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October 25, 2011
Karl Llewellyn: "You expect me to tell you that you should be earnest about your work."
Karl Nickerson Llewellyn
You expect me to tell you that you should be earnest about your work, and get your back into it for dear old Siwash, and that he who lets work slide will stumble by the way.
My guess is that he was not a fan of "going through the motions". We can safely assume that unlike us he would have never Tweeted (or at least not have disclosed that activity to sane and serious clients).
And that he would have been deeply saddened by the current professional trend of doing all things in a way to "please the professional"--rather than to advance the interests of the entity served: Client, Patient, Buyer, Customer.
The above of course is from the opening chapter of the The Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study (1931), which sprung from a series of introductory lectures Karl Llewellyn (1893–1962) gave to first-year law students during the 1929-30 academic year, when he was appointed the first Betts Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia. The book's title is from a poem "The Bramble Bush" by Robert Penn Warren, excerpted here:
There was a man in our town
and he was wondrous wise:
he jumped into a bramble bush
and scratched out both his eyes--and when he found that he was blind,
with all his might and maine,
He jumped into another one,
and scratched them in again.
(from past WAC? posts)
Posted by JD Hull at October 25, 2011 11:55 PM
Comments
I wonder--even with the new edition of The Bramble Bush--how many newly minted lawyers have heard either of Llewellyn or his spouse Soia Mentschikoff (both of whom were key figures in the drafting of the bane of all bar exam candidates, the UCC)? Is negligent ignorance of the history of one's own craft another sign of the coming of the professional apocalypse?
Posted by: Erwiest ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.whataboutclients.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 23, 2011 11:46 PM
Lawyers in the last couple of decades have possessed very little in the way of context for anything. We're myopic about background, history and culture across the board--our own or anyone else's--and have become technicians, mechanics and "oil checkers". Glad you remember Soia. And yes the UCC is really a work of high art. :-)
Posted by: Dan Hull at October 24, 2011 04:07 AM