Read on Twitter
Good morning. Nine thoughts about this argument:
1. Lawyers are a professional class with the unique power to turn words into consequences — all choices about what they learn (and do not learn) have necessary implications for how that power is exercised, and to what ends; https://twitter.com/Honickman/status/1288237811741741057
1. Lawyers are a professional class with the unique power to turn words into consequences — all choices about what they learn (and do not learn) have necessary implications for how that power is exercised, and to what ends; https://twitter.com/Honickman/status/1288237811741741057
2. There are few choices more "ideological" than the choice to teach property law without teaching the history and context of those who have been property in the eyes of the law; the choice is one that favors abstract, internally rational categories but not their consequences;
3. For the vast majority of people in this country, the law is only and always about its consequences, and never about the abstract categories or academic rationalizations that forced those consequences upon them; those people are our clients and the public;
4. Legal rules, including "doctrine", are not like gravity or the conservation of mass; the "craft of legal analysis" is not about the discovery of phenomena existing in nature, nor about the practical application of fixed and consistent scientific rules beyond our control;
5. The author's argument assumes that the law, as taught and practiced, is working well for clients and the general public such that intentional reproduction of the status quo is both a desirable policy outcome and the actual function of a law faculty — on both counts, it is not;
6. There is no better way to learn "the craft of legal analysis" than by working through the realities — historical and actual — of injustice, by studying the ways in which the law oppresses and excludes, by looking honestly at the ways that its promises fall short;
7. Inertia doesn't need a good lawyer; the "craft" of legal analysis is not about the systemic maintenance of those injustices — anyone can do that;
8. Instead, the "craft" is the skill of working through the law and all of its contradictions with skill and courage and precision to overcome that inertia; it's the skill of seeing the human project of law as it is — as something dangerous and imperfect, but maybe aspirational;
9. A legal education should prepare students not only to know and apply the the law, but also to refuse to be its accomplice. That's the "craft."
Also, I wrote this before I read the full breadth of other important threads on the subject. See also:
- https://twitter.com/JoshuaSealy/status/1288243964802367488?s=20
- https://twitter.com/Breanna_Needham/status/1288439181627273217?s=20
- https://twitter.com/FraserHarland/status/1288258236907491330
- https://twitter.com/Mitchell_CBrown/status/1288482191111008259?s=20
- https://twitter.com/JoshuaSealy/status/1288243964802367488?s=20
- https://twitter.com/Breanna_Needham/status/1288439181627273217?s=20
- https://twitter.com/FraserHarland/status/1288258236907491330
- https://twitter.com/Mitchell_CBrown/status/1288482191111008259?s=20
