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Law in Contemporary Society
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Time (and Waiting) in Legal Practice-- By ElizabethHuh - 11 Mar 2022IntroductionBeing a lawyer is being able to make things happen with words—for the clients, having a lawyer is being able to make things happen with words in a short period of time. The embeddedness of temporal aspects in the legal system is clear from the way law firms operate through billable times, and incarceration is colloquially called “doing time.” A recent Criminal Law reading noted that in courthouse legends, judges openly justify the discrepancy in the plea bargain sentence and the actual sentence by saying “he takes some of my time; I take some of his.” Thus, time is a valuable resource and its taking is wielded as a weapon; in response, the lawyer’s job is to make sure that time is restored from the client, be it through shortening a drawn-out litigation or the judge’s ultimate sentencing. The value in having a lawyer is not just that they could make things happen, but that they could make things happen in a shorter period of time. A closer look at the way time and waiting operate in the criminal justice system, which is where I will limit my discussion, reveals the real costs of losing time in the form of waiting. Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Court by Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve is an especially devastating look into the way time is used to consolidate a socially patterned distribution of power and reify racial and economic inequality. At the Cook County courthouse, defendants are expected to convene sharply at 9 AM to wait for their turn in the docket, and their final hearing times are left to the mercy of the judge. They have no discretion: losing their place means more waiting, and waiting comes at a great economic loss. They are missing work and paying for daycare and parking. The role of lawyers creates a sharp divide between those who have private attorneys and those who do not. The attorneys approach the bench and have their client’s cases heard first whereas clients without private attorneys wait indefinitely in the public gallery. In the criminal justice system, someone is setting the condition of waiting and has the ability to control the other’s own expenditure of time, and this discretion does not fall to poor defendants of color. Empirical experience is key to not only navigating the justice system but being an effective lawyer. Therefore, I think we should begin by realizing that time, despite its exterior as a neutral, mechanical concept, is not a neutral nor equitable resource.Is Time on Our Side in Law School?It is difficult to say that time is on our side in law school. In some aspects, it is not—1L year is what Professor Moglen has called “frantic language acquisition.” Yet, this compressed time serves not to oppress us; instead, it is intentional and systematic. The shortened period of time merely emulates the knowledge acquisition waiting for us when we are thrown into the legal world. It is even stranger is when time is catered to us. My Legal Methods II class was taught by a judge on Zoom, so he arranged for the students to get a chance to chat with him when he was briefly on campus. To defendants, the opportunity to be in front of a judge is a make or break, a sliver of time when they can make their case. Here, we were listening to a judge who had made the time for us and catered to our schedule by holding the meeting in the afternoon after our classes had finished. At law school, time becomes a neutral feature. We don’t think about its effect on our potential clients, especially indigent clients, and its lasting impact on the clients’ communities. We think about it in terms of classes and opportunities, a mere Tetris piece in our academic and professional careers. Time’s scarcity for us is in stark contrast to how its loss translates to particular economic and social costs to people at the other end of the criminal justice system.Time in PracticeIn Lawyerland, Robinson states that a lawyer’s medium is time. The lawyer is “playing the delay game” and accommodating their strategy depending on whether time is on their side or not. Robinson’s words imply that time is a flexible and malleable tool in our arsenal to get a favorable outcome for our clients. However, describing a legal strategy as a delay game is grossly simplistic when we think about the real costs of delay for the clients. Time is a medium for us but a valuable—and limited—resource for clients. If we are to truly understand the social forces behind decisions and their consequences, we have to look at the way deploying time as a strategic means sweeps its effects under the rug.Making Things HappenThere is a dissociative effect from recognizing the often destructive effects that time may have yet acknowledging that we are to weaponize this. The latter is already overpowering the former through our legal education. Time has already shifted to our side because it is stripped to its neutral façade: as we make our ways to become “legal professionals,” time is a tool to meet deadlines and there are costs only in so far as it shapes our academic and career opportunities. In fact, we have people waiting for us. Our legal education necessitates that we think in sequence, following the straightforward trajectory from law school to practice. This class is a disruption of that sequence, an opportunity for us to ponder about the lawyers we want to be and the lawyering we want to practice in an institution that actively prevents such reflection before we hold jobs. But, as Professor Moglen says, we are already engaged in legal practice. Dissociation generates discomfort. The next question is how we should respond to this discomfort. One that we will trade-off for security, or one that becomes an impetus for courage?Elizabeth, this draft is almost 1250 words, 25% over the maximum. You have to cut it to within 1,000 words before I can accept it. There is plenty of slack you can remove, and you might want to consider the relationship of time and space in language as you do so; it's really the implicit subject of the essay.
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