Law, pain, death

Law exists in a field of pain and death. That’s the first sentence of an article I read 1L year. I’ve said that line to myself over and over again, hundreds of times, in these last few years. It’s the truest thing I’ve read in this place. Pain and death. The courtroom is a place of pain and death. I hold this line like a talisman, repeat it like a prayer. It obliterates the biggest lie the law tells about itself, rips aside the façade of civility and order and sterile justice the law hides behind.

Haven’t we been hearing that story all day today? Haven’t we been hearing it for weeks now? Let due process take its course. Let the system work. Here, in the court room, law and order. There, out on the streets, violence and destruction. We are so invested in that piece of fiction. Look at how people dress in a courtroom. Look at the finely pressed suits, look at how we stand up when the judge walks in, look at the solemn oaths and the under Gods, and the justice. This is what civility looks like. This is how civilized people behave.

These structures are set in place to keep the violence and the sheer terror of what happens in the court at bay. The judge announces the sentence, then we all rise, and he walks off to his elegant chambers with dark oak desks and handsome thick texts. He never watches the families collapse in heaving sobs. He doesn’t put chains on a human and lead him to a dark cell. The judge says, neglect, but someone else walks into the playroom where the children are waiting for mommy to finish court. Someone else watches a mother who was guilty of just being poor saying goodbye to her children, that she’ll try to get them back, someone else pulls the sobbing children apart and takes them away. The person who administers the injection is not the same person who decided the cocktail should puncture the skin and see, everyone is absolved, no one has blood on their hands. It’s all very orderly. Rule of law. Nothing violent about saying a word (the word)– violence is looters in a convenience store. Sticks and stones.

You can’t fucking win, that’s the thing. That’s what you have to know. Maybe you care about the police state, and you care about the incarceration of colored bodies. And so you say, fuck prosecutors, fuck their unbridled discretion, fuck these one sided grand jury proceedings, where the prosecutor can say anything and bring anyone and the accused doesn’t even have a right to fucking defend himself, much less be present for the proceedings. Fuck how badly the decks are stacked against the accused, the systems that decide your guilt before the cuffs go on your hands. Fuck all of that, on most days—but maybe a broken clock can be right, this time. Maybe when a black body is the victim instead of the accused, maybe we can make that work for us. Maybe just this one time, the decks are stacked for us.

But, nah. Did you forget what I said? Remember that for colored bodies, the court room is place of pain and death. You can’t fucking win, you see. It’s all very orderly, very organized, like an equation, set up so that you know the answer before you even start solving the problem. Rule of law, motherfuckers. Now, please stop causing violence and destruction out on the streets. That kind of behavior is for the courtroom.

“A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.” 

somewhereinamerica

I woke up to this beautiful piece of work in my Inbox a few days ago, and was immediately obsessed with it. Aside from seeing familiar faces and feeling like I know celebrities, the video is gorgeous. I sent it to my sister, and we re-watched it several times over Thanksgiving break. Apparently though, putting hijabis in skinny jeans and skateboards is super controversial (see the comments on the video here), and putting Jay-Z on in the background is a promotion of “sex, swag, and consumption.” Let’s just dispense with the Jay-Z bit first: I keep seeing references to this video being set to a song about Miley Cyrus twerking– can y’all at least Rap Genius this first? The song is about how racism intersects with class, that it doesn’t matter what Jay accomplishes and how much he’s worth, white folks will never welcome him to the club. But Miley Cyrus’ whiteness still lets her dip in and out of hip-hop and black culture as she sees fit. And Jay says fuck you to that. Let’s move on.

What I think is so remarkable about this whole discussion, and bitterly ironic (heyoooooo mipsterz), is that we hear all about how frustrating it is for hijabis to feel like anytime they are in public, they are seen not as individuals, but as Representatives Of Islam. And that’s something all of us face, hijabi or not– our bodies are marked, wherever we go, we hold up our We Come In Peace signs, always the emissaries of Our Very Foreign People. It’s an unfair burden.  We want to be responsible for repping only our own selves, we reject the idea that any of us are responsible for representing Contemporary Islam in America. And then a group of women get together in a video to rep themselves (show me where the video even attempts to claim that it’s a portrayal of contemporary Muslim anything?), only to receive all kinds of backlash and fretting over what this means for Muslim American Identity As A Whole. Can a hijabi breathe? For real?

