Paul Loriston, JD Anticipated May 2022, Law & Public Policy Scholar
One evening during my senior year of college I was catching up with friends from the old neighborhood and explaining what I was doing in college. It was in the middle of explaining these lofty concepts that I picked up while earning my degree in economics that I was struck by how little this degree had anything to do with my life. Not the life I was still working to piece together at the Predominantly White Institution (PWI) few hundred miles away, but the working class, black, immigrant life that would be forever stitched to my sense of self.
Once that realization hit, it stuck. Call me naïve, but I wanted to make a difference in the world – firms, capital, input, and output be damned. What use was a degree to me if I got fat eating at the table when the folks who raised me were left out in the cold? It was this realization, that shored up my resolve, and led me to hitch my future to a law degree. So, when I enrolled in law school, my expectations for the endeavor matched my wariness about losing my sense of purpose.
In my mind I was setting myself up for a struggle of epic proportions. So much for remembering humanity – or so I thought. When I enrolled in law school, I thought it would turn me into an absolute cynic; that I might not make it out with my values still. At Temple Law, I learned that it just wasn’t that deep. Of course, it would have been so easy to reduce the lives we read about in cases into passing references in outlines and exam answers. It would have been so easy to turn the law into a cold tool of analysis, embodying a view of the world John Adams termed as a “government of laws, and not of men.” The quote itself elicits a faint shudder of distaste even upon writing it down.
Disaster strikes whenever the law is applied seemingly outside of the context of real people and their lives. Whether it is the notorious “Three Strikes” laws that filled state and federal prisons with black and brown Americans, or “tough on crime” drug sentences that devastated poor, black, and brown communities at the end of the 20th century, a government of laws doesn’t usually bode well for marginalized folks. It would have been easy to only teach black letter law and ignore the very real effects of the law on humans.
That isn’t what I experienced at Temple Law. Professors intentionally foster a sense of the legal field as more than just a few theoretical arguments and hypotheticals thrown at students. Ethics, responsibility, and a sense of community are engrained in us from day one with the module-length Intro to Transactional Studies course. Par for course are mock trials and mock negotiations that push us to be the best lawyers we can be while teaching us to steer clear of ethical and moral shortfalls. We were challenged to step into a sense of responsibility for each other, for the Temple name, and for the legal profession and community in which we will practice. This sense of stewardship was further bolstered by my participation in the Law and Public Policy Program.
The Law and Public Policy Program offered me a sense of the world in which my law degree could be used as a means to an end greater than myself. For example, some of the most important lessons I learned as a Law and Public Policy Scholar revolved around an understanding of systems and institutions that are defunct without people: not units of production, not human capital – people. This understanding and context tied in well with the initial resolve that I had in coming to law school.
As part and parcel of the law school’s culture, the Law and Public Policy Program served as a reminder that the process we are engaged in as law students is inherently a creative one – that a law degree, inasmuch as it bestows upon its holders anything besides the license to tell cheesy doctor jokes, is a creative license. It’s up to us what we do with that. May we keep this in mind as continue to help shape our little corner of the world. Degree in tow and our community behind us, I’m sure we’ll be alright. After all, I am.