| | |
|
ChristopherBuerger-FirstPaper 8 - 26 Feb 2008 - Main.EbenMoglen
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper%25" |
|---|
Two Ideas, One Mind: The Challenge of Legal Thinking | | | This is in no way to suggest that a lawyer should be a moderate on all or even any issues. It is simply to emphasize that when lawyers do take a strong stand, they need to understand why they are doing so, and why someone else in their position might not. Good lawyers will understand the conditions that they base their position off, the conditions that are still unknown or contested, and the possible change in conditions that could shift their views. This kind of freethinking and mental flexibility is only possible when one is willing not just to entertain, but completely hold an opposite viewpoint alongside their own.
Subsection B: Bringing opponents together: The work of a lawyer | |
>
> | | | | The most important way that this kind of thinking can help a lawyer is by aiding in his or her attempt to bring people together. As first year students, we have already heard many times that when a case goes to litigation, the lawyers have, in some sense, already lost. A good lawyer will not just find opposing ideas and knock them down. Surely this is a useful skill to command. A more useful one, however, is to find opposing parties and bring them together in a peaceful way, to take two opposing ideas, hold them in one's mind, and reconcile them in a way such that a compromise can exist. The greatest hope I have for the practice of law is that it holds a promise, a promise that there is still a chance for human beings to resolve their disagreements civilly and peacefully without resorting to a show of brute force. To accomplish this hope, it is imperative that a lawyer understand not one, but at least two opposite ideas in every conflict. | |
>
> |
- AmandaHungerford originally recommended Steve Gould's Mismeasure of Man, which is indeed well worth reading. That history of the attempts to measure "intelligence," which have caused far more harm than benefit, is directly relevant only to your opening comment. The notion of "intelligences," or structures of mental action appropriate to particular genres of complex behavior, is fundamentally different, as you say.
| | |
| |
<
< | You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line: | | | | |
<
< | # * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, ChristopherBuerger | | | | |
<
< | Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of that line. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated list | >
> |
- A very pretty essay. Fitzgerald suckered you with an epigram, so you dichotomized what would have been better left in the condition of mere multiplicity, as your conclusion only at the last agonizing moment seems to wise up to. Only the lawyer engaged in pure bilateral confrontation can be content to hold only two viewpoints. Most social understanding calls for an ecological approach, in which a multiplicity of positions exist that could be inhabited as subject, and whose consciousness and behavior can be understood as a "stack" of knowledges, from the biochemical basement to the attic of philosophy. A legislative leader ideally holds as many potentially conflicting mental models as there are legislators in her chamber; a "lawyer for the situation" in the Brandeisian mold must be able to perceive the situation from all the inhabited viewpoints. Each model or viewpoint superimposes individual and social understandings: from what we know about psyche to what we know about organization. Each also interacts with the others, as characters do in an imagined work of literary narrative. Some of the material is "known" as scientific facts are known, but much of the material is "felt" or "intuited," and cannot easily be described in reductive terms.
| | | | |
<
< | If you ever get a chance, I highly, highly recommend you read Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of a Man. I'm not sure how directly it relates to your paper, and in any case you won't have time to read it before Thursday. But if you ever have some free time, it's a great book on intelligence, and I think you'd like it. | >
> |
- You could edit this text to give full reach to the principle, and to remove some infelicities. Little else can be done to improve on it.
|
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |