Here at the UMLS we (under the capable leadership of Jay Surdukowski--you will hear his name in the future) are trying to get a Humanities Council going. It'll be an umbrella organization to oversee, plan, and fund events and bring the disparate attempts at bringing light into the dark coridors of Hutchins Hall under a single banner. So in that spirit I am going to share an unpublished open letter to my fellow law students that I wrote some time ago. It's long for a blog post, so bear with me. (And don't forget to read the many insightful posts further down.)
Dear Michigan Law Students,
So this is the intro paragraph where I speak to you of common values and experiences. This is where we establish a connection. It allows you to impute your own views to me; and more importantly, it allows me to slide my opinions down your throat like oysters on the half-shell, while you swallow and think that my opinions are really just your own ideas given voice in the pages before you.
Boy, Contracts is some hard class, huh?
Well, that’s out of the way and I feel better. Doubtless, you share my relief and know that we are now close. We are like confidants, or Golden Girls. Intelligences insulted all around, I turn to my piece.
Law school is one of the best decisions I have ever made. I’m learning a whole new way of thinking about and looking at the world. I’m exposed to classes and disciplines that I would never otherwise have encountered. (Honestly, who here would have actually chosen to learn about the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure?) But there is dark heart like the cosmic vacuum at the center of a black hole that resides inside the nether regions of law school, and this gaping Charybdis waits for us even as we sleep walk through another day of meetings, lectures, and reading assignments. Even (especially) for the kind and good-hearted this dark force gnaws on the spirit when you are distracted. It finds is utmost expression in the patent arrogance of the stereotype lawyer-joke attorney…a farce which is all too true. Finally we may be entrapped by a narcissism sprung from the feeling that our special training makes us superior through knowledge and earning power, as though those two things offer complete (and enviable) personhood. This attitude is inimical to the sentiment of connectivity that is essential to responsible professionalism. All of which is to say that law school makes some people become jerks, and often rewards further those that have come to it already as jerks.
At a certain point, we must no longer stand for it. Each and every one of us—I’ve always been fond of the phrase “every mother’s child”—has the spark of animating humanity that lives inside our (surely by now quite black) hearts amidst the filth, the fury, and the deadness. And that spark never goes out, but it does get pissed. After a time it is malnourished and neglected to such egregious extremes by the low protein diet of red-bound Aspen books and the damned UCC that the spark rebels against its host. That is you. (For those of you who are 1Ls that have not yet taken Contracts, you will come to know the UCC in your own time. Like Roman initiates into the mystery cult of Mithras you will learn both its rapturous secrets and its terrible, bloody demands of sacrifice...you will be members of our club—and I liked Contracts.) Imagine that your humanity is a heavy wool coat. You bought it a couple of years ago, it fits nicely, keeps you warm even when it gets wet and you almost look forward to the first snow so that you can wear it again. Law school is a very, very warm room full of coat hooks. My metaphor is unsubtle, I understand that; but it is apt.
There is a tendency to become your work in any profession. And each profession has its own extremes. Ethnographers “go native”; doctors begin to feel that they, personally, not the medicine, are healing; authors take book criticism harder than they should because the book has become an avatar for the self. The problem with lawyers is that the extreme transubstantiation with the job is common in every sense of the word. Lawyers and law students become deals and negotiations (cops, the lucky bastards, get to think that they are the law incarnate, long arm and all that). We become contentious pricks with little or nothing outside of the suit and the terms of the settlement agreement. Machines, mechanisms, and automatons we become, and it happens all the time. Hamlet refers to himself as a machine in his love letters to Ophelia. This is part of his madness. The coolly efficient is not to be aspired to on a personal level. People and personalities are not meant to become equitable remedies.
Make no mistake, I do not write this out of sympathy or a desire to (self)help. Oh, no. You see, I am, from time to time, filled with contempt for the law and law school. Also for myself as a law student (which is the most special kind of contempt…I recall learning that from a plucky animated snowman when I was a child). I think that it is a healthy contempt, a sensible balance to the fervor that engulfs us each in devotion to study. Admit it, you feel it too sometimes. Not irrational hatred but a tiny, disdainful voice saying, “You want me to write like I’m composing stereo instructions?” or “This dude over here, to your right, he sucks…no two ways about it.” And of course, “Oh good god, I cannot believe they just said that, and with such unmistakable conviction, too.”
The problem, so far as there is one, and so far as my poor interpretation matters, is that we are each one to another nothing more than the mute features of law school. We didn’t know each other before this and our conceptualizations of each other are formed entirely by this…place. From one to another we appear born, unbidden, from the Olympian forehead of UMLS, staring with contemptuous, haughty grey-eyed glares at all that is not duly adjudicated or comped by an interviewing firm.
Look around you. The walls are collapsing, the kingdom caves in, its power over you extends only so far as you give it. There is no spoon. And you are no the contents of your wallet. I understand the necessary primacy that law school takes in our lives, but only this moment, not to the exclusion of all others. Shut up about call backs, shut up about jobs, shut up about the Supreme Court, shut up about law firms and clerkships and Taft-Hartley. Don’t you see? Digging deeper and deeper into the law/self and finding nothing is no signal to continue the melancholy excavation of every last shred of goodness left in your ossified internal cavities. The retreat from life has no honor it. If you talk about law school, fine. I mean, Christ, it is the one thing we all have in common; and it demands time and energy for success. But if you cannot guarantee conversation at least 30% free of the law then zip it until you can. I know, I know, I do it too, see above about the self-contempt. You should watch reruns of the Gilmore Girls and learn from them. Sit at the Girls’ feet and see the true beauty of completely inconsequential, inane conversation and its healing power.
Follow the lead of your colleagues--even some professors--and watch The OC with seriousness and abandon. (Me, not so much with The OC, but it takes all kinds).
“Look not long into the fire lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as it did me for a time,” says Ishmael in Moby Dick. I like law school, I like Ann Arbor, but I say let not the law deaden thee. You are not the law. And if you firmly believe that you are, then you are so irretrievably lost to humanity that I am surprised you are even reading this and not off communicating your ideas in a series of efficient clicks and buzzes (akin to the sonar of dolphins) to others of like disposition. Also I feel very sad for you. And the contempt, a little bit of contempt.
Yours,
Justin
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