the law school class that changed my life.
or, how i learned to embrace being a feminist
🎶 Fly Me to the Moon - Claire Littley (Neon Genesis Evangelion ED)​
Viva Las Vegas! I'm heading to the other city that never sleeps this week for the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) Convention. I haven't hung out with a large group of lawyers in, well, months. Come say hi if you see me! I've been to NAPABA a few times now, and I can honestly say it's one of the funnest conferences that I have ever had the pleasure of attending. I can't even imagine what having it in Vegas will be like...!
But before we fly out--this week, I reflect on the one law school class that completely changed my thinking (and my life!). See you on the Strip!
feminism made me feel unsafe.
If you had asked me during my college graduation what I thought I would be doing in law school, I would have responded: "Learning the law, of course." It didn't even occur to me that law school could be for anything else. All post-graduate studies seemed obvious to me at the time--one learned about business in business school, medicine in medical school, and law in law school. Duh.
And for the first year of law school, I was exactly right. From the core 1L curriculum, I learned in Torts that negligence was the most common civil claim and required a showing of injury, duty, breach, and causation; I learned in Civil Procedure that there was a literal book of rules that lawyers had to follow when practicing in federal court (and individual judges can even set specific rules about things like fonts and text spacing); and I learned from the other panicked 1Ls that there was a property rule called the "rule against perpetuities" that my own property professor, thankfully, did not cover.
And I loved learning the rules. I loved Big Brother. In the same way that knowing the dress code at events made me feel safer attending, learning the legal rules made me feel safer in a strange and scary world. I wanted desperately to know that as long as I knew the rules, as long as I followed the rules, then I would be safe. So I studied the cases and attendant rules with a fervor that can only be attributed to one studying as if their life depended on it--because it felt exactly like my life depended on it.
Then came Feminist Legal Theory. It wasn't a class that had been on my radar at all, to be frank, but after Nathaniel and I started dating, he encouraged me to look into the class. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but he had a better feel for who I actually was than I did, primarily due to the greater objectivity of third-party perspective and my own ongoing myopic obsession with whom I should be. In my mission for safety, I had tamped down many curiosities, pleasures, and instincts over the years. Sure, I experienced humiliation and pain less often than some of my friends did, but I also was never that excited about the happenings in my life--people whom I dated, the "black letter law" classes that I overwhelmingly enrolled in (e.g., Corporations, Taxation), the professors and lawyers whom I met as part of what I felt was obligatory networking.
Whereas most of my previous courses focused 90% on what the law was and 10% on what it could be, Feminist Legal Theory focused 100% of its time and efforts on the latter. I mean, the name really says it all--it was all theory, and case studies were only introduced as a means of evaluating the theories. By contrast, many black letter law courses rely on teaching case after case after case, only to briefly touch upon theory at the very end of the semester. The idea, I think, is to build your foundation brick by brick and then step back to take stock of what you had built, but the reality of that method meant I often laid bricks unevenly and with edges sticking out because I had absolutely no conception of what the blueprint was. When I stepped back, I had only a vague sense of what I was looking at, like the poorly restored Ecce Homo.
By focusing primarily on theory, Feminist Legal Theory challenged all of the rules that I had painstakingly learned and clung onto in life. I had eschewed the label of "feminist" in college, finding the loud bra burners whom I associated feminism with in my mind to be distasteful and anti-feminine. In class, I learned that this type of "lumping in" all feminists with one portrayal of feminism was "essentialism," the idea that there's a monolithic version of an identity. Professor Angela P. Harris described at length in her law review article, "Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory," the allure of essentialism. Essentialism is intellectually easy--it is always easier to assume that your own experiences or conception of something is representative of the thing, whereas going out into the world to discover others' experiences takes time and effort. Essentialism presents emotional safety, as well, and simplifying categories are necessary for cognitive reasons, even if the unifying experience helps organize some women at the cost of denying other women's experiences. With horror, I realized that was me--a denier of other women's experiences.
This idea that I had been flattening everything in life--myself, my goals, my views of others--shocked me. I knew I was many things, but I had never considered the prospect that I might have been intellectually lazy, of all things. But the very things I craved--knowledge, certainty, rules--lent themselves easily to essentialism on every level. In another life, I am most certainly railing against intersectionality in a gross misinterpretation of Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw's writings. But in this life, I am glad that I put down my Ayn Rand and realized that the world was large enough for me to call myself a feminist, after all.
🔖 open tabs
​The Supreme Court holds oral arguments on affirmative action. I'll be diving into all of my feelings on these affirmative action cases in this week's upcoming podcast episode. As an Asian American with parents who actively campaigned against affirmative action in California, I feel some type of way about the proceedings. Stay tuned...
Because I've been knee-deep in meetings with publishers about my book proposal recently, I've read up a lot on the Penguin Random House antitrust trial and what it revealed about the modern publishing market. (And yesterday, Judge Florence Y. Pan issued her order in the trial, blocking the proposed merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.) As I've progressed more in the process myself, I'm struck by how much publishing a book is like launching a startup--it's a lot more about alignment of vision than it is about good craftsmanship, most books/startups are not profitable, and no one really knows what makes for success (which is a bummer! I want the certainty).
I'll be speaking on a panel on Thursday at 2:30pm at the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) Convention! The panel is a part of the Women's Leadership Network programming on women APA influencers and power brokers. Come say hi if you are also in attendance! I'll be around all weekend.
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