Law on Rice

I’ve been listening to a lot of Gerry Spence’s audiobook on my iPhone lately.

Of course, my professors do a pretty good job of going beyond the black letter rules to talk about “what’s right” or “what’s wrong” with the law. I do go to a social justice school, after all. But Spence is a lawyer who has lived and breathed “justice” in a way that I have yet to. I’ve spent most of my professional career either sitting a classroom, or sitting in a comfy office chair just thinking about things, but not feeling a lot.

Spence tells me that “justice is a feeling.” Relying on Gerry makes a lot more intuitive sense to me than dusting off my old copies of Plato’s Republic. He says how can you know what it’s like to be a paraplegic victim of a car accident until you’ve lived with the man for at least 24 hours? How can you feel injustice if you haven’t spent at least 24 hours in the jail cell where your innocent client sleeps? He warns that lawyers are bookish by trade and by habit.

At first blush, it seems easy to dismiss Spence–he’s dealing with concrete, easy to recognize issues. So how can I do this with my work as a law clerk… with, say, patent law? I gave this a lot of thought on the bus ride home from the office last night. It turns out to not be that hard.

After all, justice for innovators is pretty simple too: our country promises innovators that they will be rewarded for their innovation. Indeed, the way the patent laws are written, there is an outright presumption that they’ll be rewarded. But too often, that promise is illusory–justice in this context is denied.

So, when a client looks at me, and says “can this be patented,” I can feel the uncertainty in their question. Despite their hard work, they aren’t sure if they get the benefit of what our country promised them. I can feel the irritation in myself when I see an office action from the patent office that seems poorly reasoned. A sloppy, careless, or poorly reasoned response was not what we promised them.

So, yeah, I’m starting to get it.