Law in Contemporary Society

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LawSchoolAsAnOrganizationAGroupDiscussion 10 - 24 Feb 2012 - Main.SkylarPolansky
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 Based on my question in class today regarding the applicability of Arnold's analysis of organizations to our experience in law school and Eben's subsequent answer that law school is likely no different from other organizations in society in that it coheres because of shared creeds and ceremonies, I thought it might be interesting if we as a group collaboratively brought to light some practices and ideas where we think we see the Columbia Law School creed manifest. If a business organization's creed is "rational business judgment" then what is ours? I think such a discussion is valuable because one of our (or maybe not, but my) goals in law school is to do some creative thinking while I am here, and awareness of the way our law school sustains itself might enable more creative thinking then if we engage the law school institution as if it was a "person" to which we can rationally appeal. So what does everyone think? What is our creed? What are some of our ceremonies? And how do they inform who we become as law students and how we go about practicing law in the future?

Arnold makes the argument that organizations take on personalities, the content of which depends both on accident and environment. The accidental features of CLS's personality will depend mostly on the personality of those who first assume control, after which the personality is very difficult to change because the same type of person succeeds prior leaders. In what ways do people find themselves influenced by the personalities of their professors either through personal interaction with them or through the way/style/bent in which they introduce legal concepts in class? One of the ways I see this happening is when professors cut off certain lines of analysis in classroom discussions. In my contracts class, in a dialogue between a student and the professor, the student articulated argument for why courts should compensate defendants for breach of contract on fairness grounds, to which the professor responded that it in his class, "fairness" is a "bad word" and that we should not use it when we construct arguments. He also interestingly noted that this was a rule that his contracts professor enforced when he went to law school. This seems to highlight Arnold's point that personalities, once entrenched, are difficult to remove because the individuals in power are succeeded by people with like personalities.

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 -- DevinMcDougall - 23 Feb 2012
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I believe Wylie's (Wylie is the corporate lawyer from today's piece from Lawyerland - "Something Split") description of working on a case is an apt description of this process of pointless reductionism - "That painful kind of fastidiousness, attentiveness. Details. How many details? 27 years - trillions of details! You ask me a month from now what the deal I've just done was about - I won't be able to tell you." Wylie can spout off the title or potential income of fellow lawyers, but confesses that he would not be able to remember the details of a deal he dedicated a ton of brain power and time to. He has been trained to care about the end, and not the means. So perhaps this practice in reductionism to the point of destruction is a method of training us to care about the ends instead of the means. Perhaps this is the creed we are being taught in law school.
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I believe Wylie's (Wylie is the corporate lawyer from today's piece from Lawyerland - "Something Split") description of working on a case is an apt description of this process of pointless reductionism - "That painful kind of fastidiousness, attentiveness. Details. How many details? 27 years - trillions of details! You ask me a month from now what the deal I've just done was about - I won't be able to tell you." Wylie can spout off the title or potential income of fellow lawyers, but confesses that he would not be able to remember the details of a deal he dedicated a ton of brain power and time to. He has been trained to care about the end, and not the means. As Professor Moglen said in class today "He uses his brain as a tool and gets little satisfaction out of it." Is this practice in reductionism to the point of destruction a method of training us to use our brains as tools and ignore what that does to our brains in the meantime; to care about the ends instead of the means?
 -- SkylarPolansky - 23 Feb 2012

Revision 10r10 - 24 Feb 2012 - 00:24:57 - SkylarPolansky
Revision 9r9 - 23 Feb 2012 - 16:54:42 - SkylarPolansky
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