Hi Eric, thanks for writing these and pointing us to them. I think this is a great idea. I just posted these on our business society and law society Facebook page to test the waters and see what response we’d get from a similar input. Out of interest, what has the response been that you’ve gotten so far?
I would guess that the first article would have had a quite positive response. It was well written, and a pleasure to read.
But I fear the second article has not had as positive a response, for two reasons:
It appears to be dismissive and cynical of its own target audience—and from the very first sentence:
“For people systematically chosen for being able to root out and analyze the rationality of arguments, lawyers are pitifully bad at being reasonable.”
It goes on to do things such as dismiss the positive impact of believed-to-be-ethical jobs as ‘the warm fuzzies’, without justification.
It doesn’t address what its target audience believes to be the biggest factor in determining an ethical job; the direct impact of the job; the millions of dollars which the big corporation sues from the more deserving; the dozens of individuals the public lawyer works to help.
Writing these articles can do a great amount of good, and is to be commended. But to maximise this good, we should be meticulous about catering to the needs of our audience.
Adding on to this question, there are a lot of negative comments on the second article—do you think that represents a vocal minority, or a majority, and why?
It would be interesting to try this at Berkeley as well, although we’d probably have a different target audience depending on where the article gets published.
Hi Eric, thanks for writing these and pointing us to them. I think this is a great idea. I just posted these on our business society and law society Facebook page to test the waters and see what response we’d get from a similar input. Out of interest, what has the response been that you’ve gotten so far?
I would guess that the first article would have had a quite positive response. It was well written, and a pleasure to read.
But I fear the second article has not had as positive a response, for two reasons:
It appears to be dismissive and cynical of its own target audience—and from the very first sentence: “For people systematically chosen for being able to root out and analyze the rationality of arguments, lawyers are pitifully bad at being reasonable.” It goes on to do things such as dismiss the positive impact of believed-to-be-ethical jobs as ‘the warm fuzzies’, without justification.
It doesn’t address what its target audience believes to be the biggest factor in determining an ethical job; the direct impact of the job; the millions of dollars which the big corporation sues from the more deserving; the dozens of individuals the public lawyer works to help.
Writing these articles can do a great amount of good, and is to be commended. But to maximise this good, we should be meticulous about catering to the needs of our audience.
Adding on to this question, there are a lot of negative comments on the second article—do you think that represents a vocal minority, or a majority, and why?
It would be interesting to try this at Berkeley as well, although we’d probably have a different target audience depending on where the article gets published.