lawyers and literature

Exercise 2-3: Working With Stories

Getting Started. In the endless banter about daily life and the world around us we tend to forget that we are creating and telling stories, accepting and rejecting stories, praising some, rebelling against others. Ernest Becker observed that "No organismic life can be straightforwardly self-expansive in all directions; each one must draw back into himself in some areas, pay some penalty of a severe kind of his natural fears and limitations." [Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death 270 (New York: Free Press, 1973)]. And so it is with the stories we are drawn to, the stories that throw a cloak of meaning around what would otherwise be unlimited freedom to be everything at once.

In Lawyers and Literature you are invited to read stories that might light a fire to your story imagination, to the storied way we understand ourselves and the world around us. It is an invitation to story consciousness and a more studied effort to become aware of the stories you might be asked to live as a lawyer, the stories you've inherited that you bring with you to the legal profession, and the stories one might wisely reject if life is to turn out well.

Stories Call Us Up Short. Familiar as we are with stories, many law students feel a sense of uncertainty (or resistance) when confronted with the suggestion that they are knee-deep in stories. Still more problematic is the notion that the stories we now tell, stories we are now living, might be made the subject of public discourse, and judged for their adequacy and authenticity. Some law students resist the notion that stories make a real difference in the kind of lawyers they will be.

Busy People and Their Stories. Paying the rent, making good grades on an examination, or finding a place in a law firm don't just happen; they are made to happen and are given priority because they demand attention. Surrounded by matters that demand immediate attention, we tend to overlook the stories we are enacting, the scripts we have already adopted. Indeed, we may not think of our ourselves as having a story at all, until we find ourselves in an unforeseen darkness, or subject to a fate we would not have willed for ourselves, becoming characters in stories we had not imagined.

It's easy enough to let everyday affairs keep us fully occupied, so busy that we don't engage in the reflective, introspective work that keeps a person grounded, authentic, real. We are so enmeshed in the business of everyday life that when asked to start thinking about what stories lie in all this business, it seems a bother, an irritation, an obstacle in the path.

In the drive to become successful students and lawyers we find it convenient to avoid the reflection and studied response that literature demands. Indeed, some versions of the law school story would have you believe that reading novels for an education as a lawyer is simply nonsense. Those most enamored with success are readers of what might be called a "success script": "

A script is a set of expectations about what will happen next in a well-understood situation. In a sense, many situations in life have the people who participate in them seemingly reading their roles in a kind of play. The waitress reads from the waitress part in the restaurant script, and the customer reads the lines of the customer. Life experience means quite often knowing how to act and how others will act in given stereotypical situations. That knowledge is called a script.

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[S]cripts obviate the need to think. . . . This works for all of us some of the time." [Roger C. Schank, Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory 7, 8 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990)]

One problem with legal education is that it pays so little attention to the stories that particularize the limits and problematic nature of legal practice, the stories that show how being a lawyer can implicate us in lives we would choose NOT to live. For some, the success story seems the the only story worth telling or thinking about; getting ahead (a rather complex story itself) turns out to be more important than thinking about how a good life based on good lawyering might work.

If we assume that beneath the affairs and immediacy of everyday life and conventional professional roles there lies a part of the self, forgotten, repressed, unimagined as it might be, then literature might be read as a diagnostic of this condition. The literature of lawyer stories allows us to explore these split-off parts of the self.

Difficulties. Exploring these unimagined parts of the self is not at all simple or straightforward. "The knowing self is full of darkness, distortion, and error; it does not want to be exposed and challenged to change. It seeks objectified knowledge in order to know without being known." [Parker J. Palmer, To Know as We Are Known 121 (New York: Harper & Row, 1983)]. We sometimes venture into the great darkness of our lives by accident, by having delivered at our doorsteps a fate we did not choose. And so it is with any course of reading, some of what you read is unchosen and even distasteful.

There are, as you might guess, significant obstacles to using literature to see, in broader, deeper, more encompassing ways, who we are and what we are not. Literature is not magic. Literature does not turn every reader into a thoughtful, reflective, caring person. Yet, for some of us, reading and the possibilities we find in literature do at times seem to be a kind of magic. Unfortunately, it is not the kind of magic that can be converted to classroom teaching and offered as a formula for immediate use by those who have set out on a life of law and nothing but law.

