Something that I feel is lacking in my fellow law students’ attitudes is a sense of the beautiful in what they do, a sense of art.
Yes, we are all in school to become lawyers, a particularly conservative profession by trade, but government—law—is one of the most radically spit-in-your-face-absurdity enterprises that you can imagine. It is, at its heart, the very embodiment of living, undulating, creating meaning together. Being a lawyer, in that sense, is very much like being a choreographer, a playwright, or a painter. Influencing how people live together—who has what power, who has what entitlements, who has what rights—is an artistic venture. As most people with at least a college course in philosophy understand, there may well be no right or wrong, good or bad. There is no “public interest” that can be absolutely defined, so instead we can craft what appears, to us, to be beautiful.
What is beautiful? Is it egalitarianism? Order? Societal achievement? This is something I am interested in thinking about, but to begin I will say that for me change itself is beautiful. People challenging power and the status quo is beautiful. People gathering all of their courage and saying “No. I am not this. This is not okay. I choose something else,” is beautiful. People fighting against the demands of conformity and the status quo is beautiful.
I like to think of social change as inherently artistic. And I would like to think of my career as a lifelong work of art. I mean, if I ever get an internship.
