Law in Contemporary Society
-- AndrewWolstan - 07 Apr 2008

(Please edit as you feel necessary)

Song: Blackbird by the Beatles

Started communicating by email in 1974, most important self maintained software of his life is the software he wrote to keep track his email since then – 8 active email addresses that are scrubbed to remove spam All students emails are supposed to reach him, but he didn’t get a good number of them, and if you wrote lost email, let him know or send him one from a Columbia address, but if it came from hotmail… not his problem Hopes some people won’t need an extension on their papers; if you have a draft that you consider to be ready for him, mark it as if it is prepared for submission

1000 words is still the word limit for the paper He won’t say no to an extension or to someone who says that they are late Indicate somehow that the paper is ready to read

Is Lawyerland useful? Silent agreement to keep reading lawyerland

Cerriere’s answer: 2 experienced fighters are circling one another in a partially demilitarized moment, but the game never stops between them – constant adversaries and that is ever present – in spite of all the ways we are shown that she is a human being first, no doubt she is aggressive and wounding character in her own

She draws blood, no question – does that bother anybody? Did anybody like her until she became so aggressive? - She might be more muted than Cerriere, compared to him she’s pretty docile o Thinks she’s pretty vicious and directed, maybe betraying her status as a woman or vindicated, but maybe both; she was introduced to somebody and the power of being invisible makes you dangerous – not surprising that she can get away with this

o When men are being tough, they yell and stand up, when he yells in class, women particularly step back – gender styles of aggression that have biological bases o The other side of that… where do we attach that sociobiologically – makes sense to talk about the way we are structured to fear the way the genders aggress

o How do women aggress? She is using the gender structure to get under her skin (not looking for aggression) people don’t generally think all women are safe, not generally true  Women’s form of aggression, drop emotional bombs (you’re stupid like your father)  If you drew it out you might discover that the ranges overlap so equally that threes nothing left to account for the basis of gender  If you do color blindness, the ranges wont overlap at all

 We’re in that place where we’re trying to think about a subject that we can’t be sure about – thinking about the hypotheses that there’s a piece of it that we know as gender and part of that might be part of the genome o We could start the other way: if you maintain there’s a universal, find out what it is o You could ask people what they think and ask them why they think that o There are a lot of ways to have the conversation

 The attempt to deduce culture from biology has a long history of people using it to justify things that we don’t like  When the book was written, they mischaracterized it as racist (anyone get the book name?)  The behavioral economists are doing something that says go down a layer below where you have been (economics) to the intrapsychological and refresh your view of human nature and you’ll get better economics  So why not go down below the layer to biology and consider again what that will get you – contemporary cognitive and neuroscience  Once you get contemporary NScience, isn’t it inevitable that you’ll start to think complexly about how evolution makes brains and then how it makes minds and at that point you’re doing sociobiology – how individuals perceive the organizations within which they work is explained by it - Also when you look at animals, it makes you want to think about human beings in a different way - When Tharaud and Cerriere acts like primates, shouldn’t we notice that the biology is relevant to that? - Biology is a determinative because without glasses we’d be dead, but it doesn’t mean it’s dead - We have a LeMarckian? mode of cultural evolution that has to do with grinding lenses, but that doesn’t mean because biology isn’t determinative that we don’t want to know anything about it - We should still think about how nearsightedness affects 19th century painting and architecture

- When Tharaud objects him to sexual ridicule, there is a biological basis o This isn’t something that didn’t happen in the history of the evolution, its old o Similar to the act of sacrificing the boy in the boat in the south Atlantic o Of course it’s a contingent behavior, but the behavior itself is classic and it teaches us about how stuff is conducted How did they choose the prosecutor to get the kid? They want that kid dead – they picked the sexy prosecutor, someone who would have pulling power with the jury and the judge – they wanted extra power They use that power all the time, they’re not unfooled, they know there’s not sexual determinism, it’s not everything, but they think it’s there

Those forces are also forces: - In our society people use power in the way we’re seeing, it’s not necessarily biological Is the argument weakened by adding the biological argument? But everything has an independent probability of being wrong, so why not add it to the collection If you look at the way the male ego is the target of female aggression in legal behavior, you can see 1. Interpretive insight 2. Irregularities will be supported by gender theory argument

When all the arrows point the same way then it points you to think that you might be more right about what you’re saying He is deliberately surfing the resistance – there is a desire now to escape biological argument equal to the flight to it – equally undesirable to the lawyer now She often solves the legal problem by using the very conceptions and structures that people don’t talk about

He’s saying the armemantarium is behind every action; everything you know about human beings – she won, the lawsuits over, this is what’s left over after the legal problem is solved This is what they do because they can’t help themselves because they are the people whose lives are shaped by getting and preventing those results Women withhold copulation, have sex among themselves and the other men when they fight among bonobo chimps He's not trying to save effort, he is taking extra trouble to push the argument because he wants to make the point, but he wants to know why you’re pushing against it You can say it’s because Americans or human beings have a system of gender relations, and he’s saying that because all of that and it’s HUMAN BEINGS One of these people thinks of these people as only lately white and the other thinks about it as white

