I think AJ's post is largely correct. In my first paper, I wrote about how despite all the evidence Professor Moglen has tried to present to us to the contrary, I still adamantly believed that the law is a powerful form of social control. But the Trayvon Martin case, as well as the cases we've been reading recently in Criminal Law that AJ succinctly summarized, has forced me to consider otherwise.

My question now is just how effective public interest lawyering can really be on its own- and how much I can do for the Trayvon Martins of the world by merely going to work for an NGO upon graduation. As a former humanities student, I used to feel ambivalently towards peers who would- with no self-consciousness, whatsoever- say things like "art is not a luxury." Adrienne Rich, one of the thinkers who has inspired me most, likened society's need for socially conscious and transformative art as being on a par with the need to provide its citizens with affordable food and shelter. But as much as I believed in the arts, I simply could not believe that a novel, a poem, or any other socio-cultural artifact could be a more practical way of effecting social change than "the law."

I think I'm starting to realize that it's not enough to simply be a uncreative lawyer that merely "does law" because the the law doesn't do any of the heavy-lifting at all. The uncreative lawyer merely facilitates the only power the law really has- that is- to impart a veneer of legitimacy to what much of the populace already deems legitimate. Perhaps being a creative lawyer, then, requires doing more than just law, understanding what other disciplines can teach us about the society we live in, and seeing the law as merely one more tool to be used in conjunction with others.

-- RumbidzaiMaweni - 01 Apr 2012