I have decided that this year, I am going to include some advice and demands of my law students beyond the normal variety.  I have prepared a letter describing that advice.  What do you think? What would you add?  What would you take out?

As you begin your law study (and law career) things are moving quickly around you.    You are building new relationships, continuing old ones that will have to adapt to your new surroundings, and engaging in a life-altering, rigorous study of the legal discipline.  Some of you chose to be lawyers because of family.  Some of you chose to become lawyers for the money.  Some of you chose to be lawyers because of some meaningful interaction with the law some years ago.  Some of you chose to become lawyers to pursue justice.  Some of you had other reasons.  Whatever was the basis for your decision, I am glad you made it.   It shows that you are willing to take up a challenge.

Let’s be honest for a moment.  Some of you that start will not finish law school.  Some of you will decide that you would rather do something else.  Kudos to you for making that decision!   You came and tried the law and decided that it just wasn’t for you.  Frankly all of you come to law school without significant personal experience being a lawyer.   Its ok to decide that you do not want to be a lawyer.  Some of you will not be able to handle the rigors of law school’s academics.  Don’t get me wrong — we think you are capable.  But some of you will decide that other things are more important than engaging in the type of study that law school requires.  Some of you will face insurmountable obstacles that just don’t allow you to devote yourself to legal study.  Let me say right now: that’s ok too.   Some people are just not meant to be lawyers.   It may be because they have more important work ahead of them.  Or it may be that the timing is just not quite right at this moment.   Seasons of life change slowly, and often we do not obtain the perspective necessary to know whether we should have stayed with something or not until years down the road.  Don’t worry.   Do your best and make the best decisions you can.

Now for some advice and demands, if I may.

First, be diligent in your work. Law school can feel overwhelming.  Trust me, it is overwhelming.  But you can make it and you can succeed.   What you can’t do is just coast by.  Remember that you are sitting next to people every bit as smart and talented as you are.  For every minute that you are not working, someone else is working and gaining.   Maintain a discipline of devotion to your studies – force yourself to work hard and not accept shortcuts.   Treat this like a job.   Designate reading hours for each week and keep to your schedule like you are being paid to do so.

Every year, students ask me what supplements I recommend. And every year, my answer is the same: your textbook is a supplement to our class periods; your notes are a supplement to the textbook; and my lectures are a supplement to your inquiry into both.   Class supplements train your brain to be lazy in the disciplines of the primary things we do as lawyers – thinking.   When you purchase a supplement you are allowing someone else to think for you.   That will short-circuit your brain over time and leave you impaired. If you do choose to engage supplements, do so cautiously and in a very limited form.

Along those lines, don’t wait to begin your fidelity to diligence. Begin now with setting out the plans for how you think you will attack this course of study.  Two things about that.  First, don’t expect those plans to remain the same.  Be flexible and allow them to change as they need to in order to meet your study demands.  Second, don’t think that intelligence or other factors will make up for a lack of discipline.  There is a fable of a boy who owned a corn field.  Everyday he would wake up and say, I’ll hoe the corn tomorrow.   Finally, the corn grew up so tall that rot began to set in.   Still, the boy said, I will hoe my corn tomorrow.  In early September, an early frost came and wiped out the boy’s corn crop.   The moral of the story is start developing your work discipline now.  I can assure you, December will be here before you know it.

In maintaining your discipline, don’t assume that you will be taught anything. This sounds odd doesn’t it?  After all, you entered law school to learn from people, like me, who have had successful careers in the law.  Notice I did not say that you would not learn.  But law school is not a process in which you are given information to digest.  Rather, you must engage actively in the learning process.  Thus, expect that you will do a lot of self-learning, self-reflecting, and gain some understanding from that process.  When you come to class, we will challenge your learning and understanding, and hopefully refine it in a way that forces you to reenter your textbook and re-examine what you thought you learned. Thus, class can be at times a demoralizing and often frustrating time.  Be open to understanding and allow your Professors to challenge your knowledge.  Let me say, I know this is an exhausting process.  However, you will be a better law student, a better lawyer, and a better person by engaging in the type of discipline that assumes that you have created a base level of knowledge to work from.