It is offensive to me, the fucked up shit we do to our women. It is offensive to me that if we had a video of brown dudes with beards and skinny jeans and skateboards (always the best game: hipster or Muslim?), no eyelashes would be batted.  But if you’re a hijabi, you have to perform some kind of purity, some kind of authentic Islam, and if you step outside the lines of What Hijabi Ladies Should Dress Like, you’ve set yourself up to be hypersexualized. You are now Secretary of Muslim America State, Muslim Lady First, never just skateboarder or motorcyclist or fencer.

Sana Saeed, editor of the Islamic Monthly, writes:

 “The only semblance of purpose seems to come in with the images of Ibtihaj Muhammad who is shown in her element, doing what she does as a professional athlete. Those images are powerful and beautiful in what they are saying. Other than that, however, all we as the audience are afforded are images that, simply put, objectify the Muslim female form by denigrating it completely to the physical.”

Hold up there for a second. First of all– it’s fascinating to me what images people have focused on. There are some ladies in the video who are wearing skinny jeans and high heels, but most of them are in big skirts and loose pants and lots of layers. No one is making sexyface. Many of them are ignoring the camera altogether and are wrapped up in their own acrobatics– dancing, jumping, and goofing off with their friends. But because there is some gorgeous lighting and they look pretty in it, they’re being objectified? If that’s the case, is it possible for a hijabi to look good without it being a performance for the male gaze?

More importantly than that, though, I take issue with the argument that only the fencer, Ibtihaj Muhammad, is “in her element” because she’s shown in her fencing gear, her professional work. Is that the only space in which Muslim women can be in their element? I am just as much in my element when I’m being goofy with my friends as when I am in my law-student-drag, but if a video showcases me in the former, I’ve been stripped of agency?

Saeed argues that the video is all style and no substance, that the aesthetics of the video are empty, that it’s just about stylish ladies posing magazine ready. But are we really going to talk about hijab and then argue in the same sentence that women can’t make profound statements about who they are and what matters to them through the way they dress? I mean, really? Women can only speak through their clothing choice if the clothing is hijab, but a statement about themselves through the cut of their jeans, the color of their skirt, the heel on their shoe– that kind of statement signals a “denigration” of the female form? Really? You can make that argument to me only if you’re going to Catherine MacKinnon this and be willing to argue that women can never make meaningful choices about what they actually want because their choices about what they want is dictated by patriarchy and the male gaze. But damn, I really hope you’re not going to then also make a hijab-is-a-personal-choice argument.

There are all kinds of comments on the blogs and the vimeos that this video is not Islamic. And that’s absolutely correct. This video is not Islamic, it does not claim to be Islamic, it does not claim to be anything. It’s a Rorsharch test that says far more about the anxieties of the people who are watching than the ones who created it — and shit, is that disappointing.

Two Cities

I have spent four days out of every week this semester taking the subway up and down the island of Manhattan. On two of those days, it’s towards South Ferry, getting off at Chambers St. to intern for a judge in the federal courts.  And on the other days, it’s to the South Bronx, where I intern at a public defender’s office. It’s been a tale of two cities, this semester.

The Family Court in the Bronx, where I’m working in family defense, is chaotic, drab, uneasy. Lines of parents often snake outside the courthouse, they sit on rows of wooden benches in a room inside, waiting for their cases to be called. Folding chairs line the walls of the court room itself, officers in thick bullet-proof vests lean back in their chairs and chat at the back table. The social workers, the lawyers, the security people- everyone knows each other. And then of course, there are the children. Family Court is a terrible place where terrible things happen.

The federal courts in Lower Manhattan, on the other hand, are gorgeous— all marble and gold and wide windows looking out to the city set against the Brooklyn Bridge. Skyscrapers surround the courthouse, and on foggy days, the buildings earn their name. On sunny days, everything gleams.

The Bronx used to gleam. In the early 1900s, the Grand Concourse was one of the most fashionable streets in the city, lined with art deco buildings owned by the wealthiest families in New York. That was over by the 1960s. The Bronx is beginning to make a comeback, thanks to work by community activists, but there was a time when filmmakers who wanted to shoot scenes set in 1940s war-torn Europe would come to the Bronx.

