Hey Crew

Hey everybody, I thought I would take this lazy Saturday morning/afternoon to let you all know what has been going on with me since I posted last. So law school started and I have been working my tail off. I am working for both a professor and the legal journal that is published at Western. Its fun work, but really tends to stretch my time and I am nowhere caught up in my class work. I am taking a bunch of interesting courses however that are keeping me sane. The first is Public International Law. I know I have harped against all things international in the past but this class is really interesting because it still involves a bunch of politics. I am beginning to view this international stuff in a new light. In particular I find that international studies, in particular international law, has little critical or theoretical discourse.

I say little because I have found some recent books (2004~) that have expanded many of the ideas familiar to me from Political Philosophy into international law. This is really exciting of course since I can combine my theoretical interest with some law stuff. One fellow, Martti Koskenemi, has written some very interesting books on the structures and political underpinnings of international legal arguments. The one I am currently reading is call The Gentler Civilizer of Nations, which is a history of the rise and fall of international law thinking from the mid-1800’s to 1960. The book is really well researched and Koskenemi writes really well. I am writing a paper for the course (hopefully for publication) on the legitimacy of the international legal order.

A second class I find somewhat interesting is called International Humanitarian Law (IHL). This name is somewhat deceiving as it really is the law applicable to war and the waging of war. I thought the class was going to be really interesting but it is and it isn’t. I keep thinking the political questions that all the issues bring up are interesting while everyone else just wants to take about the legal arguments and principles. I find this frustrating. I know it’s a class in a law school but its frustrating because of a clash of philosophies of law. Although my philosophy of law is more explicit to myself as I have thought about it, most people follow a very traditional view that law is separable from politics while I think that legal questions and rules have a political decision underlying them, and therefore are not separable from the political issues and debates that went into their creation.

Because I take this view, that politics underlies law, I think it’s very warranted to discuss the political issues and talk about the interplay between law, morality, and politics in the development of and application of legal rules. So that makes the class somewhat frustrating.

Also frustrating is the focus on rules. Article 5 of additional Protocol 1 states that blah, blah, blah. This focus on the minutia of the legal rules of the law of war is boring. Once again I recognize that this is what law is all about-rules- but I found it disturbing how the focus on the legal rules could make something that seemed so interesting so boring. All this began to make me think about why law is kinda boring for most people. The reason why, is that all law is the same, its all about procedure and not about content. Law is like this thing that just layers itself over interesting things. That is why law seems kinda interesting and really diverse. Because law has layered itself over so much we tend to think we can be involved in all these things.

Like entertainment law. A lot of the people I know who love music and all that stuff, who wanted to work in the industry of cultural production, but didn’t get jobs there or whatever come to law school to do entertainment law. But really what they wanted to be was involved with the creation and production of the stuff and not just be a lawyer who reviews contracts and goes to court when it has to happen.

That is why, in many ways, being a lawyer is the same all over. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. But it makes me think of a couple of conclusions. If you want to be a lawyer and view that as similar to being a musician, cowboy, astronaut, pilot or whatever, then its awesome and it’s the ticket for you. If you don’t feel that way then law school might not be right for you because you might just move towards a job that you don’t want, but think you want because it is associated with something you like.

A second conclusion, and a good one I think is to realize that what you are learning at law school isn’t necessarily a bunch of content but a set of skills and practices. I find looking at it through this lense as being really helpful. First, its helpful because it helps you get through a lot of the boring sludge work you have to do that is teaching you and improving your skills. Second, its really helpful if you ever decided to leave law and work somewhere else because you have gained a set of practical skills.

For me, with my academic bent, law might be really advantageous; especially international law because of its openness towards political thinking (and its dearth of theoretical thinking) may allow me to get a good career going. Besides law professor get paid almost twice as much as professors in other faculties.

So there is a bit of what my thoughts have been over the past couple of weeks of law school

I will try and post again soon.

D