Academics, and musings on social stuff

Classes:

Largely the same as last semester, with a few changes. Of the classes I had last semester, I still have Contracts, Property, Torts, and Civil Procedure. They’re all year long classes, which means that my grades in those classes for fall semester are “IP”: In Progress. This means that once I take the finals in those classes, that gets factored in with how I did on the midterms (back in December), and if the overall grade is a B+, then my grade for both fall semester and spring semester in Torts will be a B+.

My Criminal Law and Legal Research classes were only for the fall semester, so I’m done with those. (By the grace of God, I managed to do well in both.) They’ve been replaced this semester with Constitutional Law I and Legal Writing.

Constitutional Law I is about federalism, the structure of our federal and state government. Lots of abstractions, big issues, theories, textual analysis, trying to reconcile apparently contradictory Supreme Court decisions. It’s definitely the class that I think the most in. It’s probably the closest to my picture of what law school would be like before I came.

Legal writing is a lot of work. The goal of the class is to teach us how to write like a lawyer. One surprising factoid from the textbook: a career as a lawyer will likely involve as much (perhaps more) writing than a career as a novelist. This is the one class without an exam at the end—instead, like Legal Research last semester, we have weekly assignments to turn in. Although it’s only 2 units (whereas most of the other classes are 4 or 5 units over the course of the year), many have said that the skills you develop in it are the most important for a future legal career.

Come to think of it, this class also involves trying to reconcile apparently contradictory court decisions. You’re supposed to extract the underlying legal principle from various decisions, then express that succinctly and persuasively. I have far to go in developing these skills.


Additional school related things:

Various student groups meet. The Christian Legal Society meets for lunch once every week, the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association sporadically meets a handful of times each semester, and the King Hall Intellectual Property Law Association occasionally puts on a talk or a panel. The International Law Forum hosts various speakers, about every other week, as well.

I’ve not taken an active role in any of these, but I’ve attended various events/meetings. Other student groups also occasionally host events.

One of the things I didn’t expect (or hadn’t thought much about) before coming to law school was the number of opportunities to hear interesting talks about various topics: racism in the 1950’s, trends in intellectual property law, prostitution as a human rights issue, water rights struggles between Israelis and Palestinians, the Chinese tort law system, treating “cyberspace” as a physical space, historical roots of the idea of law, the death penalty, drug laws, discrimination and immigration issues in Saipan (a US territory), 9-11 and the USA PATRIOT Act’s effects. These are all various topics I’ve heard people speak on since the beginning of the year.

There does seem to be the trend to learn about, discuss, criticize things, and yet not to do very much about them. This is probably true in any academic environment, but I feel it acutely here. How much have I prayed about any of the injustices in any of the issues above? Very close to zero. How much should I? I don’t know—there’s an article I once read about different roles that Christians have played in different societies, but I won’t get into it here.

But it does remind me of a discussion I had the other day with a grad student in sociology here. She felt that as a Christian, she should not be caught up in the way everyone else in her department condemned the American government vehemently for all the bad things it does. While acknowledging that they have done some bad things, and are doing some bad things, she also felt that attacking the government is not really the answer: instead, Jesus is the answer. Every knee will one day bow, and all things on heaven and earth will one day worship God. He will set all things right one day.

While I agree that the Christian hope is ultimately in Jesus, I had to disagree. Because people are created in the image of God, because He loves every person, because Jesus came to bring life and to destroy the works of the devil, Christians should work to affirm human dignity. We should fight injustice. We should fight those things that oppress the people who Jesus died for. Christians were involved in ending slavery (in England, William Wilberforce) and ending child labor (in the West). While they (rather, we) have not politically done much (that I know of) in the following areas, we have collectively (in the history of the world) fought poverty, illiteracy, and diseases through aid organizations, schools, and hospitals. Christians have founded orphanages, established hospices. Most of the Ivy League schools were founded by Christians (quoting from Ralph Winter: “Princeton University Press fairly recently came out with a restudy (Witchcraft at Salem) of the Salem event which showed that precisely the clergymen in Salem, who studied both theology and science at Yale, were the ones that insisted on a strict, scientific court trial which ended the hysteria”).

I do not mean to say Christians should be socially involved in a blind way. As the old saying goes, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. The Crusades, colonialism, the destruction of cultures in South America, all may have had very good intentions, yet ended in much human misery.

Nor do I think social action is an ultimate good. While feeding the hungry, outlawing slavery, and diminishing diseases are all good things, they attack manifestations of the spiritual darkness in the world. The Christian struggle against “the principalities, the powers of this world” is fought on more levels than one.

When I was an undergraduate, I overheard a conversation between the president of the student body and a member of one of the Christian student groups. The president asked for support. The Christian replied that she would see if her group and other Christian groups could start praying for him and for the university as a whole.

I expected him to be disappointed. I thought he’d be looking for votes, or signatures on a petition, or attendance at some rallies, or manpower to help set things up. To my surprise, the president was thankful. It was the help he wanted.

Disclaimer: I know I'm not a historian. Nor am I a sociologist. I may be way off base, or wildly inaccurate in what I’ve said. Still, a friend encouraged me to write more spontaneously, and I don’t have the time to check the accuracy of what I’ve written.

Your thoughts?