The history of the Bronx’s decline is an ugly one, but nothing about it is accidental. City planners in New York made decisions to systematically push the city’s undesirables into the outer borough in an effort to beautify Manhattan. In the 1930s, the Home Owners Loan Corporation created maps of cities in the U.S. categorizing the districts within the city from “most secure” to “least secure,” and banks would refuse to give out mortgages or credit lines to “low security” neighborhoods. The decisions about what was a “low security” neighborhood were based on highly racist ideologies—they were generally areas with high black/brown/immigrant populations. The term “redlining” comes from these maps– the “Grade D” neighborhoods were outlined in red. Here’s an HOLC map of the Bronx from 1938.

In the 1960s and 70s, the Bronx began to deteriorate as there was a mass exodus of both people and wealth from the borough. The federal government began funding the demolition of neighborhoods in favor of high-rise public housing and expressways. The Cross-Bronx Expressway, the brainchild of Robert Moses, tore through residential neighborhoods in East Tremont and displaced the thousands of families that had built their lives there. Property values plummeted. Instead of doing upkeep on what had now become very cheap real estate, it became common practice for slumlords to set their own buildings on fire and collect the insurance.

“Planned shrinkage” is the euphemism city planners use to describe cutting back on civil services where tax dollars can’t support them. And as the Bronx literally burnt down to the ground, city officials decided to cut back on fire departments. Manhattan and the Bronx feel like two different cities because that was the point.

The area of the South Bronx where I get off, 161^st St. is more or less indistinguishable from the commercial blocks around Penn Station. The area has developed a lot in the last few years, I’m told. Dozens of corner stores, nail salons, vendors on top of each other. Sidewalk broken by the occasional patch of tree, weeds and grass running through cracks in the grey cement. One key difference is that there are many more black and brown bodies. There were chalkings for awhile on the sidewalk near the courthouse, before the rain washed them out: “why do I always fit the description?”

Our clinic professor had once told us that some judges and prosecutors refuse to walk down the block from the courthouse to their office without being escorted by court officers. A judge had once leaned in and asked one of their lawyers, “Aren’t you afraid walking down to the office by yourself?” I’ve spent this semester thinking a lot about what it means to commit yourself to the practice of law, to vouch for its legitimacy. It is one thing to read about the horrors of the legal system, and quite another to see it with your eyes, to be a part of it. And so the questions that are on my mind when I make the walk to the courthouse are these: What about 161^st street scares judges? And how do you adjudicate with fairness and dignity in a community that scares you? And what happens when you let a community burn to the ground and then use all the violence of law to police what’s left of it?

Desert Blues and Rebel Musicians

What do Rihanna and former Tuareg militants from Mali have in common?  They were both performers at Mawazine, a massive world music festival held annually in Rabat. If you follow Rihanna on Instagram (and if you don’t, why are we even friends?), you can see a few photos she posted from right here in Rabat the night she was here for the festival. Mawazine lasts for 10 days, on six different themed stages across the city, with shows happening on every stage, every  night. Mawazine performers include everyone from international sensations (see: Rihanna, Psy, David Guetta) to local, Moroccan acts.

What’s particularly incredible about the festival is that it’s free to attend, and hundreds of thousands of people go to the shows every night. The festival used to be funded by the government, but now has private sponsors (political issues around this coming to you soon). There’s something communal about the existence of a festival like this– everyone that I met that week made sure to ask me if I was aware of Mawazine, if I was going, who I had seen. It felt kind of like being on a college campus in the middle of some long-established tradition, Spring Fling and the like.

The first night that I arrived in Rabat, the professor I’m living with, Rita, gave me the pamphlet for the program. The part of me that puts “What’s My Name?” at the top of my list of summer jamz squealed a little bit when I saw her headlining the first night of the festival.

That lasted for all of 5 seconds, quickly shut down when Rita sniffed at the program and said “All the kids here are excited about RIHANNA…psh. We should go see these Congolese drummers. They’re wonderful.” I didn’t want to be like “ME DUMB AMERICAN ME LIKE DIAMONDS IN THE SKY,” so instead, I just had a mini-Rihanna party with Spotify in my kitchen, and went to see the drummers (I’m still not convinced that I made the right choice). I later made up for this by going to see both David Guetta and Enrique Iglesias, and had my fill of trashy pop music.

