the Zealous

In Lawyers as Upholders of Human Dignity, Georgetown Law Professor and legal ethics guru David Luban explains how advancing and maintaining human dignity is a fundamental cornerstone of our profession. Indeed, it is  “what makes the practice of law worthwhile.” 

Defining dignity as a “property of relationships between humans”, Prof. Luban articulates how the right to legal representation in criminal cases neatly encapsulates the notion of the law as a defender of human dignity. Prof. Luban starts with the premise that if human dignity is to mean anything at all, it must mean that every human has the right to have her story heard, particularly if the consequences at stake are moral condemnation, and loss of life or liberty, in the form of criminal sanction. “A procedural system that simply gagged a litigant and refused to even consider her version of the case would be, in effect, treating her story as if it did not exist, and treating her point of view as if it were literally beneath contempt.”

Selected excerpts from the most recent edition of Landslide, the ABA Intellectual Property Section’s flagship publication, and the articles and authors from which they are lifted:

[W]hen you start a business as an entrepreneur or inventor, it’s all about managing a relationship between risk and reward. There’s obviously a huge amount of risk and uncertainty in starting a company or developing a product. But the reward, the ability to get a patent …, is the reason why entrepreneurs and investors are willing to assume that risk. With a strong patent system, there’s greater certainty that a patent is going to issue and then that patent is going to kind of stand the test of time ….

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In his 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graebe, anthropologist and an early founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement, recounts the rise in the last century of “bullshit jobs”: occupations that serve no socially useful function, and instead cause soul-crushing psychological suffering to those forced to take on such work. Graebe contends that as much as forty percent of all jobs in the world are bullshit, which he defines as:

a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

Graeber catalogs five different species of bullshit jobs: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He indicts all “corporate lawyers” as falling into the “goons” category.