By: Shannon Chang

I didn’t shower this morning.  Nor yesterday.  And according to Freud, that is what I’m naturally inclined to do – bask in my slovenly glory.  Apparently I don’t like being on time either or, for that matter, any other social restriction civilization imposes on me.  I guess that means the less structure I have the better.  But frankly, I find that hard to believe.  I’m not working this semester.  And it was fun at first – getting up late, hanging out, getting to do the things I wanted, but it’s fast losing the luster of novelty.  I’m getting bored.  And for Fromm, that can only lead to bad things because if someone doesn’t have the sense of a productive life, he runs the risk of becoming violent.  Even worse, he’d be violent just for the pleasure of it.  So, maybe Freud was wrong, or at least partially so – we don’t like the way civilization dictates our lives, but we certainly need it to avoid devolving into a mass of reckless beasts.

By Duane Hanson

The scene is this:  The Big Lebowski is in seclusion in the West Wing of his mansion.  His young trophy wife (in the parlance of our times) has been kidnapped and held for ransom.  Now he needs the Dude’s help.  “What . . . what makes a man Mr. Lebowski?”  is the question posed by the Big Lebowski (David Huddleston)  to the Dude (Jeff Bridges) as he stares plaintively into the fire.  He continues – “Is it, is it being prepared to do the right thing?  Whatever the price?  Is that what makes a man?”  The question invites us to look into the protagonist’s (the Dude’s) morality on display throughout the seminal motion picture of the Coen brothers.  What are we to make of this person, “the Dude,” who is dropped into this complex Raymond Chandler-esque mystery and stumbles his way (miraculously) toward a resolution among nefarious schemes and subplots involving nihilists, rug-“micturators,” and known pornographers?  Does he care or not give a shit?  Does the situation define his behavior or does he create his own destiny?  What we do know is that the Dude stands in opposite to the Big Lebowski, a disabled veteran who “achieved” despite his many difficulties and who the audience may have been suckered into placing their sympathies.  In the end, of course, the Big Lebowski is the villain and the Dude has resolved the mystery.  This is accomplished by the Dude without really understanding how he knows how to solve the mystery.  In fact the Dude knows how to do many things without necessarily knowing how to do them (and herein lays the irony).  What’s great about the “Dude” and this Coen brothers masterpiece is what it is saying without really saying anything.

Which brings me to the point of this blog – isn’t this how all moral decisions should be made?   Shouldn’t we all intuitively make the proper moral decisions without soul-searching or self congratulatory recognition?  The Dude entanglements provide plenty of opportunities to display this admirable quality.  He does not let the aggression of the rug-pissers stand.  He agonizes over the botched money-for-hostage exchange and contemplates the repercussions of failure – “her life was in our hands man!”  He stands up to the reactionary Chief of Police of Malibu.  The Dude does all these things, even though all he really ever wanted was his rug back.  He does them outside of the “legal system,” a concept so arcane his worldview that it is not even considered as an option until absolutely necessary (when his car is stolen).  All the while he still finds time to defend Smokey after Walter draws a firearm during league play.  So I guess we should all take comfort in the fact that things turned out “pretty well” for him in the end, as the Stranger puts is.  After all, if moral decision making can be turned into something this casual, then things may turn out pretty well for all of us, too.

By Lauren

As I lay in bed this morning, willing myself to get up and go to the gym before class, I decided that my sore throat warranted a day off and settled in to watch I Am Sam which was playing on TV.  I had never seen it before, but I realized that I was watching it with a new perspective.  It helped to illustrate the importance of a victim’s story, the objective nature of the law, and the way the law only recognizes physical damage rather than spiritual damage.

For those who don’t know, I Am Sam tells the story of a single father, Sam, with the mental capacity of a 7-year-old, who is trying to regain custody of his daughter after a social worker deems him incapable of caring for her and takes her away.  Sam shames Rita, a high-powered lawyer, into taking his case pro bono after he shows her up as cold and heartless in front of her colleagues.
One scene that really struck me was when Sam tried to pay for Rita’s meal in the cafeteria and she belittled his effort.  Sam realizes that Rita, the one person he believes can help him, thinks the same things as the people trying to take his daughter away from him.  Even though she says that it doesn’t matter what she thinks, Sam emphasizes that it matters to him.  He wants and needs his lawyer, the person fighting for him, to understand his plight and to believe in his story.  Without her genuine support, he is left alone and vulnerable to the opposing lawyer convincing him that he can’t provide his daughter with everything she deserves.  How can a lawyer who agrees with the other side effectively represent her client?  It was a slap in the face for Sam who realized that he was alone in trying to make his story heard, and even more difficult, getting others to believe it.