My favorite act of the entire festival, however, was a group called Tinariwen. The group is composed of Tuaregs, a nomadic, Berber tribe who have been in on-and-off in conflict with the Mali government since Mali was granted independence in the 1960s. Tinariwen was born in the midst of the Tuareg rebel community. In 1980, Gaddafi put out a call for Tuareg rebel fighters to receive military training from his army, with the hopes of creating an army of the best Tuareg soldiers. The original members of the group met each other at these training camps, making their own instruments and writing protest songs about freedom, living in exile, and the struggles of their people for independence.

They began to record their songs on cassette tapes and distribute them around the Sahara region, playing at weddings and the like. Their music combined elements of traditional Tuareg folk songs with rock n’ roll to form lovely, guitar driven melodies reminiscent of the blues (hence, their music is often termed the ‘desert blues’). The group dispersed temporarily in the early 1990s as members joined to fight in the Tuareg uprising in the southern Sahara, but have now committed full time to their music. They won a Grammy for their most recent album, Tassili, in 2012.

Seeing them perform has been one of my favorite experiences in Rabat so far. The stage was set on the Bouregreg River, it was a beautiful night, and the music was the kind you just closed your eyes a little bit and rocked back and forth to.

There are a lot of political issues around whether or not Mawazine should exist, which I’ll write about later– but I think it’s interesting that the king approved Tinariwen to perform at Mawazine, given the fact that their songs are about a desert people rebelling against who they see as their occupiers. Morocco has its own issues with being an occupying force in the Western Sahara, which it has occupied since Spain gave up its colonial rule there. Moroccans insist that the Western Sahara belongs to a historical “Greater Morocco” that existed as part of the Moroccan sultanate before colonial rule. The area remains one of the largest non-self governing territories in the world, though the U.N. recognizes the Polasario Front (the Algerian-backed military wing of the national liberation movement to form the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) as the representatives of the Western Sahara people.

One of the persistent issues in the region is whether or not there should be a referendum to allow Western Sahara to decide how it should be ruled. Aside from what the options in the referendum should be (ie. autonomy versus full independence), who should be allowed to vote is an incredibly decisive debate. This is because in 1975, King Hassan II (the father of the current king), ordered The Green March of 350,000 Moroccans into Western Sahara. The goal was to send the message that the Western Sahara was Moroccan land, and that the Spanish should turn it over to Moroccans, instead of granting it to the Sahrawi. It was incredibly effective: the march met almost no resistance by the Polisario, or by the Spanish. Over the last decade, the monarchy has poured millions of dollars into the capital city, Laâyoune, with the clear purpose of marking it as its own.

Morocco withdrew from the African Union because some of the members have expressed support for the Polisario. Talking about the Western Sahara is a major taboo in Moroccan politics (the other two being criticism of Islam and the monarchy). One of my friends here who teaches English at a swanky, European style school here told me that she’s had no problems discussing all kinds of things in her classroom: sex, homosexuality, abortions– she said that many of her students here are more liberal than the people she went to college with in the South. But there was a huge uproar when she used a map in the classroom that marked out Western Sahara as a distinct territory from Morocco, and parents angrily came in demanding she stop.

I’m fascinated by the parallel here to Israel and Palestine: the situations to me are remarkably similar, and I am taken aback by how the government can criticize Israel but defend its own actions in the Western Sahara in the same breath. Interestingly enough, Javier Bardem has been a major advocate for the Sahrawi cause. He produced a documentary, Sons of the Cloud: The Last Colony, on the Western Sahara issue a year ago (it’s on Netflix Instant). Unsurprisingly, not a single Moroccan official agreed to be interviewed for the film.

Les Petite Nouvelles

1. Street harassment is mostly terrible, but occasionally hilarious. The other day, a group of barely pubescent teenage boys mashAllaaah‘d me as I walked past them. THE ORIENT: so sexual, but so SPIRITUAL. Especially on nights when the desert wind blows through the the curtains of the harem…(jokes, Eddie Saidz, jokes!).

