
Law Schools Are Bad for Democracy? - jseliger
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Law-Schools-Are-Bad-for/245334?key=1brOtA2hhki0d3uawry_7keK-LKkePsVzDJMg51ZD2KJK4l8zeJVeGfM04AyDnaHQkFYRWdhclZTWWRvZFZEVVZKLWhNYXMtbzR1TFlrdzNiRGNpblhiR001SQ
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wahern
> law schools need to pivot away from judicially oriented activism to make
> room for a new kind of engagement with the public.

How about pivoting away from social change altogether. There's a fundamental
tension between explaining the law and advocating for change. Lawyers who
abuse their credentials and authority by _advocating_ in public forums harm
the rule of law. When two lawyers dispute abstract legal questions in a
popular public forum it gives people the impression that the law is more
malleable and more capricious than it is.

The shift of scholarly discourse, legal and otherwise, into the political
culture hasn't increased the intelligence of the conversation, but merely
served to pour gasoline onto the fire. Few people not educated (formally or
informally) in the field appreciate the nuance nor are they capable of
differentiating substantive arguments from arcane technicalities. There's not
even any incentive to do this. Rather, the incentive is almost entirely to
weaponize an argument by divorcing it from its context. In this way
credentials and scholarly authority are abused and debased, regardless of the
scholar's intention.

For lawyers in particular this should be an ethics issue. If a lawyer wants to
engage in any sort of public advocacy, it should be ethically improper to
reference their degree or bar membership. And it should generally be frowned
upon in the profession for lawyers to use lawyerly, matter-of-fact language
when engaging in such advocacy.

For a recent example of the perils, this recent Popehat post and the
subsequent comments are a somewhat decent example:
[https://www.popehat.com/2018/12/18/alan-dershowitz-is-
lying-...](https://www.popehat.com/2018/12/18/alan-dershowitz-is-lying-to-
you/) Though to be clear the issues are far more numerous and complex than
exemplified in that post.

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gamblor956
The law is very capricious and malleable...

Barring lawyers from referring to their legal backgrounds would violate their
First Amendment rights. And not letting them use precise language could result
in their audience misunderstanding what they are saying. Finally, arcane
technicalities frequently are substantive matters, especially in a system of
law based on historical Court decisions.

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tracker1
I'm not sure that social advocacy should be a goal of the legal profession. I
understand that most politicians tend to have degrees in law, however when you
take on a political stance and display it, it seems to me that this has the
net effect of weakening the role of lawyers and justice in general.

I've always thought that public defenders, and prosecutors should be a pool of
publicly paid lawyers that have to take on cases of all kinds. That the
respect for the basis of personal liberty and being able to objectively argue
for either side of any given narrative is of paramount importance.

I think too many of the current twenty-something generation appear to be far
more concerned with feelings, virtue and equality of outcome than they are
thinking critically and doing what is most right for all involved. Less self,
more service.

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gamblor956
Social advocacy has always been the province of lawyers. You owe your civil
rights to lawyers. The codification of human rights into meaningful rights was
done by lawyers. Hell, the very concept of individual property rights that
underlies Western Civilization was the work of lawyers.

And it was all driven by lawyers concerned about virtue and equality of
outcome.

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remarkEon
>equality of outcome

See that’s where you lost me.

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solidsnack9000
_As dusk turns to night for progressive activism in the courts, law schools
need to pivot away from judicially oriented activism to make room for a new
kind of engagement with the public. What is lacking in public discussions
about law school is attention to what it means for legal elites to serve the
democratic conversation about how the people rules itself. Rather than
burnishing the credentials of law and its royal judicial stewards, we should
insist on the centrality of the people in a democratic legal order. If elite
students are forced into a dilemma about how to preserve their sense of
justice even as they embrace extraordinary privilege, it is, first and
foremost, because society allows law schools to endlessly reproduce elite
ascendancy. But the institutions themselves can force some change from within,
in part by explaining to the people how the law rules them._

Activism in the courts, where so much of the outcome depends on judges, who
are neither elected nor accountable to the people, undermines democracy, the
legitimacy of the rulings so made, and the causes thus supported.

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Simulacra
I had hoped this article would touch more on how lawyers pervert democracy and
law, creating entire industries out of greed; i.e. Prenda

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RickJWagner
The article says democracy is in open crisis.

History says otherwise. There have been far worse periods, and democracy just
adjusts and moves on. (Sometimes the ideas of the past arise again. For
instance, socialism has been somewhat fashionable in America's past, and again
is on the political radar screen.) There is not an open crisis.