Second, in your devotion to being diligent about work, communicate with those in your lives about what you are doing. Trust me, they do not want to hear it all.  Trust me, they will tell you to stop very often.  Rather than communicate about what you are learning, communicate about the process.  Be honest with them about what you like, what you hate, what you are scared of, and what you expect to be coming out of this process.  We often assume when we take on life-altering processes that everyone in our lives are on board for the change as well.  That’s not always the case.   Remember: You are the one that is in law school.  You are the one that is changing.  And you are the one with responsibilities and obligations to your professors and classmates.  Your significant other, your partner, or your family may not be on board completely.  You will find out soon enough.   The most important thing you can do is communicate with them about this process and what you expect all along the way.

Finally, don’t assume that law school is only about learning the law. It’s not, though a great deal of our time is spent doing so.  Law school, as part of the liberal education tradition, has a role in shaping you as a human being.  We are also a professional school in that you are being trained to enter a profession.   Part of being an engaged, and learned human, and being a member of the legal profession, is the ability to critically assess your knowledge and experiences against other people’s knowledge and experiences.  On a personal level we call this self-awareness.  When applied to the law, we call it policy.   Let’s be clear about both.  In order to do well at being both a human being and at being a lawyer, you have to both know the subject and be able to assess where it is going and where it should go.  As a human, you have to know yourself to understand how to adapt.  In the law, you have to know the “black letter law” before you can assess where the black letter law will go.  Law school will do its share of teaching you not only the law, but how to critically analyze the law (and hopefully yourself too).  Don’t resist either part, and don’t assume you can do one without the other.

To that end, be engaged!  You will enjoy law school more, do better, and become a better thinker, and therefore a better lawyer.  You will be thrust into classrooms where there are people from many many different backgrounds and experiences.  Embrace those people, particularly the ones who are different than you.  Learn from them.   Allow your own beliefs and thoughts to be challenged, even the sacred ones.  Particularly the sacred ones! Trust me, if they are meant to stand the test of time, not even law school will overcome them.    Remember, law school, like every other hard venture you undertake will help you put miles on your soul – some of those miles include laughter, some include crying, and some, just are hard!

Because law school puts you in contact with so many different people, remember one key piece of advice and a demand if you are in my class – be courteous to everyone. Remember, your faculty, fellow students, and the staff that make this wonderful law school work are entitled to, and deserve your respect.   As trying as law school is, there is no excuse for discourteous behavior.   Little things matter – being on time to class, being prepared, saying thank you to staff members who assist you, speaking in proper tones – these things are very important.  As an NYU business professor has said, these things in and of themselves will not make you successful – but failure to master them will certainly hold you back and prevent you from achieving the great possibilities that no doubt your talent and intellect prepare you for!  As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “There is always time enough for courtesy.”

And don’t confuse your Professor’s attempt to frustrate you or challenge your thinking as discourteous behavior. The same is true when we may show intolerance for laziness, lack of preparation, or inartful expressions.  All of these things are for your benefit.   Your Professors are interested in your development and success.   That should be the default assumption regarding any actions that your Professors take towards you.   Until there is evidence to the contrary (and I don’t mean your grade in a particular class) you should assume that your Professors (each one of them) are vitally committed to do whatever it takes to develop you as a law student, lawyer, and more importantly a human being.

And along the lines of courteous interactions, be helpful to everyone – including your fellow students. Share outlines and notes with each other.  Be a resource for each other.  Discuss together.  In short, be a community for each other.   I learned the most by helping friends understand.

Finally, a word of advice to those of you who are more successful than your peers.  Be humble about your accomplishments. Don’t brag.  Be measured and restrained in your accomplishments.  Trust me, there will be many opportunities to celebrate your well-deserved accolades.   However, boasting of your own accomplishments creates an atmosphere of distrust and disdain.  As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The louder he spoke of his virtue, the faster we counted our spoons.”  Decide to believe that everyone, yourself included, are smart capable people.  Do not discount anyone.   Instead resolve to do your best and allow your successes, whether measured or great, to speak for themselves.

