Drop Everything and Emulate
posted by Mark Edwards
My kids’ school had a program called “Drop Everything and Read.” The idea was that no matter what else was on the agenda, every once in a while the kids just stopped what they were doing and made time to actually read (I told my kids that in my rough school, I followed a program called Drop Everything and Run). The point was to prevent them from losing sight, amid the constant hustle and bustle of school, of the joy of learning and storytelling.
Law students often lose sight, amid the alternating grind and panic, of what they might be able to do with a law degree some day. I like to think we’re training them to be wise counselors, people to whom others turn for guidance when the going gets rough. But how do we show them that?
It seems to me that it’s worthwhile, every now and then, to drop everything and talk about some ordinary lawyer who, when history conspired to give them a choice between trying to help people who needed it, and turning away, chose to try. I think of it as “Drop Everything and Emulate.”
The criteria are that the lawyer must be either someone they’ve never heard of who tried like hell to help when needed, or someone who did great things, whom they never realized was a lawyer. And, there must be a tie-in with whatever we are studying at the time.
Last year, I chose the the 75th anniversary of the ‘Reichstag Fire’ Decree of February 28, 1933, to introduce my students to a lawyer named Hans Litten. We were studying zoning and takings at the time. Here’s what I told my students:
Under the February 28th decree, the Nazis declared, among other things, that searches could be made in peoples’ homes without a warrant, and property could be taken without compensation or redress in the courts.
Once property could be taken without compensation, people could be forced to live in particular zones based on their political viewpoint, or race, or religion, or sexual orientation.
Within 3 weeks of the decree, the Nazis opened a new ‘camp’ to hold people arrested and dispossessed of their property. It was in a town called Dachau. Eventually thousands died there. Eventually millions would die elsewhere, in camps and ghettos across Europe. That’s what takings and zoning can be about.
Back to Hans Litten: he was one of the first four people arrested under the decree, on the night of the 28th. Why did they arrest Litten, and why so soon? Because they feared him, this guy who looks like Harry Potter at recess. Why?
He was a lawyer, and before he even turned 30, he had decided to fight Nazism with the law. How? When the brown shirts attacked innocents, he sued them and the people putting them up to it. At the age of 29, he put Adolph Hitler himself on the stand and cross-examined him. Can you imagine the courage?
The Nazis knew, if they were going to triumph over law, they were going to have to get rid of people like Litten. And not sometime down the road. First. Because he had learned how to use the law to seek justice. Like Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, when the worst illegally seize power, they know that first, they’d better kill the lawyers.
Litten wasn’t a superman; in fact, his whole sense of justice depended upon the idea that there was not a class of supermen and a class of ordinary men. He wasn’t perfect, he wasn’t a saint.
But he learned the law – he studied this sometimes boring crap to learn things like under what circumstances governments can decide who lives where – in order to learn how to ask for justice.
And, when history conspired to present him with that awful challenge, he found the courage to do it. Personally, I can only barely imagine it.
Litten was never tried, or even charged with a crime. He died in Dachau. But we remember him today.
So now, let’s honor him by taking our turn to learn.
November 5, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Posted in: Teaching
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Responses (2)
Peter - November 6, 2008 at 10:21 am
thanks. that’s a great post.
Mark Edwards - November 6, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Thanks!
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