Outside Counsel

Some years back, when A was still at the Attorney General's office, she asked me to have lunch with one of her clerks, to talk to him about finding a law job once he graduated. This was something that I did fairly frequently back then-- I had always had good luck finding jobs, and was happy to provide whatever advice I could. This particular student had come highly touted-- we had just opened our practice, and our associate, a recent graduate, was acquainted with him, and A was also very high on his abilities. He was, in fact, all that, a joint degree candidate who was completing his Philosophy PhD along with his JD. He showed me his resume, and I recommended that he leave the PhD off-- or at least soft pedal it. "Firms won't take you seriously if they think you are pointing towards a career in Academy," I told him. "But I am," he said. "That doesn't mean that the firms you are interviewing with need to know that," I said, "And besides, nobody wants to hire a philosopher." We finished our lunch, and I went back to work.

A few months later I was out of town at a conference or something. My partner called me. "Wait until you meet the lawyer I just hired," she enthused. "He's getting a PhD in Philosophy!"

We practiced with David for a few years, then, in the inevitable course of these things he moved on. He has moved in and out of the practice of law for a few years, doing a dot.com thing, and teaching, and doing some other stuff as well. He is teaching and doing other stuff at the moment, perhaps out of the practice for good, and I was very flattered when an IM chat we had last week moved him to invite me to speak to his "Law and Morality" class last night. The class took the form of a debate: He asserted that objective morals exist, that law has its foundation in morals, and that the law should be a search for truth and a vehicle for justice. I took the stand that although law and morals sometimes look the same, they are really very different, and that when legal systems are called upon to operate in the realm of morals, bad law will often be the result. "Law and Morality are like apples and pears," I said. You can wander in the orchard, and sometimes you'll see that they grow together, but if you bite into a pear expecting an apple, you are in for a surprise."

It was good fun, and the first time I have been in front of a class of undergrads. They are different from the law students I usually teach-- more differential, a little harder to engage. Teaching is some heavy lifting, I'd say, even at the university level, but it was pleasant to have a chance to dabble a little.