Thank you for sharing this post -- I am working to put your "tips" into practice. Outrage can be addicting. And caricaturing comes too easily to a brain seeking heuristics to lighten its load.
This post represents good advice to law students and many of the rest of us. Bravo! However, I do have one little quibble with an aspect of your supporting argument—that in the end that law relies on violence. While the threat of armed force by the state is certainly present, I think it both overstates your case to make violence the foundation of the legal enterprise and warps the shaping of lawyers. Both convention and aspiration function as honorable and necessary (though not all sufficient) supports for law. Further I suspect that perhaps in all but the most minimalist societies that without convention and aspiration we would find law as the violently backed command of the sovereign could not effectively function. Indeed does your notion of pluralism really root itself in such a violent notion of law—I don’t think so. So law students need to work with a more well rounded notion of law in their pluralist context. Again, I am quibbling—good advice for lawyers.
Thank you for your kind and thoughtful comment. The premise underlying the law's connection to violence (I don't mean to claim or imply an exclusive foundation in violence) is probably too much to address in a comment, but I hope to explore it in a later post. I've been influenced by Robert Cover's classic article, "Violence and the Word" (95 Yale L.J. 1601 (1986)) as well as some work by Stephen Carter. For a (very) brief summary of Carter's argument, see this Atlantic comment: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforcing-the-law-is-inherently-violent/488828/
+1 @ Lee
Thank you for sharing this post -- I am working to put your "tips" into practice. Outrage can be addicting. And caricaturing comes too easily to a brain seeking heuristics to lighten its load.
LOL about the subpoenaed draft emails.
This post represents good advice to law students and many of the rest of us. Bravo! However, I do have one little quibble with an aspect of your supporting argument—that in the end that law relies on violence. While the threat of armed force by the state is certainly present, I think it both overstates your case to make violence the foundation of the legal enterprise and warps the shaping of lawyers. Both convention and aspiration function as honorable and necessary (though not all sufficient) supports for law. Further I suspect that perhaps in all but the most minimalist societies that without convention and aspiration we would find law as the violently backed command of the sovereign could not effectively function. Indeed does your notion of pluralism really root itself in such a violent notion of law—I don’t think so. So law students need to work with a more well rounded notion of law in their pluralist context. Again, I am quibbling—good advice for lawyers.
Thank you for your kind and thoughtful comment. The premise underlying the law's connection to violence (I don't mean to claim or imply an exclusive foundation in violence) is probably too much to address in a comment, but I hope to explore it in a later post. I've been influenced by Robert Cover's classic article, "Violence and the Word" (95 Yale L.J. 1601 (1986)) as well as some work by Stephen Carter. For a (very) brief summary of Carter's argument, see this Atlantic comment: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforcing-the-law-is-inherently-violent/488828/