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LawSchoolAsAnOrganizationAGroupDiscussion 6 - 23 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. | | | To me, Columbia's creed is that "law school is a competition." I already talked about it in this thread, so I won't repeat too much of it here. But I think this creed validates to your observation, Prashant, about the grading system and exams. Because we don't know any better, our main objective in the exam room is to vomit as much as we know -- names of cases discussed (and throwing in some not even discussed), judges, theories, some random point we think the professor really wants to hear -- into the small window of 3/4 hours. And we just don't see it in exams, right. Everything from getting an interview slot on OCI to getting the right housing to getting the right elective to getting on journals, it's all a competition. This creed is totally counterproductive to our professional development as lawyers and our personal capacities to even be remotely relatable to normal human beings. I'm really trying to be conscious of it as much as possible because it's easy to let something like competition define who we are.
-- LizzieGomez - 22 Feb 2012 | |
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> | Combining points made by Josh re: conlaw and by Jared re: Thinking Like a Lawyer, led me to this seemingly glaring dichotomy: The very schools that constantly assign us cases revering a constitution made “by the people” are the same institutions which brag that no common person could understand the law and think critically about it without a law degree. What the fuck kind of sense does this make?? If you have to study the law/have a degree in the law order to understand and be able to use the law, how is the average person – who the law is ostensibly made for– supposed to be protected by the law and use the law to his/her advantage?
I think a big ceremony in law school is reductionism – to the point of destruction. We are constantly trying to condense and reduce material into manageable little chunks we can use and immediately expel from our brains. We create outlines reducing months of books, thoughts, and classroom discussions into 35 pages or less. We reduce these outlines to attack outlines. Before going into interviews we Vault a firm or google an organization in order to formulate and list 3+ reasons why we want to work at that organization specifically.
In class Professor Moglen said “reductionism is the method by which things become simple enough for us to deal with them.” But in no other graduate school does such a culture of “outlining” exist. Is this because the law can never be simple enough for us to be able to deal with coherently? Or is the law itself simple enough (use time to your advantage, know the psychology and relationships of those in power, a la Robinson) and law school is just trying to mask this fact?
And why do we ignore the products of our reductionism in law school? We throw away outlines, regardless of the grade. After an interview we forget about our listed reasons for wanting a job, regardless of whether we get it. Why work so hard to condense and reduce and understand, only to toss the finished product at the end, with no deeper level of understanding? Is it because law school itself is a worthless, pointless exercise, but after three years of learning, cramming, and reducing only to immediately forget the material, we learn not to care about conducting pointless exercises? Or perhaps it's not a pointless exercise. It's an exercise in learning how to enter an institution/profession where we are not supposed to care that cases will be decided by means outside our intellectual achievements, and the power of our arguments...
-- SkylarPolansky - 22 Feb 2012 |
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