Bom dia, Blog,
Today is Tuesday July 2, 2013, and I am ready to add some countdowns to my dashboard! It is exactly 41 days until I move into my new Brooklyn apartment and only 50 days until I start my first day of law school! After a year of downtime since graduating from Smith College, I am ready to move on to the next part of my life.
These steps are really exciting because I feel like they are leading me to exactly where I want to be. I will be diving into the depths of law and policy just as significant Social Justice Initiatives force their way to the front of the legislative stage, and all of the while I'll be in the middle of one of the world's most happening cultural epicenters. Lets just say "It's gonna be big!"........ It's gonna be big.
A lot of people see law school as a bad career decision because the market is flooded with lawyers, but I don't think that actually becoming a lawyer is the main motivator for my decision. Explaining this may be complicated so I will begin with telling you about some changes happening in the Supreme Court. (Don't worry, this won't turn into a gov't class.)
Yesterday morning the Federal Supreme Court announced some changes in its rule book, and one of those changes is basically that your argument must be made by a Supreme Court Bar admitted attorney. This may seem like its not a big deal since why would anyone want to present themselves infront of the Supreme Court without an experienced attorney representing them-- the law is VERY complex.
To me, however, this change highlights one of the biggest problems I have with our legal system. We have a government in which people are considered to be free as long as they are aware of and follow the nation's rules, but how is anyone supposed to do that when the rules are written by lawyers for other lawyers to understand? As a regular person without a law school education, how can normal people access their freedoms if they are not fully equipped with the resources needed to understand them?
While the recent changes in the Supreme Court are a magnified example of this, it is a problem evident throughout the system. Legal writing alone merits an entire semester-long course in law school. Lawyers argue that their lingo is used to minimize ambiguity, but I think that in some ways it ensures the exclusivity of their knowledge base and, by extension, increases their job security. In writing this I don't want to assert that lawyers are unimportant since I do value the work that they do and the order they provide, but I do think it is important to recognize the injustice that underlies the system they work in.
People are isolated from the law because of the complexity and exclusivity involved in understanding it, and in order to completely follow the rules and to be fully protected by them, people must have access to an attorney who has been trained and apparently bar certified if we're talking about the Federal Supreme Court. I could dedicate an entire blog to writing about the problems associated with accessing proper resources and how this access is significantly influenced by class, race, gender, age and so much more, but right now I won't.
Instead I will just say that this is why I am going to law school. I want to know the laws so that I can be a resource for people who don't otherwise have access to them. I want to be able to work at increasing the equality of our legal system because even though laws are written by and for lawyers, rights are supposed to be for everybody.
And so with my wide eyes and bleeding heart, I will leave you with that.
I am so glad I have ACCESS to such incredibly insightful people. But honestly, nicely put!
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