You are an accomplished group.  Welcome to the next phase of your life.  Embrace it.  Enjoy it, as hard as it may be.  Allow it to put miles on your soul.

I’m grateful to Allen for bringing these thoughts to the table for discussion.

I suspect the portrait of the “environmentalist’s dilemma” is a bit exaggerated on both sides. It reminds me of the first vociferous “debate” in the environmental movement between so-called “Deep Ecology” and “Social Ecology” Greens (the latter largely the acolytes of Murray Bookchin). This debate was perhaps more imagined than real (insofar as it took place among a handful of writers and intellectuals and was less apparent ‘on the ground’), although it did reflect underlying tensions and questions within the Green movement having to do with the kinds of worldviews that inspired and motivated those engaged in environmentalist/ecological politics in the broadest sense. On one side, the more (loosely) spiritual-oriented folks were busy canvassing if not rummaging through the globe’s various worldviews for philosophical perspectives they believed evidenced a more holistic and harmonious metaphysical and ethical picture of mankind’s relation with the natural world; on the other side (and again, loosely), were those of Left and New Left vintage who understood the new ecological politics to emerge from within a tradition that was more beholden to the likes of Marx and Kropotkin or the Wobblies and the SDS, and thus were prone to carcicaturing their ecological counterparts as New Age whackos with irredeemably bourgeois sensibilities afflicted by historical amnesia utterly lacking in “true” socio-political and economic sophistication when it came to social analysis and understanding the dynamics of social change. There were truths to be learned from both camps, although egos and polemicizing served to obscure that fact (in time, both sides began to dismantle their character armour somewhat and the debate itself virtually vanished).

Robert E. Goodin’s book, Green Political Theory (1992) helps us to understand some of the reasons that animate the above debate as well as a more significant divide within “green political theory” and praxis. Goodin writes of a “green theory of value” that, in short, “provides the unified moral vision running through all the central substantive planks in the green political programme.” Conceptually and politically distinct but thought by many to strictly follow from this green theory of value is a “green theory of agency” that tells us how to go about pursuing the green theory of value(s). Goodin points out that part and parcel among those who concentrate their energies on the “agency” aspect of green politics are a belief in and commitment to the propogation of views revolving around choices of personal life-style, questions of New Age cosmology, and the desire for transformations of consciousness, views that tend to trivialize or crowd out more pragmatic and practical orientations and strategies that rely on conventional politics for the realization of the green theory of value. Those cleaving to such views make the price, so to speak, for subscribing to or endorsing a green politics too high for the vast majority of citizens and thus, in the end, prolong the realization of a green theory of value(s). Some years ago I wrote that while I thought Goodin was a bit hard on some of the “agency” folks, he made a compelling argument. On the other hand, he may not have sufficiently appreciated the very real obstacles presented by conventional politics for the realization of green values (this would be the position, say, of the late Rudolf Bahro or even the late Arne Naess).

The “economists” of the post would therefore be identical with or at least similar to the practical or pragmatic folks (including those willing to ‘dirty’ their hands in conventional politics) Goodin believes better capable of implementing green moral values, in other words, more likely than those “moralists” who, fewer in number, can be a bit too self-righteous or unrealistic in their advocacy of wholesale lifestyle and worldview (‘belief’) changes of the sort that could not, it seems clear, occur anytime soon, a fact with dire consequences if one is convinced of the necessity and urgency of the green political program.

In several respects, I think Goodin’s argument provided a way out of the impasse, in any case, it addressed questions of a more down-to-earth sort than those intrinsic to the theoretical and rarefied debate that took place between the deep ecology and social ecology greens and it made the larger point that “being green” did not strictly entail adopting wholesale the idiosynractic or unfamiliar worldviews of green intellectuals and movement leaders, nor did it mean adopting a radically new lifestyle on the order of the hippies and countercultural devotees of an earlier era.