This movie is a great representation of how the law focuses solely on the objective, when the subjective can really tell us much more.  Looking at the situation objectively, it seems clear that a man like Sam, essentially a 7-year-old, would not be able to raise his daughter.  This is all that the opposing lawyer, Mr. Turner, thinks about and focuses on.  But a more subjective look into Sam’s life shows that he possesses so many other qualities that make him a wonderful father and that he has a great support system full of people who love his daughter and who are willing to help him.  Mr. Turner cannot or will not step away from his objective view to see that there is so much more to what makes a good father than what you see on paper.  Sam brought an unusual element to the courtroom—raw emotion—which really gives everyone a chance to see that separating him from his daughter will cause much more spiritual harm to both of them than any physical harm the daughter might experience if she were to remain with her father.  Mr. Truman doesn’t accept this as a legitimate reason to allow Sam to keep his daughter, since spiritual injury doesn’t fit into the traditional legal paradigm.

By: Morgan Gold

At the Fordham film festival last week I saw the film “The Confession” starring Ben Kingsley and Alec Baldwin.  The film touches upon many of the Law and Literature themes.  Alec Baldwin plays Roy Bleakie, a New York attorney hired to defend Harry Fertig (Kingsley), the CFO of a major company who murdered three hospital employees after they refused to treat his son (who ended up dying later that evening from a ruptured appendix).  Roy’s defense strategy is to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, hoping Harry will serve a few years in a psychiatric institution instead of prison.  To the “reasonable man,” this strategy seems like the best option.  The reasonable person test asks what most people would do in a situation given geography, religion, profession, etc.  Most people would rather be considered insane than go to jail or get the death penalty.  However, Harry, the idiosyncratic man, does not want to plead insanity.  He believes that his crime was justified in order to avenge his son’s death and pleading insanity will send the message that the crime was unjustified and groundless.  Harry also wants to take responsibility for his crime, an honorable notion that many criminal defendants in the United States try to avoid.  Harry is trying to do the right and honorable thing, yet is considered crazy by failing to live up to the mediocre standards set forth in the reasonable person test.

Roy Bleakie views the legal system solely in terms of money or jail time.  The best result for his clients means the least amount of jail time.  Roy will do whatever it takes to achieve that result, even if the truth and back story are stifled.  However, because Harry wants to take responsibility for his crimes, he is a different type of client.  Harry was actually disappointed to learn that the prosecutor was not pursuing the death penalty.  For the first time in his career Roy experiences an internal, moral battle: go against Harry’s wishes and “win” the case by successfully arguing the insanity defense (which is what Roy would have done in the past without second thoughts) or listen to Harry and strive to achieve the truth and the correct moral result.  Roy ends up choosing the moral path because, as Harry told him, once you know what the right thing is, it’s hard not to do it.

By Alana Rubenstein

The Jewish High Holidays are rapidly coming to an end.  There are a lot of things to think about during this time period.  Yet, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, I found myself thinking about Law and Literature.

One of the Rabbis at my synagogue was speaking and began his sermon with words “Justice is truth.”  And I couldn’t help asking myself, “Is it really?”

According to Black’s Law Dictionary, justice is defined as “the fair and proper administration of laws.”  That has nothing to do with truth though.  The laws of the American legal system are concerned with procedure, efficiency, and some may argue fairness, but they are not especially concerned with arriving at the truth.

If they were, settlement wouldn’t be the ideal in the American legal system.  Settlements do not uncover details and stories.  They do just the opposite.  Settlements cover the truth, silencing the parties and forcing no one to actually divulge what happened.  There is no admission of guilt, and there is no public declaration of innocence.  There is only a change of money.  This is justice, not truth.

Truth is a moral concept.  Lawyers are not concerned with the truth.  Take the lawyers in the film The Verdict. They are concerned with putting on a show.  They are preparing for their case and want to win their case without any discussion of the actual case and what actually occurred between their client and the woman lying as a vegetable in the hospital.  This concept is also illustrated in the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.”  Atticus Finch is so remarkable because he is unlike any other lawyer around.  And what is it that makes him so different from other lawyers?  It is the fact that his lawyer persona and his man persona are the same.   There is no split in his values, his personality or his beliefs.  Unlike his peers, Atticus is moral at work.  He is concerned with the truth and is not afraid to publicize it regardless of the consequences.  This is illustrated twice in the novel, both when he exposed the Bob Ewell and at the end of the novel when he was willing to expose Jem.