She’s aware of what it’s like not to be white, namely invisible – invisibility equals danger… Doesn’t expect the pogrom to reach lower Manhattan – doesn’t think mouthing off will get her murdered, she’s white now and can say what she wants without getting beaten All of these people spend all day with juries who are composed of stereotypes Juries are boxes full of them and everybody “knows” that – why do defense counsel think the day you pick the jury is the day you win They have government or defense jurors and they’re ethnically constituted because that determines whether or not you believe the policeman Defense counsels have all sorts of belief and the prosecutors have their own sorts of beliefs and they’re justified because in their experience they pay out mathematically

The poet who wrote this piece was naive enough to ask her about if being a woman in the law and everything that happens after that is an explanation of that question in one way or another – this is a piece about what it means to be a woman and a lawyer and she makes that clear to everyone including Cerriere – she’s a fighter and fights hard – she kicks Cerriere while he’s down

Their relationship is not based upon mutual improvement, what he telling her with is aria on the mopboy: - It’s about class and the aria is about the fact ht poor have it good because they’re here o Everyone over the world is coming to us to become our “victims” - He’s satirizing what he has heard her do in the past many times – her thing on how to judge a society on the relations with a single employee o He’s performing her song to his music and of course there’s no question what that’s about – they’re all going to be millionaires one day - The mop boy knows where his mop and his pail is: o He knows what real, but she has all of these ideas, and he’s proposing a different reality than hers o About globalization – this is the capitalist view on the dematerialization of the money o Except the here and now performance of services for us what people are going to come from all over the world to do o The societies where people can get their shoes shined and the ones where you can’t France and Germany believe too much in a safety net, but America is where you can get your shoes shined, shouldn’t raise them up to the point where you couldn’t get your shoes shined anymore

In the 10th century a bishop went from Germany to Constantinople to do negotiations and he sends back long letters to the superior about the trip - He comments on the city and he said this is a city so full of gold and all is gilded and luxurious, but the bishop opens his own door and does his own marketing - He comes from a poor society where servants are plentiful - In India there are lots of servants and much more sensitive awareness to talk to and about servants in their presence - Talk about servants would be great moral failings, to speak to them in a way that isn’t grammatically correct or to fail to acknowledge the personness of a servant - To deny that personness is to begin to commit the offense that we swore we never would – slavery, we find people treated like them, personenss of persons is being denied all the time - She prides herself on not doing it, but she prides herself on thinking about them as people, but she doesn’t behave that way with them o She thinks she’s humanizing them, but she’s still not doing what Cerriere does

He often treats people by thingifying them – the name mop boy joins him to a thing He welds the two together, but he wants to get ahead, so he has come to the US to be wealthy mopping the floor, but we know that’s not how he feels it, but it’s good enough as a story for Cerriere They see a reflection in an employment relationship (world in a drop of water), 2 people with contending views of the world they have elaborated in the course of fighting one another They’re never going to join; no one is going to change an opinion or a view - How does she deal with that fact? – she thinks she has it right in the end, lawyers continue to work in the space between what can’t be prove and what you can prove until it’s over - Why doesn’t she think of herself as being trapped in a sterile relationship with Cerriere and people like him - Does someone want this job? She really believes in this and is being well compensated for it o Why don’t we want the job? – him too, he believes in what he believes that this is the work of the future o There is compromise, she’s definitely opportunistic; she makes money because she needs to make money and she wants to be able to spend money on things she thinks need to be done - The question they ask is ‘can they win’ but they’re not contingent fee lawyers; they don’t have to win - Tharaud is pointing out that Cerriere’s own client prefers to pay her than to pay him, which is the nature of the work that she does o She’d rather get paid than see the money go to Cerriere, but why are we not fair to him? o In the end, her nuisance value is what determines the value, but she’s not a nuisance because she’s successful  This is what you get paid for when you get a certain point in your practice

Shark? James in Newark is watching the prosecution dissolve as their witnesses are going by the wayside - People are playing dumb and at the end of the case they decide whether or not to testify - But they’ll get him next time in the credit card case because it has fewer witnesses, but he might go fishing through that one - This is the same level of knowledge about how this goes - Trying to goad them into trying to spend more of the clients money is increasing the nuisance factor, makes his client think more for the client to pay her to go away - You might want to give his client that his lawyers are in a grudge match to encourage them to settle out - She’s playing the psychology here and he’s overmatched maybe its age - Why is this – not me? o She doesn’t think that the things she believes in will happen through litigation o She knows there was a vital labor movement in the United States, remembers the birth of the CIO o ASME and public sector unions are part of her story - Idea that people who work for private employees will have a union is gone

o She’s picking up the pieces for herself and her clients from a war we lost long ago o It depends on how you feel about fighting – maybe people don’t want to keep fighting, why do you want to scream and yell all your life - Most of the big money in the world is “fuck you money” children poorly treated who become rich to show someone something - There are no more liberal people – there are progressive people o The two sides are defined in exclusionary terms o Obama is looking to be a bridge builder in the middle and the middle is happy because it believes the country is on the right track  This is why that question is a favorite of the pollsters  Ends are not happy and the middle is not occupied, so change might be inevitable - Tharaud and Cerriere are the unhappy edges, but in the end if you don’t feel like being them, you don’t want to be locked in that telephone box yelling at one another -

 

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r4 - 02 Feb 2010 - 20:56:04 - ChristopherCrismanCox
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