| | 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. | | | 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? | |
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< | 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... | >
> | 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 | | | This is a really interesting thread. As a 3L in my final spring here, I have found myself reflecting on how this place has affected me, and what this place "is" culturally or institutionally. I'm not sure. There seem to me to be a lot of little clusters within CLS, such as the environmentally-minded cluster I have participated in. What all these clusters add up to together, I'm not sure. An image that comes to mind is the "scramble suit" from the film "A Scanner Darkly," a suit which displays a constantly changing mix of images of different people. But I also have the intuition that there are deep structural traits at CLS that do mark most students at least to some degree. I think competitiveness is part of it, also positive dispositions towards authority figures and hierarchical social relations, suspicion of the possibilities of cooperation, and probably more stuff too. I think maybe one way to put it is that one basic, underlying 'creed' at CLS is the valorization of centralized authority.
-- 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.
-- SkylarPolansky - 23 Feb 2012 |
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