But here’s the most important thing she told me: Despite the fact that the middle-school principal herself told me I had a legal right to opt out (and none of the players in this morality play ever told us otherwise, whether explicitly or implicitly), that’s not actually true. In Colorado, kids are required by law to test. The “refuse testing” option on the enrollment forms? It’s “being phased out” because it’s “confusing.” If kids don’t show up for school on testing days? Zurkowski told me that some districts have sent truant officers to their homes.The author is a law professor. I'm surprised by how many people go into the law with a hatred for institutional discipline. Maybe it's the same reason that the most messed up people on earth are the ones who choose to pursue psychology?
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It surprises you how many people go into the law with a hatred for institutional discipline? It doesn't surprise me. I think many lawyers are drawn to the profession by a revulsion for being pushed around and a desire to learn the ropes that might prevent it. Also, perhaps, by an antipathy toward being asked to swallow the sort of vapid, evasive sludge that serves some people, particularly bureaucrats, in the place of principled or persuasive reasoning. That was an amazing story. I doubt I'd have been so patient.
I believe a lot of non-lawyers think of the law as an institutional discipline, but I know few lawyers who do. We're more likely to see it as a flexible framework that always has to be tested against circumstances and reason. We tend to maintain a pragmatic awareness of all the possible costs of resisting a legal standard, without necessarily feeling any loyalty to the standard itself. Many laws are nuts, after all, and all are subject to change if enough people conclude that they're nuts.
It's an interesting perspective. I would assume one went into law -- at least the prosecutorial sort of law that I ever dealt with personally -- out of a sense of a need to impose order on a community. Just like JAG lawyers exist to enforce institutional discipline (and thereby protect their commander's career), I expect lawyers in general to be all about upholding the law.
But of course what you say makes sense. The most effective way of resisting the law may be to become a lawyer. Especially if you aren't free to move out of the cities, where the law is so much more a part of day to day life.
You may be right about prosecutors. Everything I know about them comes from TV shows! I've only ever spent much time with commercial lawyers. We don't think of the law as something to be upheld. The closest we come to that, probably, is to think of using whatever law is handy to uphold our clients' rights in a particular dispute. But you don't have to be involved in many commercial disputes to find that there's usually considerable "right" on both sides, so the law becomes a way to try to balance the competing rights, according to a rule that has some consistency, predictability, and practical justice in it. Even then, the law is only a small fraction of what settles the dispute; there's a lot of custom, reputation, and trust involved.
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