I sat down with my law school’s career development alumni liaison (or whatever fancy title they use) this past week. She was friendly, she tried to be as helpful as possible, and (to be fair) she did give me some good ideas about my job search.
This post is not about that.
During the course of our conversation she asked me why I enrolled in law school, why I wanted to become a lawyer. I was reminded of a similar question Brian Tannebaum had asked on his blog that I tried answering while still in school.
Back then, I really didn’t know why, other than having some vague notion of wanting to help people. I saw friends and family get screwed over in ways that could easily have been avoided with the help of someone with legal knowledge and experience, and I thought that I’d like to be that someone for them.
Fortunately, all of these situations were civil matters, so I was thinking solely of practicing civilly.
Since then, however, I have become more and more interested in criminal defense work. Scott Greenfield, Mark Bennett, and Brian Tannebaum were probably the initial catalysts for this change when I started following them on twitter and reading their blawgs.
Every so often news items like these come up and highlight exactly how crucial criminal defense lawyers are in our judiciary.
Then I started interning at the Office of the Public Defenders and I have been loving the hell out of that.
When I gave the career development woman my bland answer about helping people, she called me on it; there are many ways to help people, why a lawyer?
It sounded cheesy in my mind when I said it and it sounds even cheesier now that I’m writing it down, but my answer to her was that I believe in criminal defense.
That’s why.
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