Blah Blah Blah: Why the Law?

Why the Law?

I suppose because of where I come from and where I went to school, I know or have known many many lawyers. A cousin, two or three friends from grade school, a half-dozen from college, and the moms and dads of what seemed like half the people I knew as kids. Despite this, I didn’t grow up with any particular interest in the law. Like many people, lawyers were associated in my mind with avarice and mendacity, people who exploited loopholes to get rich and keep their clients rich. It didn’t help that so many people I knew went into the law, not out of any kind of dedication to its recondite and occult ways, but as a method of maintaining social class: we had gone to private schools and grown up in large-but-not-ostentatious houses and traveled the world and so on, and if we wanted the same for our children, we had to find ways of making a lot of money. Lawyering, if you were smart and educated and dedicated, seemed as good a way as any to maintain that.

As my adulthood sort of floated by, I maintained a faint thought that I might do the same thing one day, for more or less the same reasons. It sounded like a sort of slow death, but a respectable slow death that included a gym membership and a pair of Priuses in the driveway and a certain amount of social status, the kind that America wrongly affords to its haute bourgeoisie. I took the LSAT once in my late 20s, more or less out of curiosity, but I didn’t really want to be a lawyer and I hadn’t yet begun to fight my losing battle with the publishing industry. As I flailed about trying to find ways to feed myself — teaching, chiefly, which I had expected to love and had instead loathed — it always hung in the back of my mind that I could probably go to law school if I felt like it. But I never felt like it. I swore to myself I would never do it unless and until it started to feel like something more than a social obligation.

I’ll be frank and say that it was the advent of the Trump era, and its peculiar form of lawlessness, that drew me inexorably toward the law, even as my writing career began to falter. This was something of a paradox: many of my lawyer friends were telling me that their careers, while lucrative, were exhausting and stultifying, while simultaneously I was noticing many lawyers in public life whose careers seemed fascinating and admirable. I’ve always been a liberal — increasingly so, as I get older — but the life of the prosecutor, the investigator, began to call to me. I started telling people, I wanna be Robert Mueller when I grow up. The joke being, of course, that I was already 37 years old by the time this brainwave came to me, and would be past 40 before I was able to even try.

But I’ve begun to perceive a place for myself in there, despite all the hazards and ways in which I might seem like a strange fit. I sometimes can’t get over the sensation that I’ve been little but a leech on society in my life, a half-assed artist-cum-party-boy who did virtually nothing for anybody but himself. This is not the kind of life I was raised to admire, and it’s not really one I’ve enjoyed living. The idea of being a public servant calls to me, in part because it feels like the opposite of what I’ve done with myself to date. I suppose I feel like I’m paying a debt.

I also feel like I’m righting a wrong, however. One of the chief flaws with government and law enforcement, it seems to me, is that it has come to be the bailiwick of the reactionary, with an emphasis on punishment, a blindness to society’s iniquities. I’ve been on the outside criticizing the system forever; if you want to see my views on criminal justice and race, scroll back through this blog and you’ll find some things. Perhaps nothing specific, but you’ll understand my point of view. But then — what use is it to complain, if nobody’s listening? Over the last couple of years the phenomenon of the “progressive prosecutor” has started popping up in America. Not long ago that would have been a contradiction in terms, but today it seems like a necessary corrective to a system that is completely out-of-whack. These are people who go into government, not just to enforce the law, but to see it enforced justly, whether that means ending onerous prosecutions for minor drug crimes, holding police accountable for their errors and abuses, or throwing the book at corrupt politicians and corporations. That’s the kind of justice I can get behind. And it seems to me that, if we really want progress in this country, more people with my sorts of views should have a hand in serving that kind of justice.

The kind of law that draws me will never make me rich. Not that I won’t be fine — so long as prolonged furloughs don’t become a regular element of life as a federal employee — but if I have kids they’ll probably go to state school and the house they grow up in will be far more modest than the one I grew up in. But I’ve been rich, or rich-ish, before, and I gotta tell you, it’s over-sold. Not that having money has been the cause of my problems, and not that I can’t see the ways in which having very little would have made those problems much worse — but having money certainly didn’t solve my problems, either. I was still depressed, lost, angry, and alone. Those are things you could feel at Bill Gates’ house or in a studio apartment, and nothing to do with your material circumstances is going to make them go away. What I have lacked, all these years, was purpose. I lost the writing vocation a long time ago; for many years, it has simply been a thing I’ve done because I’ve put so much effort into becoming good at it. That doesn’t feel that different than being in the rat race my old friends who went into corporate law have been running.

I don’t know. That last paragraph is making me feel weird, as talking about the many and vast privileges with which I have lived my life usually does. But it’s also the truth: the American idea that getting rich is a noble or important goal is just wrong. It’s far more important to feel useful. And I’m trying to put myself to use.