Hi Karsyn, thanks for a truly insightful essay. I definitely resonated with your account of disassociation in law school. As an English and History major, I was so accustomed to placing myself within the texts I read, whether by empathizing with the characters or considering monumental socio-historical movements. Law school was definitely a jarring experience, and in addition to being disassociating, it was also disillusioning. Despite my prior ideals, I noticed myself losing faith with the idea of resisting the corporate path. But your account and our class discussions have restored my faith to an extent, and I will continue to grapple with confrontation and hard questions. - Justine Hong

A much-improved draft. Further tightening was still possible and desirable. Every word that isn't doing its proportion of work should go. Paragraphs need to show their role in the sequence of ideas clearly, at their front. Sentences which do not advance the work of the paragraph should go too.

The proper work of the class in discussing a case is neither to eschew the realities in favor of doctrine nor to ignore legal context in deference to the primacy of politics and social struggle. The first question asked about any case in, say, my Property course always was and should be "What is really going on here?" That's what Legal Realism asks of us, and when a teacher won't show up for the real, the students should make it happen. But this is law school, and what we want to understand is how the powers embedded in and behind the law deal with the realities, and make the law do it on the terms they set.

Dissociation, as I said last time, is a profound, sophisticated human mental response to internal conflicts, including those engendered by law school and, perhaps more importantly, by the practice of law. This draft can be improved in many ways each growing out of a closer consideration of what we read and enacted in this course.

Ian Jack writes interestingly in the Guardian on 19 March about that question, from the English and Scottish points of view. Paris and Berlin were quite different places from one another and from London or Glasgow in 1938, of course, and all the people in those places were different, too, but I think your inquiry into mood, like Jack's, centers very usefully on the dissociation of anxiety, which is your central subject throughout this draft.

This draft did the hard work of getting your ideas out where they can be taken further. It needs to be tightened: the reader will read more attentively when you have condensed and reordered, to help her train of thought run more smoothly over your line. That also makes the space that allows you to focus explicitly on the theme of dissociation, which will benefit from being surfaced. You write of "almost clinical detachment," presumably because this is not medical school. But the detachment required for us to do our jobs is required even when it doesn't have an adjective to shine it up. That's because all activities that cause severe internal conflict are met by our defenses against such conflict. Dissociation is the most powerful, complex and dangerous of those defenses; all human minds need and us it all the time.

But "splitting," or creating a new identity state to contain what we cannot process (holding through state-dependent learning and memory the experience safely away from other identity and personality states it would disrupt) is hardly free of consequences. So how do we understand the dynamics of "detachment" in our work lives lawyering, and in our other personality states that our practice affects. modifies, and conflicts with? That's one important theme of Lawyerland, and of this course. You are saying something important on that subject here, but the edit has to bring it out into the light and show the reader more about what the idea is, in the next draft.

It Keeps on Turning

-- By KarsynArchambeau - 11 Mar 2022

In recent days, I find myself wondering what the people in London, or Paris, or Berlin felt in the months preceding World War II. Did the relative freshness of the first World War make any act of aggression seem like a precursor to what would eventually happen? Was that feeling heightened by the fact that they were neighbors? Or did it feel more contained than that, like diplomacy could bring the world back from the edge? I cannot say I ever wondered, past the occasional war movie or documentary, in too much depth what that must have felt like. I find myself wondering about it now. Perhaps that reflects a flair for the dramatic that I have been wont to lean into before, but to not consider it seems more than naive and willfully ignorant.

In Life

In Law School

I assume my thoughts on this are likely not very original--many of my friends are experiencing the same dissonance as I. But more than a common experience at large, this dissonance should be something all law students should sit with. On almost the daily, and certainly more than once on those days, we read about horrible aspects of the human experience: a woman suing a property owner for creating an environment in which she was raped; a child murdered by his father in an alleged fit of rage; a mother forced to watch her child killed by a malfunctioning elevator; a man, abused and degraded by our so-called justice system in the aftermath of 9/11, refused his day in court. What’s more, we discuss it. We judge it. We use it to understand the workings of the law. But there is an almost clinical detachment–at least that I find myself falling victim to–at work that allows me to remove myself from the realities of the experience and treat it as just a collection of facts. This is what law school has trained me to do. This is not to say there aren’t exceptions to that general rule; certainly, some professors or students occasionally pop this bubble of detachment to remind us all that we are discussing people, not concepts. And more certainly there are cases that strike particular chords with students interested in an issue pertinent to the experience of a specific plaintiff or defendant, making that case one with which that student engages on a much deeper level. But I hesitate to call that the norm over my former description. In times such as these, that detachment feels much more obvious than before.

The method of learning in law school encourages the distance at which I find myself more often than not when reading or discussing a case. That is not to say there aren’t opportunities to talk about the intersection of law and, in this case, the crisis in Ukraine; there definitely are. But those opportunities come in the form of student organizations or guest speakers, not in class. Ironically, the times I have felt most “like a lawyer” have only ever occurred outside the classroom. Because as much as I would rather spend class time discussing normative values represented or disregarded by a certain court’s holding, or how a deeper understanding of social structures like race and socioeconomic status could have changed a court’s reasoning, when those discussions do arise I find my mind wandering to the exam, contemplating how this discussion could possibly fit in. And that is where law school discourages true engagement. It is why those opportunities are found outside of class, rather than as a supplement to discussion. It is not testable, so to speak. I cannot focus too long on those discussions I would rather be having because my professors will not be asking me about such things when it comes time to judge my understanding of their class. So I push aside those conversations and go back to creating my outlines and taking my notes. And I discuss atrocities and injustices with an analytical mind. And after class I go to happy hour with my friends or join a networking Zoom call with a firm I might like to work for. And war rages on in Ukraine–and all around the world–and people’s lives are changed forever. And the world just keeps on turning.

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