Even though classes haven't started yet, it seems that law school is already having a mind-altering affect on us. My experience in the last couple days has demonstrated this affect.
Law school seems to bring together a fairly diverse set of individuals. The only common factor seems to be that we are all smart, did well on the LSAT, and got good grades in college. Everything else is up for grabs. In my class, there are a fair number of libertarians, a large number of liberals (this IS Bloomington, after all), and I'm sure at least a few ultra-conservatives.
This week a few of us have been going out, and we got to discussing politics (as happens often when I'm around). One of my friends, a registered Libertarian, was telling me how he disagreed with the death penalty in all cases except treason and terrorism. Now, I am a firm believer in the death penalty, at least when guilt is 100% (or 99.9%) positive, and the crime took the life of another. This is just my personal belief, and I don't generally push it on others.
The following day, he had finished some of his reading for the first day of class, and discovered that perhaps his opinions were incorrect. You see, our first class in Criminal Law, and the first reading is about the purposes of punishment. The reading raised a good point about why the death penalty should exist. Let's assume that the death penalty is abolished, and that capital crimes earn life in prison. Well, as you may or may not know, so too does armed robbery. So in our hypothetical world, if an armed robber knows he is about to be caught, and thus will recieve life in prison, he might just start shooting. After all, a few murders on his hands won't gain him any more of a severe punishment.
While it is reasonable to assume that not all criminals think things out with such logical reasoning, we must believe that one of the purposes of punishment is to act as a deterrent. As such, many of the philosophical ideas that make us who we are will fall by the wayside as we begin to "think like lawyers".
And that's without having been in the classroom once.
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The rhetorical ramblings of a student at Indiana University School of Law - Bloomington.
3 comments:
one thing you will learn as school starts is that not all law students are really that smart
I don't know if I should be troubled or relieved by that fact.
You found a really good one: someone who sees new information and actually reconsiders and opinion he had. Worse than the gunner is the "I feel"-er. The person who had beliefs which are too firmly established, and cannot accept the rush of information they get that challenges those beliefs. So they feel they need to regularly chime in during class and tell everyone how unfair anything they disagree with is.
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