Friday, March 19, 2010

Trials of our Times

What do I know about lawyers?  Well, I harbored a deep adolescent crush on the floppy-haired lead in the 1970s TV series, The Paper Chase – does that count?  What could be more romantic to a budding nerd than a show about late-night study groups and the adrenalin rush of the Socratic method?  I barely noticed the near-absence of women in those classrooms; I was caught up in my fantasized quest to prove to John Houseman’s irascible Professor Kingsfield that I was up to his standards. You may remember that every show replayed Kingsfield’s threatening promise to his students:  “You teach yourselves the law.  I train your minds.  You come in here with a skull full of mush, and if you survive, you’ll leave thinking like a lawyer.”

What does that mean?  To think like a lawyer?  For lots of teenagers in Michiana, the thrilling and fraught world of “Mock Trial” competition brings this question to life every winter.  Mock trial sounds straight out of Alice in Wonderland, and that’s not far off – it’s a simulated trial in which students are given the intricate particulars of an invented legal case, and then they act as lawyers and witnesses to carve varying paths through stacks of material as both prosecution and defense.  In the sporting tradition, students can earn letter-jacket stripes, and kids in our area regularly win state and sometimes national championships.  Mock Trial is part memorization, part debate, part theater, and all chutzpa.  For families, mock trial season means months of teenagers sprawled in our livingrooms, plowing through Doritos and paperwork while shouting out the arcane rules of hearsay:  “Your honor, this is not hearsay because it is not offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted.”

Now, I might criticize the former-varsity jock parent who seems over-invested in a child’s athletic promise, but the hearts of nerd parents beat hard – maybe harder than they should – when we see teenagers choosing to spend nights and weekends working through data, building narratives with evidence, and reveling in brainiac collaboration.

Now, there is an obvious disadvantage to having razor-sharp teens in a house with aging parents who would take our ginkgo if we remembered where we put it. But it’s easy to love mock trial’s focus on heads, not hormonal bodies. And there’s something a little charming about seeing teenagers dressed in the clothes of adults.

But that’s also where it starts to get weird for me.  The boys’ suits, with too-broad shoulder pads and strangling ties, and the girls’ body-conscious tops and jackets and skirts, often paired with viciously high heels, look like grown-up drag. They reveal an uncomfortable truth about our costumes of power: choked men and hobbled women.

At the regional competition here in South Bend, I walked along Main Street behind my daughter’s power-suited team as they took a break between trials, and in a passing car bumper-stickered with peace slogans, I caught a look of disdain from a tousled-haired woman who looked a lot like me; my guess is that she thought she saw gang of striving, junior John Birchers with me as the den mother.  No, no! I wanted to shout – it’s not what you think!  They’re just acting, just practicing!  But practicing for what?

What does it mean: to think like a lawyer? In the best sense, it means to champion justice, to think through the implications of facts and claims.  An anthropologist friend reminds me that it’s important for kids to learn to speak the language of power.  I get that.  And who among us doesn’t value our legal protections?  But in the courtroom – both mock ones and real ones – often a narrow set of the most adversarial tools are rewarded.  Killer comebacks and linguistic entrapments score winning points.  And while these pitched battles of wits are impressive coming from accomplished teenagers, I suspect these are the legal tactics that perpetuate an argument culture that mostly keeps the same old people in power.  It’s true that the gender balance in high school mock trial is fairly equal – certainly more so than in still-male-dominated real court rooms.  But minority lawyers in both mock and actual courtrooms are depressingly scarce. Who speaks this language of power? Not everyone. Just look at our mostly white, mostly male, mostly contestatory Congress.  With the health care debate as exhibit A, it’s clear the adversarial tactics of those in power aren’t enough to cure what ails us.

In The Paper Chase, the romantic and altruistic lead is tellingly named Hart, and though he learns to think like a lawyer, he thinks like much more.  With Hart in mind as a model for our smart and still-tender high schoolers, I like to imagine our students being rewarded as much for learning a wider set of tools – including those of restorative justice.  Of mediation – and why not meditation?  If enough of us put our “skulls full of mush” together, surely we can offer something that honors hearts as much as minds.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on March 19, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
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