Law students are sometimes resistance to the simple notion that learning how to be a lawyer is in reality, a way of learning to be a person. Some students, but by no means all, are convinced that being a lawyer and being a person are different enterprises and that one may engage in the one without undue concern for the other. In this "two worlds" approach to law and life, the idea that being a lawyer depends on being a person carries baggage with serious questions for our professional lives.

Mindfulness. Basically, lawyering is a purposeful activity and we give high honor to those among us most intent on getting somewhere, doing something, being something, having a career, gaining recognition, realizing the success that law makes possible. But we need, I think, to contrast purpose and mindfulness as they entail different values. Purpose, unmoderated, can push us toward mindlessness. Mindful work is characterized by care, concern, attention, awareness, thoughtfulness. Those overly committed to narrow purposes often become mindless as they fail to attend to the questions that surround their pursuits.

Crossing Over. One might see the profession of law as work in a "fallen" world. Lawyers witness, by the work they do for clients, every manner of human deprivation and failing, bar none. Lawyers traffic in and profit from and come close to all that is vile and reprehensible in human behavior, all the while proclaiming, to themselves and to the world, that they are justified by their profession and their work in trudging the paths they follow. But lawyers are, one suspects, always in danger of crossing the line, becoming tainted, eating forbidden fruit of the tree that sustains their livelihood.

Lawyers are perhaps like shamans, the healers whose power to heal comes from crossing over to the "other" world--the world of the spirits, the world of the dead and the ancestors--to bring back to the day world, the world of light and reason (and human deprecation), the knowledge, power and spirit by which healing can take place. This power of the shaman to crossover to the spirit/non-ordinary world makes the shaman a figure of veneration, awe, and privilege. It also makes the shaman a figure to be suspected, gossiped about, feared, and ultimately sacrificed. The shaman/healer in traditional cultures is a symbol of transformation (sick to well, ordinary to extraordinary, profane to sacred, low to high, mortal to god. The shaman is also feared as he has the ability to engage in the black magic of negative transformation, making good bad, the eatable spoiled, crops to fail, settled matters fall into great confusion, and prompting the decided and determined to become unimaginable anxiety, uncertainty, and chaos.

Diagnostic Work. One doesn't have to dig too deep or look too far to see that lawyers and the legal profession are in something of a mess. Anecdotal evidence abounds. Journalistic accounts confirm it. We see it on lawyer television dramas. Or you can step into a law school classroom and get a first hand look at how narrow, instrumental training works. Talking about the mess we are in is going to bother some people; some it will bother a great deal. They are bothered in all manner of ways:

The claim that we are in a mess has, they argue, simply not been proven. And, they assume, the claim cannot be proven. This claim, bolding presented, evokes a fair amount of denial.

Some folks don't like to be reminded of a troublesome condition. They may know, at some level, that things aren't right but they don't want to acknowledge it, don't want to talk about it, and don't see the value in airing dirty laundry. They simply don't want to focus on the dark and dirty side of the world they inhabit. They don't expect things to get better any time soon.

Those who focus on the mess we are in have an agenda; they cannot be trusted. Any world we get by better understanding the mess we are in will become, in short order, another mess (even if of a different sort). Better to live with the mess you're and have managed to survive, than a new mess those who want to change the world will bring about.

"If you can't say something good about the situation your in, then don't say anything at all." (These are the people, who by natural inclination, will offer a favorable impression about every pathology or problem that can be readily identified.)

Others know that things aren't exactly right but think that on balance, we are doing so many things right, that the mess we are is temporarily and will resolve itself if we stay the steady course.

Learning to Avoid Mystery. Parker J. Palmer notes that "We want a kind of knowledge that eliminates mystery and puts us in charge of an object-world. Above all, we want to avoid a knowledge that calls for our own conversion. We want to know in ways that allow us to convert the world--but we do not want to be known in ways that require us to change as well." [Robert Palmer, To Know as We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education 39-40 (New York: Harper & Row, 1983)]

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