Here’s the text of a very interesting speech given to first year students by Adam J. MacLeod, an associate professor of law at Jones School of Law, Faulkner University (Montgomery, Alabama). Fascinating. The man does not pull any punches.
It’s a speech he gives in a course entitled “Foundations of Law.” That’s not something I recall from my law school days, although my guess is that it may be somewhat equivalent to old-fashioned “Jurisprudence,” which was already undergoing a (temporary?) switch to “Philosophy of Law” back then. It may surprise no one that this was my favorite area of law, hands down, rather than things like the Uniform Commercial Code (the details of which never seemed to penetrate my brain).
MacLeod has the following to say in his introduction to the article, which was not part of his speech to the students:
I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.
I found my students especially impervious to the ancient wisdom of foundational texts, such as Plato’s Crito and the Code of Hammurabi. Many of them were quick to dismiss unfamiliar ideas as “classist” and “racist,” and thus unable to engage with those ideas on the merits. So, a couple of weeks into the semester, I decided to lay down some ground rules. I gave them these rules just before beginning our annual unit on legal reasoning.
After I went to law school I decided not to go into law. In those days—long long long ago—a legal education didn’t set my family back any significant amount (practically nothing compared to today), and so my defection wasn’t as big a financial deal as it would have been now. I had actually thought to drop out right after my first year, but I was talked out of that and finished up, knowing I was unlikely to go into the field. I was told that studying the discipline of law—what MacLeod refers to as “legal reasoning”—would help me throughout my life (although I don’t recall any units specially devoted to the topic).
And so it has. It really has—although it certainly hasn’t always made people love me. I use it every day. I use it in this blog. I think of it as applied logic.
One of the reasons I went to law school in the first place was that I had a natural affinity for that sort of reasoning. I had always been told—even as a little girl, even when female lawyers were rather rare—that I “talked like a lawyer.”
This was not a compliment, by the way. But I took it as such, at least partially. A lot of people hate lawyers, and I understand why. But having studied law, I have deep respect for our system of law, however flawed it may be. It is a daunting task to codify morality and try to pin it down in a legal system that is clear and fair. You may think ours falls very short of that, both on paper and in execution. And of course it does. But until you study law and try to devise a better system yourself, you may not appreciate what a valiant (not always, of course, but often) effort has been made over the centuries.
Here is a small excerpt from MacLeod’s speech to the law students. I think the words could be addressed to any student, at least at the high school level and above:
…Before you learn how to think you must first learn how to stop unthinking.
Reasoning requires you to understand truth claims, even truth claims that you think are false or bad or just icky. Most of you have been taught to label things with various “isms” which prevent you from understanding claims you find uncomfortable or difficult.
Reasoning requires correct judgment. Judgment involves making distinctions, discriminating. Most of you have been taught how to avoid critical, evaluative judgments by appealing to simplistic terms such as “diversity” and “equality.”
Reasoning requires you to understand the difference between true and false. And reasoning requires coherence and logic. Most of you have been taught to embrace incoherence and illogic. You have learned to associate truth with your subjective feelings, which are neither true nor false but only yours, and which are constantly changeful…
First, except when describing an ideology, you are not to use a word that ends in “ism.” Communism, socialism, Nazism, and capitalism are established concepts in history and the social sciences, and those terms can often be used fruitfully to gain knowledge and promote understanding. “Classism,” “sexism,” “materialism,” “cisgenderism,” and (yes) even racism are generally not used as meaningful or productive terms, at least as you have been taught to use them. Most of the time, they do not promote understanding.
In fact, “isms” prevent you from learning. You have been taught to slap an “ism” on things that you do not understand, or that make you feel uncomfortable, or that make you uncomfortable because you do not understand them. But slapping a label on the box without first opening the box and examining its contents is a form of cheating.
Much more at the link.