Avenue Mohammad V is one of the main arteries of the city, dotted with tons of bakeries, coffee shops, and stores. A 10 year old boy was standing by one of the shops with a bunch of yellow roses and tried to sell me one. I shook my head la, and kept walking, but he kept apace with me, speaking quickly in darija (the Moroccan Arabic dialect). I couldn’t quite understand what he was saying– he kept on repeating something that sounded like hudda or khud’a– so I just kept walking, hoping he’d give up. He finally just stopped in front of me, threw a rose at my open bag, and then whipped around in the other direction. I later looked up the word in my Lonely Planet phrasebook– it meant “gift.” And voila, to the right, c’est ma rose.

2. I wanted to make okra for dinner last night. Rita, my landlady, had bought some okra from a market a little outside of Rabat, but we weren’t sure if  it was actually sold in the medina (the old city, where the main market in Rabat is found). I didn’t know how to say okra in darija, so I just took a piece with me to the medina and asked sellers if they knew where I could buy some. They’d give me some winding directions down alleyways and around stalls, and I’d wind up in front of someone else who’d direct me elsewhere. I finally asked an older Moroccan lady with her son. She first attempted to explain, in darija. My blank stare made it clear I understood only one of every 20 words, and so finally, she just said “Okay, I will show you.”

It’s so wee!

What she had really meant was “join me on my evening market shopping, and we’ll end up at the vegetable stalls at some point.” It was kind of amazing: we kept on being stopped by other ladies that she knew, and as these other ladies would go down the line hugging and kissing her and her son, I’d get thrown in the mix too. Once we got to the vegetable stands, she went one by one asking each of the sellers if they had okra, but no one did. After speaking to the last shop owner, she turned to me and said “Somethingsomethingsomething and you will find it.” I couldn’t quite understand what the “somethingsomethingsomething” was, so I assumed it was a location. I asked her if I could get there by taxi, she looked at me blankly and then repeated herself. And then I realized that “somethingsomethingsomething” was “when the month of Ramadan starts.” Which, yeah, no, can’t get there by taxi.

3. The other day, I somehow found myself on a street that housed stalls of artists and their paintings. Most of the stalls had small studios in the back where the painters were actually working. I talked to one of the painters who happened to speak excellent fus’ha and a little bit of English. He gave me his business card, which lists his occupation as philosopher-painter. Kind of wonderful. Also wonderful is this painting that was out on the sidewalk, shaded by trees in such a way that it looks like the sunlight hitting the canvas is actually emanating from the clouds in the painting themselves

4. And then finally– at a 20 minute walk from my apartment:

        

On being lost and diaspora

Ordinarily, this title would portend a post about law school angst and the metaphorical lost-ness of identity etc. etc., but no, I just mean lost, in the literal way.

My mom was my age when she came to the U.S., twenty-five. Unlike me, she came with two little humans attached to her hip: me, five, and my brother, four. She grew up in a traditional Pakistani home under the tutelage of a severe, widowed grand-mother, Amma-ji, who ran the show for my mother’s entire clan of seven uncles. After a certain age, Amma-ji mandated that my mom couldn’t go to school anymore, and so she stopped. But my mom still loved to read. She was obsessed with Urdu digests– dramatic serial novels and short stories. One of my favorite stories about her is how, when my grandma was after her to do some chore, she’d hide in the bathroom with her digests and read until someone realized she was missing and the jig was up.

The upshot of this is that unlike the rest of my family, my mom came to the U.S. knowing about as many English words as she did people (that would be about six). I’ve always known that, but that fact has come into startling relief in the past week that I’ve been in Rabat. (Number of people I know: Four. Number of words I know: Embarrassing for someone who studied French from middle through high school.) Every conversation is an accomplishment. The shortest trip is a puzzle.

I went grocery shopping the other day, at a small convenience store that looks a lot like a CVS, if CVS sold vegetables. I spent the walk over there silently rehearsing my lines: “Acceptez-vous les cartes de credit?” or “Pourriez-vous m’aider?” I spent 45 minutes going up and down the lanes, silently translating to myself. Filled my cart. Went to the cash register. Pulled out my—and it turns out, I had left my wallet at home.

