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Jerome Frank's "Music": Thinking About Law as an Aesthetic Domain | | | The upshot is that although the judicial decision-making process may not be entirely rational, we have some agency over it because we can study and alter our second-order mental organization, and therefore our pre-reflective reactions to some extent. Noë says that to understand our nature, we must study "the transformation of the ways that we are organized by reflective resistance to the ways that we find ourselves organized." | |
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< | Lawyerland offers a caveat for this project. Robin West calls Lawyerland “a meditation on lawyers’ knowledge: what lawyers know, first, from the evidence of their practice, and what they know, second, from the evidence of things not seen.” Each character discusses something that lawyers know, such as knowing the difference between lying and culpable lying when the existence of too much information necessitates lying. Each character also discerns evidence of things unseen, or of what lawyers don’t know, such as willful blindness, often to moral questions—occupying “the moral center of too many hurricanes,” as West puts it. Confucius sums it up this way: "When you know, to know you know. When you don’t know, to know you don’t know. That’s what knowing is” (Analects 2:17). The caveat is that Lawyerland's percipient characters quietly acquiesce, or comfortably adapt, to how they find themselves organized. They have come across the outer bounds of knowing themselves and their world and still lack agency. Lawyerland thus proposes that Frank's "music" is less about "How much can we know about ourselves?" and more about "How much, if at all, can we resist how we find ourselves organized?" | >
> | Lawyerland offers a caveat for this project. Robin West calls Lawyerland “a meditation on lawyers’ knowledge: what lawyers know, first, from the evidence of their practice, and what they know, second, from the evidence of things not seen.” Each character discusses something that lawyers know, such as knowing the difference between lying and culpable lying when the existence of too much information necessitates lying. Each character also discerns evidence of things unseen, or of what lawyers don’t know, such as willful blindness, often to moral questions—occupying “the moral center of too many hurricanes,” as West puts it. Confucius sums it up this way: "When you know, to know you know. When you don’t know, to know you don’t know. That’s what knowing is” (Analects 2:17). The caveat is that Lawyerland's percipient characters quietly acquiesce, or comfortably adapt, to how they find themselves organized. They have come across the outer bounds of knowing themselves and their world and still lack agency. Lawyerland thus proposes that Frank's "music" is not only directed at the question, "How much can we know about ourselves?" but also at "How much, if at all, can we resist how we find ourselves organized?" | | | Law as an Aesthetic Practice | |
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< | I think Frank's "music" denotes any experience that disorganizes us—inviting us to reflectively resist our habitual organization. These experiences might come from encountering art, relationships, the use of technology, suffering, philosophizing, the alterity of something, and so on. A disorganizing experience bids us to see something hidden in plain sight, or to catch ourselves in the act of being creatures of habit. I think that is how a judge reviews and modifies her ethos; her work, therefore, is not confined to the courtroom. This describes Noë's definition of aesthetics—the work of moving from not seeing to seeing or from seeing to seeing differently by coming up against one's own limitations and habits to make something come into focus, which one can reflect upon to gain some agency over one's ethos. Frank's intuition in declaring that justice should be administered "as an art" with "music," and that legal rules frustrate this work, is that the practice of law isn't just linguistic; it's aesthetic in Noë's sense. | >
> | I think Frank's "music" denotes any experience that disorganizes us—inviting us to reflectively resist our habitual organization. These experiences might come from encountering art, relationships, new technologies, suffering, philosophizing, the alterity of something, and so on. A disorganizing experience bids us to see something hidden in plain sight, or to catch ourselves in the act of being creatures of habit. I think that is how a judge reviews and modifies her ethos; her work, therefore, is not confined to the courtroom. This describes Noë's definition of aesthetics—the work of moving from not seeing to seeing or from seeing to seeing differently by coming up against one's own limitations and habits to make something come into focus, which one can reflect upon to gain some agency over one's ethos. Frank's intuition in declaring that justice should be administered "as an art" with "music," and that legal rules frustrate this work, is that the practice of law isn't just linguistic; it's aesthetic in this sense. | | | | |
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< | This class, unlike doctrinal classes, employs music in this sense as well. It disorganizes us, inviting us to examine whether we have agency over our plans for practice, or whether we are quietly acquiescing, or comfortably adapting, to how we find ourselves organized. | | | \ No newline at end of file | |
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> | This class, unlike doctrinal classes, employs music in this sense as well. It disorganizes us, inviting us to examine whether we have agency over our practice, or whether we are quietly acquiescing, or comfortably adapting, to how we find ourselves organized. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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