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Paper Title

-- By JoshuaHochman - 16 Apr 2010

To aspiring adults, just about any career appears to have a set of protocols that governs successes and failures, which makes growing into a career is an intimidating process. Law is the quintessential example: centuries of tradition meet contemporary ideas about justice and are played out within the theaters of courtrooms or boardrooms or Dean & Deluca's.

The weight of tradition that underlies the 1L curriculum is extremely taxing to somebody who doesn't know what kind of lawyer he wants to be just yet. The attorneys depicted in the excerpted chapters of Lawrence Joseph’s Lawyerland provide a refreshing breath of brutality and clarification to a profession that is too often shrouded in formalities. I argue here that this type of vulgar honesty is extremely useful to future advocates, despite any friction with the formalities of being a law student.

Robinson Breaks Through

When Robinson is called "vulgar" by the federal prosecutor, his defense incorporates enough dissatisfaction with the criminal justice system to reframe the term. A secondhand account of a secondhand account, the book's description here is largely depictive of misappropriated attention. Why is maintaining the appearance of justice and civility more important than talking about what's really going on?

Legal Theatrics and Advocacy

A good advocate's path is a fine line to walk. If Robinson had dropped … um, 'the f-word' … in front of a judge, he would most certainly have been held in contempt, regardless of his clear conscience and righteous intentions. Meanwhile, keeping all aspects of an uphill legal battle bottled up to comply with empty formalities is likely to stifle creative legal thinking. Consider, for example, that Robinson lacked any perspective on the Department of Justice's practice of protecting informants or that the manner in which the cards had been stacked against his "definitely dumb, not really bad" client. He would be less cynical, perhaps—less prone to resort to expletives. However, he would have traded off his effectiveness and livelihood.

From this question I thus gather that the issues facing clients might, and probably should, affect their advocates in a powerful way. It would be hard to imagine an oblivious Robinson using the same language as the Robinson in Lawyerland, just as it would be hard to imagine him turning down clients that he believed to be dishonest. I read Robinson's vulgar language as a manifestation of a stronger personal connection with his casework.

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The Adversarial Context

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