It was the kind of thing that happened on the regular in the U.S., the kind where I’d tell myself I needed to get my life together, and then fetch my wallet. But here, it felt like a crushing blow. I was totally deflated: “I’m sorry I’m a mindless idiot, I left my wallet at home” was not a line I had rehearsed. I blurted some kind of explanation that involved a lot of waving at my empty purse, and motions indicating I would be back, and began to walk home. But it had gotten darker, and I was already flustered from my Grocery Trip Failure, and so I walked down the wrong street, got turned around in several directions–by the time I got to my apartment, it took all my resolve to not hole up in my bed, abandon my groceries, and call the day a wash. As I grabbed my wallet, the refrain in my head was: “Shit Mama Khan could not afford to pull.”

I was an anxious little child, which should come as no surprise to any of you who’ve attempted to cross a street with me. My separation anxiety intensified when I started kindergarten at a school in Queens, where we lived. I would sob through most of the day, until the moment my mom and brother appeared at the door. My mom started showing up earlier and earlier. Eventually, she would come in at lunch and stay for the rest of the day, acting as something of a teacher’s aide.

After school, the three of us would embark on a public transit adventure to get home. Sometimes we would go to the public library, or the park, or go shopping and run errands. And somehow, my mom figured it out. She figured out which routes to take and which ones to avoid, when to get on and when to get off. If we were lost, we would simply march on, up and down streets, sometimes in circles– but always ending up where we needed to be.  She had no shame in asking strangers for help, no matter how broken her English, and if she was ever nervous or panicked, she never showed it. This was before cell phones, before Google maps, before she had more words than people. It was something that seemed so ordinary then, but so brave to me now: to criss-cross a foreign city on the daily, two children in tow, without a beating blue dot on an iPhone screen, relying only on the kindness of strangers and the timeliness of MTA.

It astounds me now, not the mechanics of the process so much as how she survived the sheer mental exhaustion of it. When I ask her about it, she just shrugs, “It wasn’t too hard.” But nothing I do here compares, not really. I’ve figured out a nifty (or maybe creepy?) trick on my iPhone–if you load up a map when you have wi-fi, GPS satellites can still locate and track you on the map, even without data services or a wi-fi signal. I’ll probably never really be lost.

When I was very young, maybe six or seven, I’d sometimes be overcome with panic if I was in a public place where I didn’t know the way home if I got lost. That fear disappeared once I knew things like my phone number and address, knew that I could always find an adult who would help me get back. Knowing English is kind of like that: I know that I’ll always be found. There will always be people who will speak English, people who will respect me, forgive and not scoff at my stumbles in French and Arabic, because I have English behind them. My mom didn’t have that. She did the thing that I will never do, so that I’ll never have to do it– which is to go from the colonized place and conquer being lost in diaspora.

Deprogramming: Part I

One of the very first law school clichés you learn your first year is that law school is not about learning the law, it’s about learning how to think like a lawyer. And my first few weeks here were attempting to grasp what that meant. Legal methods was our first crack at it, and you can see it in the post I wrote exuberantly blabbering about how exciting it was to read about railcars decoupling. How magical it was, this elixir of law school that could make the banal technicalities of 19^th century railroad regulations fascinating. I felt a sense of pride in it; to be exhilarated by these methodologies meant I was doing something right, that law school was the right place to be.

In the first few weeks of Contracts, we read a case in which a company hires a draftsmen with the promise of giving him a “fair” share of the company’s profits. The employee is later fired, and when he sues for his “fair share,” the court refuses to enforce the agreement. “Fair share” of profits is a vague standard, according to court. I remember thinking that there was something distinctly unfair about this, but when I raised this concern with my professor, his response was “Oh, you just used the f word.” Real law did not have room for the f word—real law was about what parties explicitly and precisely bargained for. It was not the role of the judge to substitute his own fuzzy judgment about wobbly ideals into the world of Grown Up Law. Grown Up Law was about precise rules and predictable outcomes, handed down by thoughtful judges who impartially relied on established precedents to apply doctrines to the given facts. That was what it meant to think like a lawyer.

