I don’t talk a lot about my job on this blog.
I can’t, although it’s not as if right livelihood isn’t a huge part of being a Witch.
But, a lot of what I do for my clients is confidential and, even once it’s public (as in: has been filed in court or has won a case), I still can’t identify myself with it because being represented by a Witch may not be helpful to my clients and I have a solemn duty to vigorously advocate for their interests.
But, in essence, what I do is write legal argument for a living. I produce persuasive prose, as I sometimes say, for pay, and it’s honorable work, work that helps to ensure that justice may be done, and work that I feel privileged to get paid to do.
There are two kinds of legal argument. The first involves laying out my arguments for why I’m right and why the judge should interpret the evidence and the law the way that I want hir to, in order to rule for my clients. The second involves answering the arguments of other lawyers to the judge, or of the judge to the next highest tribunal.
I’d almost always rather do the first. I can take the evidence and the law and arrange them in a logical progression in order to show why I’m right, why my clients should win. I’m in control and the “only” fee that that mystical entity known as “The Law” requires is that I delve as deeply as possible into the statute, the legislative history, the cases, and the evidence. It can be excruciating, but it’s also, in my own experience, almost always mystical and wonderful. There’s always a point at which it feels like dancing with something wonderful, and lovely, and right.
Answering someone else’s arguments can be fun, but it’s almost always, in my experience, more difficult. That’s because most other people don’t delve, as far as needed, into the statute, the cases, the rationale behind the law. (Or, if they have, they’ve found that their case is just wrong. That’s when, again, in my experience, an ethical lawyer suggests settlement. If you think a tribunal is difficult to convince, try convincing your own client that s/he may not have the case s/he imagined. But I’ve done it; oh, Goddess, have I done it.) And trying to answer an argument that’s less than logical is hard; it’s, in W’s words, hard work. It’s more difficult than it is to answer an argument that simply misapprehends the evidence or that understandably failed to catch a subsequent development in the law.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that, lately, I’ve had bad writer’s block because I’ve been trying to answer a sketchy and less-than-well-developed argument. Finally, in the last few days, I just punched through the writer’s block and started an almost stream-of-consciousness writing marathon. I ranted. I copied pages of earlier argument based on case law. I wrote in circles trying to explain why an illogical argument was illogical.
But, by this afternoon, I had written myself into enough dead-ends and enough spirals to have a large hill of debris. And I’ve learned to trust myself and to trust the writing process enough to know that I’ll be able to climb atop that hill of debris and have the long view into another country: that country where there IS, in fact, a logical way to write this argument. And then, once I had that view from the heights, it took me only an hour or so to create a new outline and to show the evening secretary how to take a bit from here and a piece from there and to shove them into the new outline in order to create, well, actual persuasive prose.
It takes practice and experience to learn to trust the writing process and your own ability to do law. It takes having thrown yourself off the cliff and learned, in Christine Kane’s words, to leap and to trust that the net will appear.
And, even now, I sometimes wonder — as I did this past week when I just couldn’t face the work and had to play hookey, when I journeyed night after night through nightmares about not being able to clean up a mess, about not being able to find my way out of a giant hotel, about being unable to get a class of misfits to settle down, when I played multiple rounds of Mah Jong — if I’ll pull it off. But I’m old, I’ve been doing this for decades, The Law and I are old, if embittered, lovers, and while there may come a day when the courage of men fails, it is not this day, at least it never has been, so far, for me.
May it be so for you.
Picture found here.
hecatedemeter