During orientation, pretty much every single speaker said that by the end of law school, the way we thought would change entirely. I assume it was hyperbole, but I am starting to think it's not so much.
Law school itself is much different than public health. Public health deals with hard, scientific facts, rigorous standards, evidence, theory, and people. There's a law against abortion but women have them anyway? The reality is the public health problem. And we can't ignore what's actually happening while people are being prosecuted for what they "shouldn't" have done. Kids should abstain from sex? There are age of consent laws to stop them? STI rates are rising among teens, and THAT is reality and THAT is what we deal in.
Law deals with fluidity. There are facts there, but there are also tricks and twists and turns and in the end, your case could be airtight and you could still lose, either by not convincing a jury that your facts were right, by not convincing a judge that your case had enough merit, by being out-argued by the opposition, by lacking standing or jurisdiction, or any other of the thousands of different roadblocks tossed up to prevent justice and fairness.*
As far as I know, I'm the only one in my incoming class with any kind of health background. Nobody in my section was a doctor or nurse or public health person. Nobody I have met is, either. Not many seem to know what public health is; a common response with the public, actually.** This is not to say that everyone is from the same background - there are many people with higher degrees than just BAs or BSes, and many people who have been working for years after school, in various jobs ranging from engineer to soldier to waitress.
But law students talk in different ways than normal people, I'm noticing. They think differently, and they value things in strange ways. The example that made this click in my head was over statistics.
In public health, we can trust statistics. We
do trust statistics. This is because we're trained - statistics are easily verifiable. That number looks funny? Well, I can look at your data and I can look at your methodology and what's your CI and what's your p value and did you do a Chi square test or ANOVA? The process is transparent, peer reviewed, and replicable. Research is published, warts and all - sure, researchers are not going to emphasize their failures or errors, but they aren't leaving them out, either. Funding sources are identified, and scrutiny is applied. Correlation is not causation, and we rarely jump to conclusions. That smoking causes cancer is about as clear as epidemiology can ever get, and you won't find an epidemiologist who will tell you that it's 100% true.
In law, people scorn statistics. They think they are all lies, period. No statistic can be trusted, and they are totally worthless for what they are. And it makes sense - lawyers use the facts that help their case. If there are facts that hurt their case, they leave them out and only if their opposition brings them up do these facts come to light. By necessity, there is no transparency, and things are argued to sound as good as possible, regardless of what's actually there. Your client wants to show that secondhand smoke doesn't cause cancer, even though evidence shows that it does? Use old studies, and attack the credibility of the new studies. Attack the funding sources, despite the fact that studies funded by industry or interest groups are heavily scrutinized and always transparent. Convince the people deciding your case that the proven facts are in doubt. Convince them, even, that there is a
chance that the studies could be wrong, either through methodology, sample size, sample itself, funding, conclusions, researcher bias, whatever. Use what you can to put that doubt in people's heads, and unless they are trained in epidemiology, who will be the wiser?
Experiences shape how you think and what you do and how you see things. As you can see by the paragraphs above, in this instance I am putting myself in the "public health" group - we. I'm not associating with the law people, because I think their way is wrong, shortsighted, and leaves out too much. I'm sure other people could challenge public health, as well, saying it didn't take into account the facts of government, economics, resources, religion, etc. Too shortsighted, you see.
But personal experiences, outside of academics, are important, too. I'm sympathetic to women who are unintendedly pregnant because I've had a pregnancy scare. I'm sympathetic to people with depression because I've been depressed. I'm sympathetic to people who take the day off from work when their dog dies, because I've had dogs die and been devastated by it. I filter the outside world through the sieve of my life, and what gets through doesn't always look the same as it did on the outside. Sometimes the holes aren't big enough. Sometimes colors change. Sometimes a whole chunk gets through but you don't realise that it's still only half the piece - it looks whole to you, after all.
It is worrisome, then, to me, that so many perspectives seem to be lacking in the legal world. There is
one person doing a dual degree with public health. One in the whole school. I don't know anyone with a JD
and an MPH (or PhD in public health). There are no state legislators with MPHs. These people decide laws and policy on individual and public health on a daily basis, and their experiences are limited in a terrible way.***
And that's just
one very small realm of the world and its issues. How do we decide? How do we get people with different backgrounds to bring their knowledge, perspectives, and experiences to the table? How do we make them effectively heard, and how do we ram their ideas into other law students' heads? Do we, for example, force "diversity" upon all realms of law - school, associate positions, teaching positions, dean positions, judicial appointments? Do we pull out
philosopher kings and install them on the Supreme Court? Should the Supreme Court be representative of gender? Race? Sexual orientation? Socioeconomic status? If it isn't, can it be truly just? Maybe it's a
good idea to have a non-lawyer on the Supreme Court. Maybe it's a
good idea to have a mediocre lawyer who has never been a judge on the Supreme Court. Maybe we should trust Bush that his buddy Harriet is going to do just fine in her lifetime appointment - maybe she will! She brings different experiences (the single female trailblazing Southern Christian evangelical experience, apparently) to the table, and that undoubtedly shapes her views.
Of course I have no answers and no solutions. I will just keep on keeping on, and hope to argue convincingly or loudly enough to get some people to see the chunks of my perspective and experiences and knowledge through their own life sieves, and hope that they do the same.
The reference back to the initial sentence, though, is that I don't want to lose perspective. And I'm becoming a strict constructionist. And I'm seeing lawsuits
everywhere. I watched
The Exorcism of Emily Rose and could only think about what would have to be shown to prove negligence.
*This ain't to say public health is all bread and roses, straight cut and without chaos, politics, and muddled puddles. But you don't so often have malpractice insurance in public health, shall we say.**Which is both good and bad - if we're doing our jobs right, nobody knows about it. But to do our jobs right, we need funding...we can only get funding if people know about what we're doing.***And I think it often shows. I mean jesus, Patricia Miller, have you ever even talked to a lesbian couple trying to conceive? Do you know if they are going to have a father figure in the child's life? Do you know their hopes and dreams? Or are you foisting your own limited experience upon them, making their loving desire to have a family some kind of purposeful child abuse? And as for you abstinence people, I'd bet my life that no more than half of you were abstinent until marriage. And don't even get me started about anti-choicers who have abortions.
