Much of what the lawyer does is mind work: thinking about a problem, giving it a name, recasting it in legal terms (for which translation might be a more apt metaphor). We may, as a result of the mental focus of our work, be less likely to associate our work with craft than do those like Needleman who make pots and weave. But lawyers too engage in physical action; our advocacy takes place by way of physical acts of speaking and writing.

Lawyers, like potters and weavers, also produce physical artifacts. They are often of a transitory oral nature as we stake our claims in a culture of argument (when we engage in conversation with clients, argue for clients with other lawyers and before legal decision-makers). But there are also more tangible artifacts of craft work found in legal briefs and other writings. The lawyer, as any crafts person, must make use of materials (language, law, rules, rhetorical strategies) of different kinds with different textures. When we work with these materials we leave behind physical artifacts (a record of how the work was done, not just who won and who lost the lawsuit, but documents that were written well or badly, performances before decision-makers that were skilled or notable for their gracelessness). Duncan Kennedy captures a sense of the physicality of law as craft work when he argues that law "constrains as a physical medium constrains--you can't do absolutely anything you want with a pile of bricks. . . ." Kennedy finds that the constraint imposed by any medium is "relative to your chosen project--to your choice of what you want to make. The Medium doesn't tell you what to do with it--that you must make the bricks into a doghouse rather than into a garden wall." The shape and look of a legal argument "in the end will depend in a fundamental way on the legal materials--rules, cases, policies, social stereotypes, historical images. . . ." [Duncan Kennedy, Freedom and Constraint in Adjudication: A Critical Phenomenology, 36 J. Legal Educ. 518, 526 (1986)]

Craft suggests pottery and carpentry, and other kinds of making, but the craft ethic extends beyond the skilled use of our hands. Craft is a way of thinking, an attitude of mind, a way of relating to any set of constraining materials, a relation of materials, skill to mind in a way so a particular person becomes known for the quality found in their use of materials. Craft is both skill and mind-set, making and doing. Craft is a state of mindfulness and a way of being.

Craftsmanship as a frame of mind (mind-set, attitude) is not fixed, or given, or inevitable, but a kind of character, a learned disposition, a habit formed over time. It can be learned. An attitude can be molded, formed, shaped (in the same fashion that we work with physical materials).

The craft mind-set is something a person brings to work and something produced as work becomes identified by its high quality. Quality is associated with high levels of skill, work produced by attentive and careful workmanship.

Needleman makes pots and is attentive to the process, the making of the pot and its maker. She finds that as a student of craft she is never without questions. "What is it to make something?" Needleman asks. [4]

How is one to feel about the pots, legal writings, and other artifacts that we make as lawyers? Needleman says that we have a rather "peculiar relationship to results" but whatever that relationship may turn out to be: "We need to know, right away, whether they are good or bad; we need to know, to pin down, to decide so that we will know how to feel." [3] Needleman confesses that when she looks at a pot she's made she doesn't know what to feel. It's difficult to even get the right question framed, to know where to begin. [3]

What is it to make something? I knew this clay before it was born, when it was nothing, just a special kind of dirt. I wedged it so that it became even and smooth, without air bubbles, a consistent something and not just a chunk torn off a bigger chunk. I put it on the wheel and put the wheel in motion and with a steady pressure of my hands brought the clay into roundness. My fingers made a well in the center of the roundness and my left hand went inside and pulled over toward my right hand to make the base. The two hands together squeezed the clay and pulled it u into a cylinder, a simple form. [4]

Needleman, in this instructive passage, lets us know how to begin. We must try to describe as precisely as possible "what it is to make something." To do that we need careful observation and what anthropologist Clifford Geertz has called "thick description." We need think descriptions of our makings. We must map out the "known."

But Needleman is also a student of the "unknown." She is, in her openness to the unknown, less mystic, more philosophical in the kind of approach she takes. For example, she muses; "I wondered again why I bother, what there is about pottery that draws me again and again to this moment of unsureness. Why do I keep coming back, keep making mediocre pots?" [4] We need something like Needleman's philosophical curiosity if we are going to be reflective about the work we do, the pots we make, the writings we produce, the arguments we make, the clients who seek out our services.

