5 ms·

> completely remove moral reasoning from their repertoire and replace it with bureaucratic rule-following Spoken like someone who truly has no idea what lawyer

> completely remove moral reasoning from their repertoire and replace it with bureaucratic rule-following Spoken like someone who truly has no idea what lawyering is about.

pdabbadabba 11y ago
> Spoken like someone who truly has no idea what lawyering is about. Or law school. My law-school experience was probably 1/3 learning the rules and 2/3 trying to understand or critique the moral underpinnings of those rules. This relates to a common misunderstanding about lawyers. A good lawyer's real skill is not knowing the rules--there are too many of them. Our skill is in rapidly learning and applying the rules to new situations, and understanding how the relevant power structures will react to our client's situation with respect to these rules. An understanding of the moral and policy underpinnings of these rules is key to doing this effectively.
wfo 11y ago
I have plenty of experience with lawyers who graduated from high-ranked law schools. I won't claim to speak for everyone, but at least in my experience, discussing moral considerations or moral consequences of the law with them is like talking to a wall. Something happens to them in law school: they concern themselves with only what can be argued in court and precedent, probably because they must in order to do their jobs. I have heard so many different paraphrases of the quote "right and wrong don't have anything to do with the law or a courtroom" from so many different lawyers. I can only imagine the moral hardening that must take place to work in a the kafkaesque legal system that generates so much horrible injustice every day almost by design and sleep well at night; the claim of a lack of ability to moral reason is not really an attack on the character of lawyers, but rather a cry of sympathy for people doing adapting as they must to survive and still work in the field. People who inflict enormous amounts of suffering upon others as part of their jobs (prosecutors, cops, prison guards, criminals, judges) develop these attitudes as a defense mechanism.
- anseljh 11y ago
  Some smart people are bad people. It sounds like you met them. Or maybe they thought you were trolling them? How many public defenders have you had similar conversations with? You might get different results.
  - wfo 11y ago
    You're right; zero public defenders. And rather I don't think they are bad people, just realistic about the nature of the system they work in.
- pdabbadabba 11y ago
  > I have plenty of experience with lawyers who graduated from high-ranked law schools. I won't claim to speak for everyone, but at least in my experience, discussing moral considerations or moral consequences of the law with them is like talking to a wall. You should find some different people to talk to. This attitude is not only not the norm among my friends, colleagues, and classmates (virtually all of whom went to good law schools), this attitude is almost totally unknown to me. It's true, of course, that lawyers have to understand and accept that legal outcomes are not always moral outcomes. So it's true that "right and wrong don't have anything to do with the law or a courtroom" in the narrow sense that when law and morality conflict, law typically carries the day in court. But don't mistake this practical understanding for a lack of moral awareness more broadly. Believe me, nobody knows better the injustices perpetrated by our legal system than lawyers. This, after all, is why many people become lawyers. But also consider that some of the injustices widely believed to be generated by our legal system (though certainly not all, such as racially-biased mass incarceration) are, in fact, not injustices but are simply widely misunderstood. I would say that legal reporting is about on par with science reporting in terms of the misinformation and half truths that get spread around. Also remember that a lot of the injustices widely attributed to the U.S. judicial system (and here I am talking about mass incarceration) are not primarily products of the judicial system. They are products of the legislative system (i.e., Congress), which the judiciary is constitutionally bound to obey. Lawyers and judges have very few tools to minimize this damage while also performing the job that our system of government assigns them.

> completely remove moral reasoning from their repertoire and replace it with bureaucratic rule-following Spoken like someone who truly has no idea what lawyering is about.

pdabbadabba 11y ago

> Spoken like someone who truly has no idea what lawyering is about. Or law school. My law-school experience was probably 1/3 learning the rules and 2/3 trying to understand or critique the moral underpinnings of those rules. This relates to a common misunderstanding about lawyers. A good lawyer's real skill is not knowing the rules--there are too many of them. Our skill is in rapidly learning and applying the rules to new situations, and understanding how the relevant power structures will react to our client's situation with respect to these rules. An understanding of the moral and policy underpinnings of these rules is key to doing this effectively.

wfo 11y ago

I have plenty of experience with lawyers who graduated from high-ranked law schools. I won't claim to speak for everyone, but at least in my experience, discussing moral considerations or moral consequences of the law with them is like talking to a wall. Something happens to them in law school: they concern themselves with only what can be argued in court and precedent, probably because they must in order to do their jobs. I have heard so many different paraphrases of the quote "right and wrong don't have anything to do with the law or a courtroom" from so many different lawyers. I can only imagine the moral hardening that must take place to work in a the kafkaesque legal system that generates so much horrible injustice every day almost by design and sleep well at night; the claim of a lack of ability to moral reason is not really an attack on the character of lawyers, but rather a cry of sympathy for people doing adapting as they must to survive and still work in the field. People who inflict enormous amounts of suffering upon others as part of their jobs (prosecutors, cops, prison guards, criminals, judges) develop these attitudes as a defense mechanism.

anseljh 11y ago
Some smart people are bad people. It sounds like you met them. Or maybe they thought you were trolling them? How many public defenders have you had similar conversations with? You might get different results.
- wfo 11y ago
  You're right; zero public defenders. And rather I don't think they are bad people, just realistic about the nature of the system they work in.
pdabbadabba 11y ago
> I have plenty of experience with lawyers who graduated from high-ranked law schools. I won't claim to speak for everyone, but at least in my experience, discussing moral considerations or moral consequences of the law with them is like talking to a wall. You should find some different people to talk to. This attitude is not only not the norm among my friends, colleagues, and classmates (virtually all of whom went to good law schools), this attitude is almost totally unknown to me. It's true, of course, that lawyers have to understand and accept that legal outcomes are not always moral outcomes. So it's true that "right and wrong don't have anything to do with the law or a courtroom" in the narrow sense that when law and morality conflict, law typically carries the day in court. But don't mistake this practical understanding for a lack of moral awareness more broadly. Believe me, nobody knows better the injustices perpetrated by our legal system than lawyers. This, after all, is why many people become lawyers. But also consider that some of the injustices widely believed to be generated by our legal system (though certainly not all, such as racially-biased mass incarceration) are, in fact, not injustices but are simply widely misunderstood. I would say that legal reporting is about on par with science reporting in terms of the misinformation and half truths that get spread around. Also remember that a lot of the injustices widely attributed to the U.S. judicial system (and here I am talking about mass incarceration) are not primarily products of the judicial system. They are products of the legislative system (i.e., Congress), which the judiciary is constitutionally bound to obey. Lawyers and judges have very few tools to minimize this damage while also performing the job that our system of government assigns them.