So was the Rabbi wrong?  No. In the context of religion, which is what he was talking about, he was correct.  Justice, morality and truth are all connected and related.  This is seen clearly in the children’s book “The Month of Kislev,” a Chanukkah story in which the Rabbi is both a judicial and spiritual figure who makes no distinction between justice and morality.

But had he been referring to the legal/justice system in the US, the Rabbi would have been wrong.  There is a separation of church and state in this country, and justice for the legal system of the state is completely devoid of the morality and truth religion brings to people.

By: Nicole Cedar

We speak in class so often about how lawyers and judges lack any human
emotion, and that they are void of moral character.  But it’s not just
the legal field that is devoid of a sense of moral justice.  In the
season premiere of Grey’s Anatomy, the chief resident of Seattle Grace
Hospital stands outside the emergency room doors, in the freezing cold,
in the hopes that an ambulance will roll in carrying with them a patient
with a serious medical emergency.  She seeks patients out of boredom,
and because she is hoping that by caring for and saving the life of a
patient while fellow residents watch and learn, she will increase the
“teaching hospital” rankings at Seattle Grace.  When a younger
resident questions her desire for injured patients, she claims that she
doesn’t really care whether or not someone is injured, or how they are
injured, just so long as she can get the practice and experience in the
operating room.  And even if this scene is an exaggerated example of
your typical doctor, the underlying lack of moral ethics is prevalent in
civilization as a whole.  It’s not just with the law, or with medicine,
or politics or finance.  Unemotional and immoral human beings exist in
every occupation, in every aspect of life, and in every corner of the
world.   That’s a fact.  But once we can acknowledge and accept this
fact, and realize that corrupt people exist everywhere, we won’t feel so
let down and betrayed when an unfeeling jerk crosses our path.  Instead
we can focus on surrounding ourselves with positive influences, people
who do care, and people who are worth our time, while just brushing the
others off our shoulder.  Harping too much on the negative side of
humanity is a waste of time that only takes away from positive feelings
and outlooks.  The more you concentrate on the negative, the more it
will show up, and vice versa.  So accept the fact that many humans lack
a sense of morality, and instead focus on surrounding yourself with the
ones who do.

By: Jeff Cunningham

I am just a simple Jew, no yeshiva boy, so I thought I might quote a not-so-simple Jew, although also not a yeshiva boy, in an attempt to discuss the relationship between religion, faith, and rationality.  Albert Einstein said, “as a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it,” and I think this idea helps explain my personal experience with my Jewish faith and perhaps its foundation as a both rational and faithful lifestyle.

The only thing I am really certain of in life is that we don’t have much a clue about what is going on, how we got here, or where we are going.  I think most of existence is unknown to us and is perhaps even unknowable.  That being said, I have always been quite skeptical of both religious and scientific certainty.  It seems unsporting to me, though, to attack religion as completely faith based and accept that science is entirely rational.  There seems to be a balance to both, elements of faith and rationality in both science and religion. 

I am certainly no scientist, but I know that we still don’t understand much of our world.  I also don’t think that scientific, rational atheism is as recent a development in human history as we like to think.  Our modern day Towers of Babel of evolution, medicine, and technology are certainly impressive to me, but I can’t help but think that in a few more thousand years our futuristic offspring will look back at our various advancements and think that we could have better spent our efforts focused on trying to build a really big tower to reach heaven.

Rationally based science seems to have an element, and a substantial one at that, of faith.  There is so much left unexplored and unexplained in life that I simply can not accept that we have it all, or even most of it, figured out.  The fear that certainly motivated our cave ancestors to bow down to statues they made seems to motivate us to invest our faith into rationality and the scientific and technological idols that personify rationality.

So assuming for my sake that science is indeed a “leap of faith,” I like to think that my Jewish religion, and really all of our various religions, are actually more “leaps of rationality.”  My problem with religion is like my problem with science: the certainty.  Judaism, for me anyway, provides a convenient alternative to this problem in that it accepts that we can not understand the Almighty in any meaningful way and that Judaism does not have all the answers, just a few of them.  I think this idea is consistent with most other religions as well, although I am quite unfamiliar with the other options out there. 

No one, I think, wants to admit that their religious belief is based entirely on faith and is essentially completely irrational.  At the same time I don’t think that a rational atheist can possibly claim that they have all the answers or that any rational person has to see the world the same way that they do.  I like to think, and my particular flavor of Judaism embraces this idea, that we all individually, Jews and Gentiles, understand the tiniest sliver of the Almighty’s light and that all of us together have come up with an ever increasing circle of light that keeps increasing the darkness around it.  So, in conclusion, I’d like to quote another not-so-simple Jew, although certainly a yeshiva boy.  King Solomon wrote, “I set my mind to appraise wisdom and to appraise madness and folly.  And I learned – that this too was pursuit of wind:  For as wisdom grows, vexation grows; to increase learning is to increase heartache.”

