LawstLawyer

Hi! I am a lawyer. I know, I hate me already too. This blog is my extremely poorly executed first foray into writing about the law as a whole, not just an individual case my boss tells me to work on. My central goal is, and I want to be upfront about this, to explain to my reader why textualism is going to kill us all. The law is lost, genuinely, and until we find ourselves again, the world’s greatest super-power, the place that invented the internet, the birthplace of reality television, will be so crippled that the only changes it can make internally or to the wider world are destructive. I want us to be able to build again, and I know engineers will think that is an engineering problem and economists will think its an economics problem, so we all know why I think its a legal problem. But I am right and they are wrong, and importantly we lawyers are the only ones actually prepared to win that argument, even as we cheat to do it (yes you can cheat while having an argument, its probably why that clever friend of yours from high school always made you so mad).

To build again, I think we have to deconstruct the reasons our legal thinkers have set us on the course they have. That means doing better than just calling them evil or stupid or staggeringly self-absorbed, though I will doubtless make every accusation at some point and my first piece actually likens them to children, so maybe I am not starting off so hot. Some of my writing is very current events-focused, but a lot of it will be more on the back-burner. Looking at cases like Citizens United and Dobbs, issues like judicial restraint and jurisprudential philosophy. Right now, I hope to write about those things at a level that can be understood by a lay audience, but which frames them in a way that will build my reader’s understanding of what textualism sought to accomplish, why it has been so persuasive, and how it actually fails in its central goals while promoting an authoritarian legal code perplexingly forged by judges and justices whose life goals involve genuinely desiring to protect our democracy.

I also intend to write some things that are very problematic. For example, I think people who believe, as much of the country’s non-Republicans do, that our leaders are preparing to end freedom in the United States should change their views on the second amendment, buy guns, and stop talking about how we are on the brink of anything. For many people, especially but not limited to victims of gun violence, this will be a hurtful thing to read, and to be honest, I think what I think but without the lived experience of gun violence, I lack a very real form of eductation that means maybe I shouldn’t say, or write, what I think. It also, incidentally, is advocating for a world I don’t want to live in. I do believe in the almost inevitable death of the First American Republic (can I go ahead and copyright that now?) and yet I don’t own a gun (mostly true, my texas grandmother gave me one when I turned 6 or 7, but I have seen it like twice since I accidentally discharged it later that evening {not my fault}).

But I think it’s important to seriously engage with our rhetoric. Every week John Oliver delivers his comedy news from New York, reasonable people have to wonder what it will take for him to flee. He seems like a very nice man who has no interest in dying for his beliefs, and I suspect he would agree with that assessment. As “liberals” I think we have a duty to recognize that the philosophy behind self-determination of peoples is fundamentally self-defensive, that the right to bear arms, collectively and individually is actually almost as liberal a value as equality before the law, and that partisan issues have so infected our brains that we are willing to defend the right to vote as essential to defending all other rights, but don’t stop to think that collective violence, the whole grounding notion of the state, is just as central to self-determination as collective expression. To defend themselves from outside tyranny, communities need access to money and violence, with which they can defend their right to speak and vote, with which they can defend all their other rights. You don’t destroy communities by taking their right to vote, you do it by the money and violence, once those are lost the vote honestly just doesn’t matter. Ask the KKK and its century of political relevance in the very black American south.

So, if you like the sound of reading a genuinely quite good at this sort of thing lawyer deconstructing our legal regime for you all while using it to slowly “win” the already lost argument against textualism, first, I have to say you are a very bizarre person, and second, WELCOME!