Atticus’s life instruction to his daughter, Scout. As he explains, “If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” In summer 2009, and again this July, the United States was roiled by debate about Barack Obama’s promise to appoint a supreme court justice who embodies this quality of “empathy”. Scores of critics asserted that judicial empathy is the same as judicial bias; that judges are at their best when they coldly and mechanically apply the law. There is no place for climbing inside anyone else’s skin as a judge. There is only truth and cold fact.

How strange it is, that we have come to a place in the national debate about justice when Atticus Finch’s mild admonition to his daughter to try to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes has become the definition of dangerous judicial activism. While Atticus still has much to teach lawyers about race and violence and prejudice and the rule of law, I have also come to think of him as the patron saint of patient, quiet listening; a quality to which all of us ought to aspire.

An “author” in the modern sense is the creator of unique literary, or artistic, “works” the originality of which warrants their protection under laws of intellectual property — Anglo American “copyright” and European “authors’ rights.”

Now Abram Sinnreich, in Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture, extends these insights into the quirks that have produced our notion of authorship and the ways the radical changes in the technological realities governing the creation and distribution of artistic works is undermines that notion. truthdig has posted a substantial excerpt, the entirety of which (like the book, no doubt) is well worth reading. Here’s just a taste, one that begins to develop the relationship between the current conventional wisdom of what an author is and its relationship to our social obsession with converting public goods into private property:

The biggest myth of all is the Romantic notion that artists somehow create their work uniquely and from scratch, that paintings and sculptures and songs emerge fully-formed from their fertile minds like Athena sprang from Zeus. Running a close second is the myth that only a handful of us possess the raw talent – or the genius – to be an artist. According to this myth, the vast majority of us may be able to appreciate art to some degree, but we will never have what it takes to make it. The third myth is that an artist’s success (posthumous though it may be) is proof positive of his worthiness, that the marketplace for art and music functions as some kind of aesthetic meritocracy.

Of course, these myths fly in the face of our everyday experience. We know rationally that Picasso’s cubism looks a lot like Braque’s, and that Michael Jackson sounds a lot like James Brown at 45 RPM. We doodle and sing and dance our way through our days, improvising and embellishing the mundane aspects of our existence with countless unheralded acts of creativity. And we all know that American Idol and its ilk are total B.S. (very entertaining B.S., of course!). Each of us can number among our acquaintance wonderful singers, dancers, painters or writers whose creations rival or outstrip those of their famous counterparts, just as each of us knows at least one beauty who puts the faces on the covers of glossy magazines to shame.

And yet, we believe the myths. How could we not? Who among us has the time, the energy, or even the motivation to buck the overwhelming support the myth of the Artist receives from the institutions that govern our society – to dispute our schools, our churches, even our laws? What is copyright, after all, but the legal assertion of an individual’s sole ownership over a unique artifact of creative expression? These laws, sometimes enforced at gunpoint, require us to believe the myths, or face the consequences.

Of course, there’s a reason the myths exist. Our economy runs on the privatization of hitherto public goods. Our legal system is premised on the individual as the locus of all rights, all liability, all blame. Our society’s profound inequalities are only acceptable because we believe ourselves to live in a meritocracy, a world where a person’s success is de facto proof of his or her inherent worthiness. In short, the myth of the Artist-with-a-capital-A allows us to believe in America-with-a-capital-A.

What has happened since the 1960s—that watershed decade in modern American history—is the growing apart, especially but not only at the elite law schools, of the lawyer and the judge on the one hand and the law professor on the other hand. Law professors used to identify primarily with the legal profession and secondarily with the university. The sequence has been reversed. Law professors in that earlier era were hired after a few years of practice, on the basis of evidence (heavily weighted by performance as a law student) of possessing superlative skills of legal analysis. A law professor was expected to be a superb lawyer and to see his primary role as instructing generations of law students so that they would become good, and some of them superb, lawyers—instructing them by precept but also by example, by being a role model; and the role was that of a practicing lawyer. . . .

By the late 1960s this model was almost a century old and ripe for challenge. The challenges came from two directions, which though opposed to each other turned out to be complementary in their effect on the traditional model. . . .

These challenges to the conventional model of the law professor’s vocation so far succeeded as to bring about a fundamental change in the character of legal teaching and scholarship and the method of recruitment into academic law. From the challenge mounted by social science came a novel emphasis on basing legal scholarship on the insights of other fields, such as economics, philosophy, and history, and from the challenge mounted by the Left came a reinforcing skepticism about the capacity of conventional legal analysis to yield intellectually cogent answers to legal questions. These ideologically opposed challenges complemented each other by agreeing that the traditional model was narrow and stale.

The model was largely buried in these twin avalanches, especially in the elite law schools. . . .

Even at the most intellectually ambitious of the modern law schools, a large majority of students will become and remain practicing lawyers; and there is a good deal more to the practice of law than economics, or philosophy,or feminism, or theories of race. There is the knack of reading cases and statutes creatively, there is a largish body of basic legal concepts that every practicing lawyer should internalize, there is a bag of rhetorical tricks to be acquired along with a professional demeanor, a procedural system to be mastered, a subtle sense (“judgment”) of just how far one can go in stretching the limits of established legal doctrines to be absorbed. These things cannot be the entirety of the modern lawyer’s professional equipment, and their inculcation cannot be the entirety of a first-rate modern legal education, because the law has become too deeply interfused with the methods and insights of other fields—and the law schools are still lagging badly in attempting to overcome the shameful aversion of most law students to statistics, math, science, and technology. Maybe at the law schools that have the brightest students only a third of the instruction should be in the traditional mold. But to reach that level the law schools will have to start hiring teachers who identify more strongly with the practicing profession than they do with academia.