Thank you for reading, I’d like to add a sort of related, sort of ancient, Jewish idea to keep in mind during our future class discussions that I think can be extended to any conversation religious or not: two Jews, three opinions.

By: Chris Leahy 

Last week, Professor Rosenbaum introduced the “four-headed monster” – bureaucracy, technology, specialization and professionalism. These four post-Holocaust concepts, he argued, enable moral detachment and allow a wrongdoer to escape self-doubt or guilt.  We focused on bureaucracies that compartmentalize tasks and responsibilities, diluting individuals’ roles into non-culpable cogs instead of responsible actors.  Such systems, Professor argued, facilitate moral injustice, including genocide.

I was struck by how the concept rang true in the American legal bureaucracy, a compartmentalized arrangement that harbors injustice.  The comparison, I would argue, is most evident in the criminal justice system.  Unlike some of my classmates who contend that the criminal courts succeed in serving justice, I know that this is pure fallacy.   The system stymies moral justice in all the ways we have learned, by repressing story telling, offering only money or jail time, etc.  On a more basic level, however, the system is so riddled with corruption and incompetence, any confidence in American justice reveals a profound ignorance.  

The bureaucracy enables injustice, encouraging the buck to be passed between not just the judge, jury and executioner, but further. The police departments gather evidence, DA’s piece together cases, juries find a verdict, and judges preside over trials (and then separately decide sentencing).  These steps function as a bureaucracy, where the big picture can be lost, and moral responsibility can be the next guy’s problem.  Imagine the following series of events.  Cops make an arrest based on a snitch’s tip. The case isn’t bulletproof, but Christmas is around the corner and they need the overtime.  Even if the defendant is innocent, the DA can always drop the charges.  The ADA thinks he can put together a case, and he wants to impress the boss, so he gets to it.  He isn’t worried about imprisoning an innocent man because he’s just doing his job; it’s the jury’s decision that counts.  The judge sentences on the basis of the guilty verdict, so he’s just assigning a dollar or time value to someone else’s decision.  Just like any true bureaucracy, it is difficult to pinpoint the responsible party, and injustice results all too often.

By: Abisola Fatade

A few weeks ago AMC celebrated the 15th anniversary of Philadelphia and I happened to catch the last 15 minutes of the film.  Watching Denzel Washington expose the sleazy law firm that fired it’s top Associate because of prejudice did not strike me as unusual much as a film about a man in the 1950s “passing” as white, when discovered to be black is subsequently fired, would not have been shocking. What struck me about the film is that it reminded me that rarely are law firms depicted as vessels of truth and justice.  The law itself is portrayed as the great equalizer, and even the justice system is portrayed in a relatively positive light, for if a 12 person jury with its own pre-conceived notions of homosexuals and AIDS could find for the plaintiff then the system can’t be all bad.  However, it’s the law firm that is the figure of “evil”.  I was reminded of Michael Clayton a film that I liked very much and not just because the title character was a Fordham law alum.  I was reminded of Clayton because it was another film in a long line of films that portray the firm as being this independent evil entity but within which apparently decent human beings live.  How is that possible?  How can a firm which to be certain, is an independent legal person, but nonetheless controlled by actual beings, be so evil and yet have good people working for it? Back to Philadelphia.  Mary Steenburgen plays the attorney for the firm and at one point she whispers to co-council that she hates the case, yet she agreed to defend it.  In Clayton, George Clooney’s character is not bad, he is a seemingly decent individual with a crappy job, but continues to work at his firm doing dirty jobs.  He does it for the money.  That seems to be the simplest explanation for why seemingly good people work for firms with a singular goal of making profit.   Conversely, the artist thinks that the individual is the victim of a corporate structure that thrives on groupthink.  I’m not so sure either perspective is satisfactory.  I think that people work for law firms because they need the money but also because they think that the work they do has no effect on their soul.  They believe that they can separate the two halves of their lives because anyone who truly believed that working for a firm was evil would supposedly leave and find some other employ.  The problem is that it is almost virtually impossible to accomplish this feat, and films such as the Firm, Philadelphia and Michael Clayton are the artists’ way of saying that you can’t play with dirt and not get dirty.  Those of us graduating this year with Associate positions in hand, should bear this in mind.