{"id":3115,"date":"2009-01-04T22:02:27","date_gmt":"2009-01-05T03:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=3115"},"modified":"2018-04-23T14:42:03","modified_gmt":"2018-04-23T19:42:03","slug":"particular-humanities-a-lesson-before-dying-a-long-walk-to-freedom-and-the-wire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2009\/01\/particular-humanities-a-lesson-before-dying-a-long-walk-to-freedom-and-the-wire\/","title":{"rendered":"Particular Humanities: A Lesson Before Dying, A Long Walk to Freedom, and The Wire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This is a vintage Murray post in that I take the\u00a0Question of the Month (favorite book or movie about the law) and, as I like to say, “tweak it” (and, as Michael likes to say, “ignore it”).\u00a0\u00a0I am selecting two books, Ernest J. Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying<\/em> and Nelson Mandela’s A Long Walk to Freedom<\/em>, and one television series, The Wire<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0I choose them\u00a0because each examines what I consider a key question: how individuals maintain their humanity as they negotiate potentially unjust legal systems.<\/p>\n

A Lesson Before Dying<\/em> taught me that lawyers have to be advocates for their clients’ humanity.\u00a0\u00a0A Lesson Before Dying<\/em> recounts the trial of a young black man named Jefferson, found guilty of two murders.\u00a0\u00a0In his closing summary, Jefferson’s lawyer compares Jefferson to a “thing,” concluding, with this sentence, “[w]hat justice would there be to take this life?\u00a0 Justice, gentlemen? \u00a0I would just as a soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.”\u00a0\u00a0It cannot be said that the lawyer does a “bad” job here since in a deeply segregated South, this tactical argument may have been the only way to preserve his client’s life.\u00a0\u00a0Of course, such advocacy denies all humanity to Jefferson (which is Gaines’ concern as a novelist for the rest of the book).\u00a0\u00a0A Lesson Before Dying<\/em> offered me, then, a rich account of\u00a0a debate often heard in Professional Ethics: do we owe our clients more than the “best” advocacy?\u00a0 Do we have additional responsibility to advocate in a humane way?\u00a0\u00a0 One of the great pleasures of working at Marquette, from my perspective, is seeing the work of Janine Geske and Andrea Schneider, who through their respective programs, attempt to answer these questions.<\/p>\n

Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, A Long Walk to Freedom, <\/em>outlines the way in which lawyers and law school impacted Mandela’s development as a social activist.\u00a0\u00a0 Mandela’s relationship to the law was a complex one: laws maintained the boundaries of social classifications within an apartheid system, while at the same time provided a means for provoking changes in that system.\u00a0\u00a0Mandela’s autobiography offers a window into a perspective of a whole set of lawyer-activists, such as Thurgood Marshall, Mahatma Gandhi, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Constance Baker Motley,\u00a0who understood the law’s possibilities even when its application was unjust.\u00a0\u00a0Such a vision of the law is a humane one, given its optimistic view of institutions’ capacity for change.<\/p>\n

The Wire<\/em>, with its perspective on the continual failures of legal institutions (the police, the courts, and the politicians) to address the drug trade, tempers the preceding optimism with a necessary dose of skepticism.\u00a0 Well-meaning attempts to change the social dynamics of the drug trade fail again and again in The Wire<\/em>.\u00a0 The only saving grace in The Wire<\/em> is the great humanity of individuals in the system.\u00a0\u00a0Although he is depicted as a sociopath throughout The Wire<\/em>,\u00a0 every time I hear Marlo Stansfield’s\u00a0“My Name is My Name” speech<\/a>, I recall his humanity (although, unlike Jefferson’s humanity, an ugly one).<\/p>\n

One more thing: I have found that these works are in a continual dialogue with each other.\u00a0 Read them together and you are subject to this rich discussion of the ways in which change can be accomplished within the legal system, the ways in which change is thwarted within the legal system, and the way each of us in our particular humanity can be engaged by the legal system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a vintage Murray post in that I take the\u00a0Question of the Month (favorite book or movie about the law) and, as I like to say, “tweak it” (and, as Michael likes to say, “ignore it”).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":3120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-popular-culture-and-law","entry","has-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3115"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27654,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3115\/revisions\/27654"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}