell doors.
This is not about whether law is a strong or a weak form of social
control, is it? This is about whether the good lawyer is a strong
social actor. And you know the answer: she is. Law is only part of
what makes her strong. Yes, she knows how to read the rules on the
inside of the box top, and she knows how to make those rules dance.
She remembers everyone and everything, and she remembers why she
needs to remember.
She sees and hears things happening in society
before other people, because she reads social signs the way a hunter
in the wilderness reads animal spoors.
When she applies force she applies just enough at just the right
place and at just the right time. One hundred guns can only fire one
hundred bullets in the correct general direction. One dagger point
pressed home with the strength of one arm can change the history of
an empire.
She exists in the milieu where property and power make their
inevitable marriage. Men with guns can only find cash in the bank.
She can find a right to profit from other peoples' money in the same
bank, good for a lifetime and no chance of being shot down by police
on the street.
Sometimes she's using law, and mostly she isn't. She understands
social action and individual psychology as well as rules. Her
politics are as much her skill as her forensics.
Her table manners, her etiquette and social persona generally, matter too.
But at the completion of my first year of law school, I feel no closer to being any of these things or having any specialized knowledge or knowing what to do if somebody calls me up and is in trouble. In fact, I probably know more about how to hold a fork than I do about being a lawyer and my biggest fear is that I will graduate law school with no more skills than I started with and that I won’t ever learn how to be the kind of lawyer that can help people, who knows the rules on the top of the box, and who wields power with my briefcase that rivals that of a hundred guns.
That shouldn't be your biggest fear. Or rather, if it should, you
are fearless. When you figure a couple more things out, you're going
to start on the journey that will make you a hell of a lawyer. In
the meantime, please make this essay better.
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> | -- ElviraKras - 03 Aug 2012 |
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