You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law

Today I made a brief car ride with my son last an hour so I could hear all of the latest episode of This American Life. Entitled “DIY,” the summary set forth below, from the This American Life web sitem fails to do justice to a story that brought me to tears, that reminds me again what this whole life of the law ultimately boils down to. Fortunately, you can hear the whole episode yourself from the player pasted in below the summary:

PROLOGUE.

Carl King, a self-taught investigator, talks about the murder case he’s working on now—one the police think they’ve already solved. Carl got started in this business after freeing his close friend from prison. He now runs an organization, called Success to Freedom, devoted to helping wrongfully convicted inmates. (2 minutes)

ACT ONE.

Reporter Anya Bourg tells the story of Carl King’s first case, where he’s able to accomplish what experienced detectives and lawyers were not. He proves that his friend was innocent. In this first half of the show, we hear the story of the crime. In 1980, Mario Hamilton was gunned down in the street in Brooklyn. A teenager claimed to have seen it happen. With police prompting, he fingered a guy named Collin Warner as the shooter. No matter that everyone in the neighborhood said someone else murdered Hamilton and that Warner had nothing to do with it. And no matter that the teenager hadn’t witnessed the murder at all. A jury convicted Warner, and he was sentenced to 15 years to life for killing a man he’d never even heard of. Carl, his childhood friend couldn’t let it rest, and started to fight the conviction. He tells everyone he can about the case. He tracks down witnesses. He teaches himself to read court documents. Eventually, he gets a real estate lawyer hooked on the case. (29 minutes)

ACT TWO.

The story of Collin Warner continues. His friend Carl manages to convince the real shooter and the victim’s brother (who watched him die on the sidewalk) to testify on Collin’s behalf. After 21 years in prison, Collin goes free. (24 minutes)

This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text. I’m trying to regain a freedomthat writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature.

A major focus of Reality Hunger is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it. Or writing a book about destroying capitalism, but being told it can’t be published because it might harm the publishing industry.

Mr. Shields, of course, is not original. Just check out Jonathan Lethem’ s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.”

Or my piece, wholly indebted to Lethem,  entitled “Appropriation.”

Or David Markson, in Vanishing Point (at page 12): “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. As is already more than self-evident.”

[I borrowed that.]

When will this idiocy end? Isn’t there some recognition somewhere that individuals making decisions that are best for them might in the aggregate hurt everyone? And when is a person really free to make a decision one way or another about whether, say, he can go to law school or he should enlist in the armed forces?

It’s Veterans Day. It’s always been a special day in my family. My father was a soldier and POW in WWII. WWII was a difficult war with an outcome that was not certain until very near the end (and even then it took a new and horrific weapon to finally end it). The U.S. and the Soviet Union won it. My father didn’t get drafted, but he enlisted because he was about to be drafted. The U.S. military was a genuine citizen’s force. My father was changed forever by the experience — mostly for the better, but it was by no means an experience he wished me to undergo in the absence of a very good reason.

I cannot help but be humbled on Veterans Day.

But Steven Levitt is much too clever for all of that. He’d tell my dad that people like him who were forced into the military in WWII were the “wrong people”! Given Mr. Levitt’s brilliance, it’s a wonder we won WWII and haven’t won wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that we’ve now fought 2 and 4 years longer, respectively, than we fought WWII:

The idea that a draft presents a reasonable solution is completely backwards. First, it puts the “wrong” people in the military — people who are either uninterested in a military life, not well equipped for one, or who put a very high value on doing something else. From an economic perspective, those are all decent reasons for not wanting to be in the military. (I understand that there are other perspectives — for example, a sense of debt or duty to one’s country — but if a person feels that way, it will be factored into his or her interest in military life.)

One thing markets are good at is allocating people to tasks. They accomplish this through wages. As such, we should pay U.S. soldiers a fair wage to compensate them for the risks they take! A draft is essentially a large, very concentrated tax on those who are drafted. Economic theory tells us that is an extremely inefficient way to accomplish our goal.

When ideas replace the lessons of experience, we dishonor those who have undergone the experience.

But one of the most difficult parts of lawyering, one most students take a particularly  long time to grasp, is that you have to pay attention to everything. So you act like a professional: you show up on time; you use professional language, not the language you use with your friends or on Facebook; you take criticism as an opportunity to learn what you did wrong; you take disagreement as a necessary part of the profession you are becoming part of, not as a personal attack; the point of your efforts is to learn to be a good lawyer, not to earn a good grade.

It never ends. But that’s okay — there’s just always room to get better.

And now comes, to fill an aching need, Typography for Lawyers, a site by Matthew Butterick, a civil litigator in L.A. who majored in art as an undergrad at Harvard, where he focused on design and typography. I’m very impressed by his recognition of the reason his expertise is needed. He explains that using good typography is like dressing well for court, a way “we signal to clients, other attorneys, and judges that we take our work seriously and we take court seriously.” Moreover, bad typography detracts from your goal of persuading your audience your client is right. “When you show up to make an oral argument, you make sure that you present yourself as professionally and persuasively as possible. Similarly, your written documents should reflect the same level of attention to typography.”

In general, the importance of graphic design to effective communication is woefully unappreciated. Butterick points to the design of the butterfly ballots that caused the 200 presidential election fiasco in Palm Beach County, Florida as an historic example of the bad consequences of bad design.

What caused the Challenger shuttle disaster? You might think it was defective O-rings, but that would be to fail to appreciate that the defect would likely have been known and its consequences guarded against, according to Edward Tufte, if the charts presenting the critical information to the decision makers had been rationally designed. Tufte‘s expertise is in the effective use of graphics in conveying information. He’s a genius, and the dedication to his craft is made clear by the fact he self-publishes his books so that he can control the design of every element of them. And his advice on the use of PowerPoint is priceless.