Needleman began her mediation on pottery by lamenting the "attitude of the achiever," an attitude that has us rushing to evaluate what we do as good and bad. One suspects that our relationship to this moment of evaluation is one aspect of peculiar relationship to what we make, to our confusion and unsureness about what we do. Notice that Needleman says her pots are mediocre. But she wonders what is, "in me," that "monitors the shapes, rejecting some and accepting others?" We need to know more about our internal monitors and how they work, what kind of evaluations they produce, and what methods of discrimination and discernment they use to produce these evaluations. Finally, Needleman decides: "I liked the shape." But there was something of a compromise in liking, what she sees as "a victory of the need to choose, to settle on something, over the need to experience something new." [4]

Still working on her pot, the pot she has decided to like, she makes a mistake. This is the way she describes it:

I took the pot off the wheel and set it aside. The next day, when it was firm enough, I trimmed away the excess clay. I trimmed too much, some of the vitality of the pot was sacrificed to a superficial sophistication of form. It is very familiar. [5]

But later, when the pot is fired she decides that it is "pleasant" enough, or so she told herself. [5] The evaluation of the work she is doing continues even as she paints a design on the fired pot. While the painting took hours and she "worked with a great deal of care and concentration," she was "impatient" and it "kept the design ordinary." [5] The pot is now glazed and fired again. Needleman has another look at her pot and "realized that the lip is weak, that the curve is far from subtle. the pot is very light."
We might notice how Needleman returns, again and again, to evaluate this pot. She concludes: "In all honesty, and the moment of honesty is terribly short, I don't know how I feel about this pot." [5] She finally decides, "it's a decent pot with some not too obvious flaws." [5] It's apparent that Needleman is a careful and thoughtful observer of pots and is constantly trying to see her pot in terms of Quality. [See Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1974)]

When we take up a craft, in the attentive, reflective way that Needleman practices it, we see the work from a different perspective. Needleman allows us to stand along side her, looking over her shoulder, watching as she watches herself. We watch as she watches her feelings: "How is it going?" "How do I feel about this?" "Why does this make me feel so bad?" Her watchfulness extends beyond feelings to evaluation and judgment. Needleman makes clear that this evaluation or criticalness of pots is part of the craft.

In this mediation on making a pot and the quality of the pot, Needleman is spelling out what she means by an "attitude of the achiever," what she later calls the "attitude toward results." [6] She makes clear that this not the only attitude "conditioning the way a craftsman works" or that its an attitude present every day. But the craftsman does have a "desire to succeed" which Needleman immediately links to "real failure." [6] Without exploring Needleman's work further we might say that the most notable thing about a craftsman's attitude toward success is his knowledge of "real failure." We don't get far with our incessant talk about the achiever's results we call success unless we are willing to deal with failure. Its against this backdrop of success/failure and the "discomfort of not knowing" how it is going to turn out that "all our activities take place." [6]

Needleman closes the first section of the mediation on pot making with the observation that: "I don't know how to feel about the pot because I don't know how to feel about myself." Evidently, there is a connection between pot and potter that goes beyond the quality of the pot and the potter's ability to reflect on that quality. Needleman says: "The pot and I then make a closed circle. . . ." [6]

With this introduction to making and reflecting on pots and their quality, Needleman has another go at "thick description":

I enter the studio on a sunny morning. I've slept well and had a satisfying breakfast. My body feels fit and relaxed and I look forward to working. I take some clay out of the bin and carry it to the wedging table. The clay smells musty and good. I notice that my thumbs move on the surface of the clay, testing the texture of it and taking pleasure in the sensation. I begin to wedge, rotating the clay upon itself. My left foot is forward, right foot back, and I rock between them, exaggerating the movement a little, enjoying how it coordinates with my breathing. The left hand supports the clay, the right pushes, so that little by little the clay rocks, I rock, and the wheel of the clay turns, making a shape like a conch, very beautiful.

