the Zealous

25 Nov 17

In The Path of the Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (former Justice of the US Supreme Court) wrote:

When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession. … The reason why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them, is that in societies like ours the command of the public force is entrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees. People want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared. The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.

Contract drafting is an exercise in prediction.

24 Oct 17
This New York Times story of the death of an intellectual property practitioner at Silicon Valley's Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati is both harrowing and heart-breaking. "He had been working more than 60 hours a week for 20 years, ever since he started law school and worked his way into a partnership …", only to slowly but inexorably become an addict of various drugs, finally felled by a bacterial infection common among IV drug users. The last call on his phone he ever made was to call into a conference for a client, mere hours before he succumbed.
 
21 Sep 17
There aren't many songs in which lawyers are portrayed in a positive light.

At best, lawyers are mentioned in order to depict someone in dire straits and desperate for legal help. Warren Zevon's Lawyers, Guns & Money (1978) is probably the best representative of this:

Now I'm hiding in Honduras
I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan.