I try not to get involved in the blog wars, but something has been bugging me. The worst offenders on the conservative side at the shitty logic, hyperbolic arguments, sloppy thinking and general innumeracy -- Instapundit, Ann Althouse, the Powerline guys -- are all lawyers or more specifically law professors. Whenever I get into a Comments spat with somebody who's just quote-farming and spitting circular arguments -- almost always the "I'm a lawyer" or "law professor" comes up.
I mean, is it in the nature of the profession, the training in constructing arguments to serve a purpose rather than discern a truth (oo, I can feel the flame war coming from that one), is it just that lawyers have more spare time, or are there just so many damn lawyers in the world that statistically, some asshat on the web is going to wind up being one?
Well, I think your point about what the Greeks called Sophistry is well taken (and my father, whom I love and respect and like, is a lawyer). When your job involves winning arguments rather than discovering truth, you become really shitty yet successful at arguing.
ReplyDeleteIt may also be that a really good lawyer can argue his client's side, regardless of his beliefs whereas the more hackish have to be able to alter their beliefs on the spot so that they can argue from a (in *their* minds) defensible position.
ReplyDeleteIt may simply be that those wingnuts are relying on the presumed authority of the "I'm a law professor" claim to intimidate others because their arguments are so weak. There may be lots of other progressive--or at least intelligent--commenters who don't feel the need to wave their credentials like a flag. (And I'm a law librarian, so there.)
ReplyDeleteI'm a law student, and it is very true that we are taught to take a position and really spin the facts to our client's positions.
ReplyDeleteFor instance we took the story of Goldylocks and the Three Bears, and wrote it from three positions. ProBears, ProGoldylocks, and objective. While still not knowingly lying(saying something that is known at the time deliberately false) a good lawyer can focus in on, selectively ignore and or explain away details to such a degree that they come out as completely different stories.
It can be hard even for me with my limited time with the law to seperate out "taking a position" vs honestly discussing something. Alot of times I have to stop myself and wonder if I honestly belief what I am saying or have I convinced myself into taking a position to the point where I believe it. Imagine how hard it is for someone with 10-20 years experience in the law. Especially a law professor who teaches the same kinds of subject answering basically the same kinds of questions over and over again during that period.
Maybe times are changing, but time was you could always tell who was actually a lawyer on the net because they were the ones who, despite being suspiciously well-informed about certain things, studiously avoided ever stating their profession. Something about trouble that could ensue if their online musings were mistaken for professional legal opinions.
ReplyDeleteCorollary to this principle: Why, yes, there are certainly a large number of people who claim to be lawyers online.
I have a friend with a degree in rhetoric. He's also a conservative republican. He can almost always "win" an argument with me -- but, as I pointed out to him, that doesn't make him "right."
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, there are few people more inclined to expound at length on things they know little about than law professors. It seems to be a hazard of the profession.
ReplyDeleteSome people can be good (or at least passable) at a certain intellectual specialty without ever developing the skills to reason well outside that specialty. This problem can be compounded when they're in a socially "elite" profession and can thus expect to have an attentive audience for their opinions, no matter how ridiculous they may be.
ReplyDeleteThink of it from the other direction: if you were trying to create a successful wingnut blogger, whom would you recruit?
ReplyDeleteYou need someone who reads quickly and is comfortable with prose; who writes well; who enjoys arguments and will take extreme measures to win them, but doesn't particularly care about truth; who adopts or defends racist and sexist rhetoric without risk to his or her career. You need an embittered misanthrope, living a sheltered life, who doesn't have anything better to do than run a wingnut blog.
Law professors -- literate, argumentative, tenured, and underpaid -- are obviously a good target demographic.
I'm a lawyer, and I don't think it's the bit about being trained to make an arbitrary argument.
ReplyDeleteI think people who go into law tend to be pre-disposed to taking an aggressive stance intellectually. In other words, they're strongly opinionated, and when it's an opinion you don't like, that's intensely annoying.
Go read something like the Balkinization blog, or TalkLeft, or Glenn Greenwald, and tell me if you find them just as annoying. If not, it must be something more than mere lawyerhood.
The idea that lawyer bloggers make tendentious arguments because they're trained to argue on behalf of their clients, whether they agree with them or not, overlooks an important point: Lawyer bloggers, in general, are not blogging on behalf of a client. They're expressing their own personal opinions. Lawyers, and especially law professors, can have very strongly-held, unwavering personal opinions, just like anyone else.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing to keep in mind is that legal writing is normally a very detailed and painstaking process, with numerous stages of research, fact-checking, revisions, proofreading, citation checking, and so forth. In the rapid-fire world of the blogosphere, then, lawyers are arguably at something of a disadvantage, since they cannot use one of their biggest skills: the ability to spend lots of time generating an ironclad argument.
So, gaijin_biker, they're a little out of shape when it comes to real-time debate? That could be. Throw a script actor into an improv skit show, and you might see a bit of fumbling there too.
ReplyDeleteMy question is, is there any correlation between what kind of law they study and how good their arguments are? What about defense vs. prosecution vs. research? It's hard to determine whether personal politics determine one's area of expertise or vice versa, but I'm curious about whether there are trends there.
I'm thinking of Michael Froomkin, for one, who's a law professor at U. of Miami. Granted, someone who's versed in the internet law aspects of free speech may be more likely to be progressive (like most techies), but he does his research, argues rationally, and asks more questions than he answers. It's a sign that at least some law profs can handle the pace and format of a blog.
Good point, alison. Another fact to bear in mind is that lawyers and law professors, while they may be quite intelligent, are usually only truly expert in a very narrow field of study. Copyright law, for example, or tax law, or criminal law, or even subsets of these fields.
ReplyDeleteOf course, they also presumably have a good understanding of general matters like how statutes are interpreted, how the legal system works, how rights and duties interact, and so forth, all of which can certainly help in debating policy issues.
But ultimately, taken out of their element, lawyers are just smart people with a talent for thinking logically. And so are many other people who never went to law school.
I'm married to a lawyer and though I love my husband I fucking hate lawyers - they stink of rhetoric and bull shit and never say thank you after dinner.
ReplyDeleteHey. I *always* say thank you after dinner.
ReplyDeleteFroomkin is good, but there are legions of other lawyers and law professors who represent different points of view than the hacks to whom you refer. Try these:
ReplyDeletehref="http://continental-op.blogspot.com/">Reports from Poisonville
href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/">Unclaimed Territory – Glenn Greenwald
href="http://www.isthatlegal.org/">Is that Legal? (Eric Muller)
href="http://www.ernietheattorney.net/">Ernie the Attorney
href="http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/">Sivacracy.net
And please be careful of dismissing lawyers as Sophists. The Sophists might have had it right: Man is the measure of all things. It's the Platonists, the Essentialists, the people who believe there's something more clear than a better argument that are the real trouble.
Peter's got a point. The problem with Instapundit, Althouse and the boys at Powerline is they don't think they need to make an argument. Their truths, it appears, are self-evident. This is not a problem specific to lawyers, though. It's a problem with true believers.
ReplyDeleteTo continue the generalization, why is it that a discernable portion of the blog voices on the Left have a background in economics?
ReplyDeleteWell, first off, I'm a lawyer (har, though it's true) and the thing about those whom you mention is that if they argue in their vocations as well as they do in their avocations...they suck as lawyers.
ReplyDeleteCiting a case and only adding "heh, indeedy. Read the whole thing" is simply going to piss off the judge and (dirty little secret) more importantly, his/her law clerks who have to read the garbage.
Similarly, whining about meanness and ickiness, a la frau Altmouse tends to draw a response along the lines of "suck it up. This league is full contact, professor.
As for the powerline guys, they're just idiots who I would love to have cases against
I was a litigator for 10 years and I hate fucking lawyers. As a group, they were the most dishonest people I have ever met. Sophistry is an honourable pursuit given a bad name by anti-Jesuit propaganda. But it does get to the point where lawyers have no ground left to stand on, and they resort to running through the maze of procedure to avoid responsibility.
ReplyDeleteI am regularly reminded by people that my arguments leave no room for others' opinions. So what? It's what lawyers do, and I'm winning and it's a rush. But always being in the right is just impolite. And who cares about law professors? Litigators laugh at them.
As I learned in Republican campaign school when I snuck in, they could give a fig about being right. It's all about winning to them.
ReplyDeleteCouldn't agree more, you're absolutely spot on.
ReplyDeleteCakreiz, Esq.
My girlfriend is lawyer so I always wonder if arguing for it's own sake is part of be a lawyer or part of being a girlfriend.
ReplyDeletePlus, there's a reason the "Trust me, I'm a lawyer" shirts were funny.
It's its.
ReplyDeleteI'm currently in law school and I believe it starts here. If you want to figure out why many lawyers are jaded and weird, sit in a law school class and listen to their endless hypotheticals and pointless arguments. We're trained to not ever come up with a real answer for anything although we evaluate both side extensively. This leaves us alone and incompatible with the real world.
ReplyDeleteGreat blog!
ReplyDelete"My girlfriend is lawyer so I always wonder if arguing for it's own sake is part of be a lawyer or part of being a girlfriend."
ReplyDeleteYes.
Lawyers what actually practise law in actual courtrooms are far less likely to be as ...uncaring... about the truth of their pet theories as law professors are because that sort of attitude does not survive an unsympathetic judge for long...
ReplyDeleteLaw professors on the other hand rarely face this test and hence ignorance can fester uncontrolled.
I have a little sign on my mirror that says: "Lawyers use facts like a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support rather than illumination."
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, it is unattributed.
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