It often seems to be the case that those who provide the vision and leadership of the green movement are more toward the “moralist” and “agency” end of the spectrum, for what has motivated their own idealism, activism and politics is often a conversion of some sort, to a new worldview (or the radical transformation of an existing one) and or a new lifestyle, the presumption or assumption being that it’s changes of THAT sort that are necessary for others to begin the turn toward ecological and environmental thinking and praxis. But to support and vote for green politics rarely requires such dramatic and wholesale changes among the masses. For us, the changes are more likely of a piecemeal kind (e.g., recycling, buying a more fuel-efficient car, less wasteful consumption decisions generally) and often at the ballot box (voting for a more environmentally sound politics that facilitates the progressive and wider adoption and realization of green values). And with regard to worldviews, this more often that not means people will come to simply modify their existing belief systems in ecological and environmentalist ways (see, for instance: http://fore.research.yale.edu/). Thus, in effect, we overcome the “environmentalists’ dilemma” on the ground, not unlike, at least in some measure and certain respects, Thoreau himself did.

With a brief nod to a literary dimension, it bears noting that “social ecologists” rightly took to task the ideas and tactics of those in the environmental movement who belonged to groups such as Earth First! (and the early writings of its co-founder, David Foreman), that wing of the movement farthest from a Gandhian-like practice of nonviolence (some would claim their praxis was nonetheless a species of nonviolence). These radical ecologists were avowedly inspired by the writings of Edward Abbey (e.g., The Monkeywrench Gang, 1975) who, while not accountable for their actions, most notoriously “eco-sabotage” (or ‘monkeywrenching’), seems to have endorsed them. Insofar as these actions were ‘underground’ (i.e., intentionally not public), and involved destruction of property or possible harm to living beings, they were understandably anathema to others in the environmental movement. Earth First! philosophy or political theory, such as it was, came dangerously close to if not actually espousing an ecological version of Malthusian Social Darwinism, the fundamental or representative ideas of which are enshrined in Paul Ehrlich’s writings (e.g., The Population Bomb, 1968) as well as Garrett Hardin’s formulation of “Tragedy of the Commons” idea (incisively critiqued by Partha Dasgupta, among others), alongside his later and more disturbing notion of “lifeboat ethics” (for a nice discussion of this variation on Malthusian themes, please see Robert C. Paehlke’s Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics, 1989).

The environmentalist “economists” cited in the post are of course constrained in part by conceptual and value presuppositions and assumptions that heretofore have helped define their discipline (cf. S.M. Amadae’s Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism, 2003, and works by Philip Mirowski), especially insofar as they are trained in and beholden to essential tenets of neo-classical economics. Alas, this kind of economics has become increasingly obtuse when it comes to forthrightly addressing questions of ethics or morality (environmentalist or otherwise). Amartya Sen details some of the historical and conceptual shortcomings of the discipline in his book, On Ethics and Economics (1987). In addition to informing his colleagues of how economics  can benefit from a more intimate relation with ethics, Sen makes a subsidiary point regarding the benefits that follow from ethical thinking being informed by a basic knowledge of economics. Another important work by way of addressing the moral shortcomings of contemporary economics as a social science discipline and thus useful for environmentalists of an economics suasion, is Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson’s Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy (2^nd ed., 2006). A book I believe sets the standard for a morally and ecologically sensitive economics, is Partha Dasgupta’s Human Well-Being and the Natural Environment (2001). Finally, a fine example of the  increasing sophistication of environmentalist reasoning and praxis is Moral and Poltical Reasoning in Environmental Practice (2003), edited by Andrew Light and Avner de-Shalit. The entry on “environmental ethics” in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is helpful by way of ascertaining to what extent our “dilemma” may afflict environmentalists as well as thinking though these topics more generally.

