One of the recurrent themes of the class seems to be that there isn’t a clear line between purely legal work and the world as it exists. Indeed, purely legal work is inadequate and inert; purely legal work results in the sort of transcendental nonsense Cohen wrote against. At the heart of law and the lifeless legal figurations we spend some time learning in class is “public policy” – an innocuous word that stands for how judges and parties think the world should operate.

Little law – the professional tasks we tackle as lawyers – and language-law – affecting change in society with words – both operate in the same medium: language. To separate the two is impossible. Thus the initial fascination with Joseph’s book: it contains something very close to the real language lawyers speak in. What is most obviously troubling about some of the characters we see depicted in Lawyerland (here I think of the lawyers at the end of “Something Split”) isn’t what they do for a living, of which we learn little, but how their own speech reveals who they are (abusive, callous, obsessed with money) and how we realize that must shape their professional lives, or, alternatively, how their professional lives have shaped who they are, i.e. how they speak.

Especially as our time-commitments to the profession of the law increase, it seems natural to want to transform life into the law and everything else. Thus, the characteristics of law limned in this thread: lawyering is what we do with law in connection to our licenses, lawyering is an activity that is more intimate with society’s intricacies, lawyering is more legitimate, more in the public eye. Some of these statements may be true of little-law. But these separations, I fear, only alienate us from our ultimate powers and responsibilities. Law becomes a very narrowly defined idea, and we begin to ignore multiple opportunities to define ourselves as verbal actors; we limit ourselves to the little law’s reduced vision of change ("splitting hairs"). Our capacity to affect the world through language should not be confined to what the profession of lawyering presents, popularizes, legitimizes.

-- ScottThurman - 31 Mar 2009