#dluv

Who gets the fundamental human condition better: Freud or Marx? I dunno… Do you really want the [Supreme] Court to make that judgment? Well, it does. It goes with Freud, after going with Marx.

We’re not here to question received wisdom – by ‘here’ I mean ‘law school’ – we’re here to wallow in received wisdom.

We might be led to feel a certain humility about our role as lawyers in the world. There is a sense in which many of our law school applications were just laughably wrong. If the reason we came to law school is something like to pursue social justice or to make the world a better place, it's not clear that we made the right choice, because it's not clear that constitutional change of this sort is primarily the product of lawyers. That's not to say there's not plenty to admire about the kinds of things lawyers and judges have done, but there are other contributions worth admiring, [largely from] those who are suffering directly. …. It's people who have the feeling that they've had enough of this kind of shit who make a big difference in the world. It's the Rosa Parks… Some fruit vendor in Tunisia who gets tired of being humiliated and lights himself on fire, and incites a revolution. People are [also] doing the work to change the culture in less dramatic ways. So with gay rights in the pantheon of heroes historically we might add people like the creators of the TV show Will & Grace, or Tony Kushner… or the writers of children's books with gay characters that Scalia makes fun of. … These are the people who make it possible for the Thurgood Marshalls and the Anthony Kennedys to follow behind. So the anti-inspiration moral from our Constitutional Law course is that you aren't really going to change the world by writing legal briefs or Supreme Court opinions -- certainly God knows not by writing law review articles. Constitutional law is certainly important but in the grand scheme of things, it's not all that important.