New Kid on the Hallway

Yet another way in which old = different

So, this is not meant to sound condescending, although it may come out that way. Thing is, sometimes I find observing my classmates fascinating. A lot of them are of the age where they're getting married (a bit younger than I was when I did, but hey, I'm slow about a lot of things), and I feel like a secret anthropologist, marveling at the cultural practices of an alien society.

Of course, it's a society that, in theory, I used to belong to, because one of the things separates me from them is simply being older. I watch these people getting all their ducks in a row to organize their lives the way they want them to unfold, and it's strange to recognize it as that, but I did it, too; I've never thought of my life "beginning" when I married NLLDH, but still, figuring out who you want to spend the rest of your life with is a big deal.

Even so, it's kind of an alien society, because I never got into the actual ritual of marriage the way so many people do. Wait, I take that back; ritual was important to me, in the form of a lack of ritual (which is significant in the same way that someone who says they "don't care" about their appearance and don't want to "waste time caring" about such things is sending a message about themselves to others just as much as people who devote themselves to painting their faces and sculpting their hair every morning). By this I mean, we did the anti-ritual ritual: NLLDH and I got married in a judge's chambers. I wore a black and white sundress from Talbots. Our witness was the assistant DA for narcotics who'd been prosecuting a surfer dude for possession of pot in the appointment before ours. After, we went out to dinner by ourselves. 

No fancy white dress. No attendants. No reception venue, no decorations, no pictures; very little external memorialization of this moment. No choosing colors, no planning for months, no figuring out seating charts. Because it wasn't about other people; it was just about us.

Which isn't remotely intended to criticize anyone's choices for how they celebrate the big moments in their lives. It's just that seeing my classmates' photos of their picture-perfect weddings (which, I have to admit, I love to look at; everything is so pretty!) brings home to me how I'm in a different place now from many of my classmates. I don't mind; I like being where I am, and can't expect them to be in the same place; sometimes it's just a little jarring, that's all.

Lawyer ethics FAIL on my part (and also, why people hate lawyers)

Okay, so I was completely wrong about something I was tweeting about earlier, so I have to clarify.

My original tweet:

was asked in interview this morning whether she'd betray a client's confidence or let innocent man be put to death. Yay law?!?

(The idea was you're a defense counsel whose client told you that they did the crime for which another person has been convicted and is facing the death penalty, and the client refuses to let you tell anyone. What do you do?)

I got a variety of responses, and in responding, I got something completely wrong: lawyers have an obligation of confidentiality to their clients. Which is absolutely correct. BUT I also said that there is no exemption from that duty in confidentiality in the situation described in my tweet. Which is WRONG: There IS an exemption to the duty of confidentiality when it's necessary to prevent reasonably certain death or bodily harm. So, someone facing the death penalty would TOTALLY count.

In my defense, I blanked on that rule for 2 reasons: first, the hypothetical presented to me in the interview stated that if you broke confidentiality, you WOULD be violating the ethical rules and you WOULD be disbarred (that is, the point wasn't to test my knowledge of the ethical rules, it was just to see how I would deal with a conflict between professional ethics and moral code). So in the hypo (though NOT real life!), you have no way out. (I think this is because that exemption is relative recent and so they may have been using this hypo since before there was an out?)

Second, in my Ethics class we talked about a similar situation (a real case), in which two attorneys represented a criminal defendant who told them that he had committed crime X, for which another man was convicted, but who refused to let his attorneys tell anyone. The difference here was that the innocent man wasn't facing the death penalty, just (just!) life in prison. So: no imminent death/bodily harm! So the lawyers couldn't say anything! They finally convinced their client to let them tell the authorities after he died. And so the innocent man sat in prison for 10s of years, until the guilty man finally died and the innocent man could be set free. The lawyers got a HUGE amount of flak for that (and you might argue rightly so), but various criminal defense associations came out in their support - according to the professional ethical code of the legal profession, they did exactly the right thing. I got the hypo mixed up with that case in my head when I was tweeting earlier.

So, I wanted to make sure I clarified that.

But it's funny, because to many people out there, leaving the innocent man in prison would be almost as heinous as letting the innocent man be executed. And therefore the distinction that lawyers see is not one that most non-lawyers would consider especially meaningful. And the fact that I do understand the distinction - and appreciate that confidentiality is the cornerstone of the lawyer-client relationship - means that I've learned that "thinking like a lawyer" thing. Very weird.

The lab experiment that is law school

One of the things that worries me about law school is that it feeds my habit of seeking external validation to determine to self-worth. First of all, even if you try to judge a class on your own assessment of what you've learned, there's a huge emphasis on grades: getting good grades is SO IMPORTANT - or so everyone keeps telling you - that it's hard not to couple sense of success with GPA. And the thing is, for certain purposes, law school grades ARE important. (Caveat: by saying that, I don't mean that other kinds of grades aren’t important. Granted, in my own grad school experience, grades actually weren't that important because everyone got pretty much the same grades. But other settings are different, of course.) Firms/judges "prefer" students ranked in the top 30%, 20%, or 15%. If you’re in the top 10% of the class, you get a boost for getting onto law review (as well as scholarships and so on). Heck, law school grades on a curve. If your grades are above a certain level, you get ranked. If grades weren’t so important, why the school would put so much effort into measuring where yours stand in comparison to everyone else’s?

And then there are all the other external measures of success: Law review. Moot court. Competitions galore. Getting the right internships. Getting the right jobs. The way law school is structured, it feels like sometimes there’s something new to apply for ALL THE TIME. First year? Law review. Mock trial. Second year? Moot court. Law review board. Summer job. Internships, new ones each semester.

What I find hard is that I feed off the successes, and I’m having enough of them that it simply encourages me to continue to find this validation through what others think of me. I still get a rush when someone wants to interview me; I still congratulate myself and preen myself for how transparently awesome I am. It still feels like getting an AHA interview, every time.

What’s stupid about this is that at some point, it has to stop. School - training - is geared to create hoops and make you jump through them. Jumping through hoops well is an adaptive mechanism while in school, but much less important once your training is complete. And if you measure your self-worth by your hoop-jumping skills? You're bound to be a bit lost once those hoops go away.

I suppose there probably is a way to go through law school minimizing some of the external validation stuff: for instance, be in a clinic. Success is about how well you do, of course, but it’s about what you do (and what you can do) for your client. It’s not some number slapped on a piece of paper that represents you sitting and thinking for 3 hours one day in December.

And really, the whole "base your grade one exam" is such a poor way of evaluting someone's performance - especially given the common disjuncture between the effort you put in and the grade you get - that you'd think it would encourage you to focus on personal satisfaction rather than external validation. But it kind of makes me think of those experiments they've done with rats: if a rat presses a button, and gets food every second press, say, or every third press - something consistent - then the rat will learn what it has to do to get food, and do that. And if a rat presses a button, and never gets food, it quickly learns to give up. But if the rat sometimes gets food and sometimes doesn't, but in no consistent pattern, so it can't learn where to put its energy, it'll sit and press that little button forever.

Sometimes, law school makes me feel like that little rat.