Linsanity and the Law

-- By DanielChung - 15 Feb 2012

I saw Jeremy Lin for the first time in a residential dining hall at Harvard College. He was well known on campus, and I knew his girlfriend from my freshman year. Although we belonged to different on-campus Christian fellowship groups, I had heard about his strong faith and his aspiration to become a pastor. His recent rise to stardom has launched a flurry of activity on my Facebook News Feed, especially from my Asian friends. I suppose I have some basic connections to Lin as well: we’re both Christian Asians who were born in Los Angeles, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, attended Harvard, and landed in New York. Watching the Linsanity unfold these past few days has been extraordinary. At the same time, this Lincredible phenomenon has encouraged me to reflect on the three major threads of our course: creativity, career, and collaboration. We aspiring lawyers have much to learn from this Linspiring young man and the Linsanity surrounding him.

Creativity

Lin’s rise to fame is a story of the failure of imagination. Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, recently tweeted: “We should have kept @JLin7. Did not know he was this good. Anyone who says they knew misleading U.” Undrafted out of college and later rejected by both the Golden State Warriors and the Houston Rockets, Lin initially struggled to establish himself in the NBA. Coaches doubted him, and the D-league beckoned. Even the New York Knicks considered releasing Lin and only started using him as a backup. Virtually no one imagined the extraordinary ascent that Lin would achieve in a matter of days. After losing to Lin, Kobe Bryant commented: “Players playing that well don’t usually come out of nowhere. It seems like they come out of nowhere, but if you can go back and take a look, his skill level was probably there from the beginning. It probably just went unnoticed.” Kobe’s statement is particularly applicable to the idea of becoming a creative lawyer. Creativity is not a spontaneous characteristic; like any good virtue, it requires discipline and training. Inspiration does not strike like lightning—it percolates and breathes slowly. Our job then is to listen and to notice when the air around us changes.

Career

This Monday, Stephen Colbert joined the Linsanity: “You know things are rough when a Harvard economics grad has an easier time getting a job as an NBA point guard than as a Wall Street bond trader.” Both career paths are unconventional and highly lucrative. Despite his large Asian following, Lin smashes stereotypes and illustrates that passion and profit are not mutually exclusive. The legal world thrives on hierarchy and order—neat categories, rules, and norms. Ironically, law school assimilates students through an antiquated first-year curriculum and then pigeonholes them through grades and the false choice between doing good and doing well. Despite his basketball talent, Lin has expressed interest in attending seminary and pastoring in inner-city communities. Lin’s pastoral aspirations remind me that I should pursue a vocation—a calling—in my life. Some have compared Lin to Tim Tebow for his very public Christian faith. For example, Lin has shared that he wants to “trust God more…surrender more…[and] bring him more glory.” Lin reminds us aspiring lawyers that we should focus on what we want to do with our lives, rather than what we want to be.

Collaboration

Basketball is a team game, and Lin has led the Knicks to six straight victories, with at least seven assists in each game. Almost as remarkable as Lin’s ability to lead his team is Lin’s ability to inspire his fans. Linsanity has infiltrated the English lexicon. Fans adore the Linpossible and Linprobable fairytale of Linderella. Simple words have united fans so much so that one even created a website to generate Lin words: www.linword.com. Where some have found a sense of unity and community, others have found opportunity: at least two people have applied to trademark “Linsanity.” As the Occupy movement recently demonstrated, words and phrases can have a powerful unifying (or dividing) effect on people. The “Linsanity” trademark applications reveal that people can abuse the legal system to advance selfish goals that harm communities. That people can own and restrict access to words or phrases that have entered the English lexicon through a collaborative creative process seems Linsane to me. Perhaps Lin will eventually hire lawyers to protect his name. Or perhaps everybody will recognize the Linsanity of trying to contain Linsanity through the law.

I take it that some basketball player named Lin did well in some games.

Other than this, I learned in this draft that creativity requires discipline; that we should ask "what we want to do with our lives, rather than what we want to be"; and that trademarking neologisms including a proper name that have built up no secondary meaning—which is unlikely to succeed at the PTO anyway—seems to you objectionable.

The first idea is a tautology. The second makes me wonder whether another choice might be to ask who you are becoming. The third, as I say, seems to me based on a misunderstanding of how trademark law works.

In any event, the route to improvement here seems to me to be to define clearly what the central idea is, to write it out clearly, develop it in relation to some evidence, including by responding to foreseeable objections, and offering the reader some sense of available implications to consider. That will probably not leave much room for gossip about basketball players.