Weeks later, we read a case about a woman in war-torn Greece who needed a loan to escape. A borrower agrees to lend her $25, but in return, she would have to give him a note which states that she borrowed $2,000 and intended to repay him that amount with interest if she survived the war. She does in fact survive, but sues the lender, arguing that she ought only to pay him back the amount she borrowed with interest. The court disagrees—she agreed to sign a note that said she borrowed $2,000 and would pay back $2,000. Even if she borrowed only $25, her promise to pay more needed to be enforced. When I read that case and reasoned out the “correct” ruling—not the one that felt right, that felt fair – I momentarily felt a sense of pride. I was doing it right. I was thinking like a lawyer.

I don’t feel that way anymore. I had already started to realize then that something about thinking like a lawyer meant thinking less like a person. And you can see that in the post I wrote in December, about the ways in which law school felt like intellectual games without a social conscience. The structures started to feel like farce. I spent four years in a critical theory utopia that constantly problematized the concept of neutrality or objectivity as ways in which elites perpetuated the status quo. But the academy of law takes these concepts seriously. Mainstream legal thought not only assumes objectivity and neutrality is possible, but believes the very integrity of the system is predicated on their existence.

I knew that assumption was wrong, but I didn’t know how to articulate it. That entire semester I felt a sense of being underwater—both because 1L is all about drowning in the law, but also because I knew that the story law and law school told about itself was deeply flawed. I just couldn’t see or hear or think clearly enough to point out what was so wrong about it. More than anything, I was totally mystified by the fact that no professors, no judges, not even the dissents– no one was breaking it down for me. Sure, professors were willing to push back on certain holdings, or explain why they disagreed with how certain cases were decided. But no one questioned the fundamental legitimacy of the decision making process itself. I was astounded that it was possible for an academic discipline as powerful and with as much potential to enact violence as the law to be so unreflective, so uncritical of itself as institution.

And then lo, I started a class called Critical Legal Thought, and lo my legal soul was saved.

To be continued.

2012: the things that happened

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Jokes

Having devastated you with the cleverness of its title, this blog aspires to be more than a repository of legal puns. More implies that repository of puns was a baseline, that there would be SOME legal puns. But I realize now that I have failed to deliver to you, reader.

Oh sure, those of you who have the privilege of being my Facebook friend (wait, that’s all of you, right? who are you, if not? say hi!) have seen me use the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures to do everything from proposing threesomes to delivering some searing burns (oh hai Rule 8). But I have a whole new category of joke I’d now like to reveal: the Ruth Bader Ginsburg jokes. They are great. And by that I mean, they are terrible. But great. But terrible. Mostly just terrible. With no further ado:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Jokes

1. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is delivering the pain to her opponents, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth Bade WINSburg

2. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is enjoying an episode of Arrested Development, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like BLUTH Bader Ginsburg!

3. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is celebrating passover she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth SEDER Ginsburg!

4. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is experimenting with other worldly Muslim beings, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth Bader JINNSburg….AHHHHHH NOOOO RUTH NOT JINN DONT MESS WITH JINN AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

5. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s teaching History of Magic at Hogwarts, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth Bader BINNSburg!

6. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is Nancy Drewing it up, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like  SLEUTH Bader Ginsburg!

7. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was really into the Knicks last season, she was like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth Bader LINsburg!

8. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is opening up a business to serve food at parties, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth CATER Ginsburg!

9. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is partying it up in Vegas, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth Bader SINSburg!

10. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is hanging out in Florida, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth  GATOR Ginsburg*!

11. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is enjoying homefries with her brunch, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth TATOR Ginsburg!

12. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is making her profile on OkCupid, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth DATER Ginsburg!

13. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is coming down after a night of partying, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth FADER Ginsburg!

14. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is out fishing, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth BAITER Ginsburg!

15. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is off to see the Wizard for a heart, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth Bader TINSburg!

16. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is delivering som Real Talk, she’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like TRUTH Bader Ginsburg!

17. And then when misogynist punks read RBG’s opinions and are like, Ruth Bader Ginsburg? More like Ruth HATE HER Ginsburg– I punch them in the face.

CONTRIBUTE YOUR OWN!

**not mine

On meaning (Or, what do I do with myself now that exams are over?)