A word of caution: I think some environmentalists who are making their argument within the parameters of economics, try too hard to demonstrate their capitalist bona fides, thereby unnecessarily constricting the imagination of prospects and possibilities for a more ecologically and environmentally sustainable tomorrow. In short, and by way of a conclusion, we might say that the “Environmentalists’ Dilemma” arises in the first instance because the profession of economics is morally impoverished, a conceptually contingent and remediable state of affairs, foreshadowed in fine fashion, as Allen helps us see, in Thoreau’s Walden.

Readers may also be interested in a compilation from several years ago of titles on “environmental and ecological worldviews:” http://www.jurisdynamics.net/files/documents/environmental_and_ecological_worldviews.doc

Over at the Lounge we are having a good discussion on the role of history and remedial acts.   Tom Russell, the author of the article that revealed the Klan affiliation of the Simkins Dormitory namesake, has chimed in with some thoughtful comments.  (Tom may stop by the Table as well to offer his thoughts more fully).  For now, allow me to provide Tom’s comments to Al Brophy’s latest post here, as well as my response.

Tom said:

Let me say briefly, though, if UT stops honoring Prof. Simkins by taking his name off the dormitory, plenty of opportunities to discuss race, history, and law will remain on UT’s campus. For starters, a portrait of Simkins hangs in the law library; I’m fine with that. There is Painter Hall and the Sweatt Campus. There’s a statues of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Pres. Jefferson Davis; buildings named after confederate soldiers; the Darrell Royal stadium, and a host of other monuments, none of which I think should be removed or renamed.

On the flip side, there’s also no reason to believe that The University of Texas would in fact turn Simkins Hall into the history lesson that it might be. The history of the university’s administration suggests the opposite.

Finally, I do not believe that those who are harmed or insulted by Simkins’s undeserved honor in having his name on the building should have to continue to experience insult or injury in order to provide a possible history lesson to whomever is subjected to a plaque, lecture, or website post. I’m looking for the right metaphor to describe this–something along the lines of “We won’t set your broken arm because it’s a good teaching opportunity.”

I have posted the following response to Tom’s very good points:

Allow me to offer a brief interjection. First, let me say that your logic is thoughtful and I don’t want to sound like my disagreement is in anyway critical of the importance of the work you are doing in this area. I also agree with you that we have to be very careful not to cause further insult to those populations that are offended (and should be offended) by this vile representation of an awful past.

With that said, however, let me push back on a couple of points. I think it matters greatly to distinguish between opportunities to talk about race and the methods that we use to talk about race. In my mind, this is not just an opportunity to talk about race relations. I agree that there are many opportunities to do so in a variety of contexts. Rather, this is whether we are going to faithfully represent our past as we have those discussions. Let me key in in on two comments.

First, I don’t think the metaphor of a setting a broken leg is not quite correct in this case. Legs can be fixed and show virtually no signs that there was ever a problem. I also worry that the analogy suggests that we may try to fix something. If we are trying to fix the past, then I have real reservations for all of the reasons described in the first post. I think the better metaphor is the environment. Like so many of our actions in the environment, we do things that cause harmful effects, that cannot be undone. However, what we can do is begin to live more responsibly with what we have. This can have a powerful effect. In some ways, it can rehabilitate the environment. In the same way, we cannot undo the Simkin’s name on a building. It has been done. But we can begin to live more responsibly with it by having frank discussions about its impact, and adding to its vile nature something that better represents our normative view of the world.

Second, if the University of Texas is not inclined to deal responsibly with its past as suggested, isn’t it just as important to maintain the building’s name as a reminder that we have not come as far as we think we have? It seems to me that we often remove uncomfortable things from sight, when they remain just as powerfully present as they did before we covered them up. Changing the landscape rarely changes the actual environment. Perhaps the building’s name serves a purpose of reminding us of how far we still have to go, rather than allowing the name’s removal to fool us in believing that we have actually come pretty far.

This is a very thoughtful discussion in which the relevance of the historical narrative has meaning for our everyday interactions.  Your comments are welcome.  Come join the discussion, either here or at the Lounge.