The exercise of wedging makes me feel warm; the air in the room had felt chilly when I started. i cut the clay on a wire fixed across the table and throw one of the pieces on the table, cut side away from me, trying to get the right sound--a loud thwack that means the clay has hit all at the same time. I reverse the other piece so that the cut edges will be opposite each other and throw it on the first with the full force of the natural downswing of my arms. I rock the clay to release it from the table and cut it again. The wire vibrates and hums. the clay slams on the table--thwack, thwack. I am part of a rhythm of sound and movement and I keep it up for a few more times for the pleasure of it. I form the clay into three balls and take it to the wheel, the kick wheel this morning, not the electric wheel.

I fix a plaster batt to the wheelhead and gather my tools: a bowl of water and a sponge, a needle, a rib, a strip of chamois, and a broken plaster batt for the wet clay slurry that comes off on my hands when I work. I push the wheel slightly with my right foot and drop the clay onto the center of the wheel. I pat the clay with the palms of both hands as they clay turns, slapping it into a good position for the work of centering. I place my left foot on the support on the side of the wheel and lay my hands on my lap relaxed. I turn the left hand palm up to remind myself to stay relaxed. My back is straight. I'm read to begin kicking the wheel.

The kick comes from the knee, the foot engaging the flywheel close to the edge and following around until the leg is extended. I allow the lower leg to return to its flexed position, to rest on the way back, and kick again. I use the momentum of the wheel to increase the momentum, kicking again and again, not tiring myself, aware of the sensation of the kicking leg, of the sensation of the relaxed left leg, trying to kick better each time with the least expenditure of energy. When the wheel is going quite fast I stop kicking, place my foot on the support to the right, and wet my hands. The two hands squeeze the clay at the base of the mound, forcing it up. The palms then push on the top of the clay, pushing it down again. My hands are steady, not riding the irregularities of the clay mound, but mastering the clay with steady pressure. [6-8]

Before I explain the rationale for this long excerpt from Needleman's mediation/essay I should explain: I have never made a pot, and have not touched clay since I was a young child. I have no secret longings to be a potter, although I often admire their work and have a good friend who is a potter and has generously given me pieces of her work over the years. With no hope of ever being a potter, I find this description of a potter-at-work quite extraordinary. It makes it possible for me to be as close to pottery in the making as I am likely to ever be. The language is concise and economical, at times almost like what we might expect to find in a manual for do-yourself potters. There is a rhythmic precision in the description. While I might be be so engaged by 200 pages of this kind of writing, this 2 page description is exquisite in the professional care with which it has been rendered and notable for the way the mechanical and physical acts are not allowed to obliterate the person. There is the constant presence of Needleman, as enters the studio, and the "I" that begins so many of the sentences. This is not an I that points, narcissistically, but an I that is a doer/maker/potter. And then Needleman surprises us with the introjection of what feels most intimate: "I am part of a rhythm of sound and movement and I keep it up for a few more times for the pleasure of it." [7] A bit later she comments: "I close my eyes now and sense the clay riding true between my hands. I have a deep sense of well-being, a kind of joyful seriousnes. . . ." [8] And this: "When my hands, working together in perfect unison, move slowly up the side of an emerging pot, raising the walls higher and higher, and I see the marks of my fingers on the sides clearly and evenly spaced, I am happy. Then there is no other place I would like to be, no other activity I would prefer to engage in." [9] Throughout the description I feel Needleman's presence but nothing of her personality. (In this sense, she reminds me of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.)

Needleman knows clay and how to make pots, but she also knows that clay and the making of pots is her teacher. The clay teaches about the unknown. There may be some fields of law where the law and the practice associated with it are relatively straight-forward and the lawyer is assured that she knows what is required and must be done. But many lawyers struggle with uncertainty in the practice of law as they navigate the liminal (twilight, threshold, boundary) space between known and unknown. If it were possible to predict legal outcomes, we would have far fewer lawyers than we do. It is the failure of prediction and the constant specter of uncertainty that fuels litigation.

It is not security, complacency, or certainty that Needleman seeks in craft work but a way of savoring the unknown and the possibilities of self-revelation in the unsureness, uneasiness, and impatience that accompany her making of pots. "I wondered again," says Needleman, "why I bother, what there is about pottery that draws me again and again to this moment of unsureness. Why do I keep coming back, keep making mediocre pots?" [4] As students and followers of law, we might ask a similar question: what brings us to do a work that involves so much uncertainty and uneasiness in the execution?

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