I walked out of my third and final exam with pure exuberance and joy (which had, by the way, 0% to do with how I thought the exam went). After a brief nap, I revived and celebrated the end of the horror with the other survivors. This was all expected. What was not expected was the next morning. I dragged myself out of bed. I looked at my room. For the first time in a month, my brain’s tunnel vision expanded to include other details of life– like the fact that I hadn’t done laundry in 3 weeks. Or that I couldn’t see my floor under the piles of clean/dirty clothes and papers and books. Or that the food in my fridge was now providing sustenance to some pretty interesting bacteria.

The afternoon hours went like this: I would sit up. Look around. Pick up a thing, throw it away. And then sink back into my couch. A friend came over. We watched Gossip Girl. Then we stared at each other and the blank TV screen. What now? I felt a deep sense of emptiness, friends. The friend surmised our state in an apt way– he said that exams may have been utterly soul-crushing drudgery. But we had purpose. There was no time to question whether any of this was worth it, whether any of anything was worth it. We had one job: get out of bed, get to your books. Eat something. Get back to your books. Study, study, study. Eat. Go home to bed at 5:00AM. Sleep till noon. Do it again. True, we were completely alienated from our labor, but who needs consciousness when you can have productivity? The cogs in the capitalist machinery do not have the luxury to wonder if their lives have meaning. And neither did we.

But now exams were over. And then what? Find ways to render meaning into my life independent of law school exams? Figure out what used to make me a person? LOL. It requires some walking back.

Four years ago, I was a person who would go to the piano practice rooms at Swarthmore and teach myself this bar by painful bar. So now, I am learning What Sarah Said, by Death Cab. on the piano (because seriously, I need more than two songs in my repertoire). It’s lovely and simple, but there is this one phrase that has been eluding me since I first tried to learn it over the summer. It’s at 00:26 on the video– the high notes on top of the normal melody (C-C-E-F-C). I think the song is actually recorded by layering a second piano, but it can also be done by crossing your left hand over the right hand to play the notes on top of the right hand’s melody. It sounds lovely if you do it right. I have not yet done it right.

12 months ago, I was a person who saw this  and decided I wanted to do the same with my life. This last week has been spent in watching hundreds of clips from this past year, looking for the 2 or 3 seconds to put into the video. Talk about divers dying of nostalgia.

Six months ago, I was a person who ran almost every day, through zoo exhibits and Rock Creek Park trails, sometimes with a running buddy but most often on my own. I was doing the Couch to 5k program, which I wholeheartedly recommend for any fellow coach potatoes. K-12 phys-ed taught me that running was a miserable and grueling process, but Couch to 5k helped me unlearn that The first time I ran for 20 minutes without stopping (the infamous week 5 day 3 of the Couch to 5k), I was so overwhelmed with MY BODY CAN DO ANYTHING!!!!!!!! feelings that I teared up a little. I’ve barely run at all this semester, but winter break = comeback time.

3 months ago, I was a person who condescendingly told a friend that it was really great that something “so simple could make her so happy.” The something so simple was basketball, and though I regret having been such a jerk, what I don’t regret is that as penance, I agreed to watch a game with her.  I moderately enjoyed myself. Then, with my brother back home this past week, I watched another Knicks game. And then another. And then another. And I started to feel things– feelings I had before thought were completely inexplicable, like how could a performance of a team that you are not a part of affect YOUR mood? But it did, dear reader, it did! This completely improbable buzzer beating win:

JAAAYYY ARRRRRRR

brought great joy to my heart! The roller coaster of emotions that was last night’s game (DOWN BY 27 POINTS! THAN UP BY 5 WITH 2 MINUTES LEFT! THEN LOSS BY 1 AT THE BUZZER!) was felt deeply in my core. And now I’m on the YouTubes and the Wikipedias, and reading the blogs, and getting excited for the games.

This is all to say, sometimes it’s useful to figure out not only who you used to be, but also, in what ways who you are can transfer to other contexts. My excitable nature, my love of camaraderie, my enthusiasm for TEAM SPIRIT!!!, and my desire to nerd out wherever there is room for one to nerd out…guys, I was kind of born to be a fan. GO KNICKS!

So these are the ways in which I am combating the Stockholm’s syndrome that is law school. Happy almost new year frandz, see you on the other side.