Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2014 12:20 am
The Whys and Wherefores of a PunkLawyer
by Charles Carreon
June 12, 2014
Trademarkable
Today the lawyer formerly known as Charles Carreon discourses on the meaning of his PunkLawyer moniker. Let’s begin with important matters. Is this a mere descriptive label, or is it trademarkable? It’s trademarkable, because it’s definitely not descriptive. We know what people want when they ask for a tax lawyer, a divorce lawyer, or a criminal lawyer, but no one would know what you were asking for if you asked for a punk lawyer. So I’m right where I like it – defining myself according to my own inclinations. We can assume that a definition for “punk lawyer” will appear in Black’s Law Dictionary circa 2035, so if you can’t wait that long, read on.
An Original Strain
It’s night time on the freeway in 1986, coming off the summit of Grapevine pass, starting the descent into the LA basin, watching two streams of lights, red and white, flowing past. I am letting no cars get between me and the red lights of a blue and white 1961 Ford Econoline window van, piloted by my wife, packed with three kids and all our worldly possessions aside from those stowed in the 1965 Dodge pickup that I am driving with a rocking chair tied on top. I am on my way to start the semester at UCLA Law School. We have enough money for a couple months, and my wife plans to get a job as a legal secretary, something she has never done before. However, she types 90 words a minute without a mistake, comes from top cheekbones, and is 29 years old.
My wife immediately turned her employment aspiration into a reality, and began pulling more than her share of the weight economically. My transformation into an LA wage earner was much slower. Before I could be worth a dime, I need to make a big change in my mental infrastructure and outer appearance. I began the process of developing from a hippie into a lawyer. I had an inkling early on that it might be easier if I first became a punk.
Mutation by the Magic of Law
When a person goes to law school and works hard at it, they change every day. They change more than other people are changing. They are thrown in with other intelligent people and told to figure it out, to talk it out, to slug it out with words and proof. Day by day they absorb words and magic lore, words and magic lore that create and dissolve the bonds of social relationships. Marriage, divorce, business relations, employment, crime, accidents, all are regulated by codes that overlap and interact, and are controlled by invocations of magic words in legal ceremonies.
We are learning magic words and lore not to be repositories of information, but to practice law, which is magic. To practice law means to do law. A judge does law by deciding cases and issuing orders. An advocate does law by arguing one side of the case. The other advocate does law by arguing the other side of the case. You need three years of special education and a license that they don’t give out very generously before you are allowed to do law. When you have the license, you are allowed to do magical acts.
Every practicing US lawyer practices magic in two ways — by creating legal relationships through legal ceremonies, or by petitioning the courts to alter legal relationships in a litigation ceremony. Most legal ceremonies create legal documents that provide evidence of what ceremony was performed. Marriage licenses, incorporation documents, jury summonses, subpoenas, all these documents are notices that the ceremonies have begun, or are being conducted, or have concluded. Magical acts can be undone, because they are merely conceptual. Magical acts need not conform to reality. The innocent can be adjudged guilty, and regularly are. The guilty can be acquitted, and regularly are. The irrationality of a judgment is in most cases, no basis upon which to attack it. The courts could order that a dead man be brought back to life, but only if it were persuaded that there was some likelihood of the order being obeyed.
Crystallization of the Punk Mindset
Understanding how the courts worked did not excite my interest to work in them. Courts are places filled with dread anticipation. Places where final outcomes are generated by the ream cannot be fun places. Arguments, hearings, decisions, orders, judgments, sentences, appeals. Not one of those words conjures a happy thought, like “iced gelato” or “cold lemonade.”
So my wife sent me off to law school every day, and she went off to work in the litigation offices of Century City. The first day I went, I was an Oregon hippie so fresh from the piney woods that my classmates secretly called me Johnny Appleseed. The day I left, I was an extremely confused, terrified person facing a qualifying exam, the California Bar, that had a less than 40% pass rate for first timers. Second timer pass rates dropped to 28%, I recall. Odds said, if you didn’t pass the first time, you might not pass until the third or fourth time, or never. I was about $60,000 in debt, so failing that bar exam was not an option. This is the type of pressure that crystallizes a punk out of a hippie. I never took punk for a license to hate anyone, but I did take it for permission to hate stupid bullshit standing in my way. And fear was the first thing standing in my way.
I needed to getaway from that crazy scene at the law school. Heads were baking in that library, arteries were pulsing close to the bursting point. A motorcycle is the remedy for all of that. With a motorcycle, there is no one next to you for long. You can always get to the head of the line. In LA, lane splitting is legal, so arrival by motorcycle was much swifter than anything I could pull off in a four-wheeled vehicle. In exchange for risking my life, I was allowed to leave my fellow Angelenos ensnared in the bowels of the permanent traffic jam that is LA. Riding downhill out of the scoops and dips of Sunset Boulevard, it was something like liberation rounding the last cure to where it opens onto Pacific Coast Highway. The cool wind blows up the canyon like a chimney, you can see the sky meet the sea, you can taste something truly delicious, evanescent yet settling in around you like the bright diffuse light that scours the beachfront boulevards.
Self-Indoctrination as Preparation for Practice
From pressure come insights. Preparing for the bar exam creates pressure, and it causes people to have insights, to make transformative jumps in how they think, analyze, and produce legal effects. When I rode my motorcycle down to the sea, I’d do the rote memorization work that is required to pass the bar exam. I didn’t know that I was indoctrinating myself in the Anglo-American concept of justice, but I was. I was learning to give the right answers to legal questions – with the magic words! For example: What is a contract? It’s “a binding legal obligation arising from mutual agreement to reasonably specific terms that manifests an intent to be presently bound to those terms.” Every word of this answer is significant, provides the code for cracking contract questions, and is the first bit of knowledge you need to get the highest possible grade on a law school essay exam.
The anvil on which the law is pounded out is the human mind. There may be a way of learning law without getting all pumped up, but I never discovered it. Since I had to inhale all of these meanings and concepts, I found it easier to do with a dose of loud punk rock to overcome the mental noise in my head that wanted to do things other than become legally educated. The aggression in the punk rock turned into aggression against my resistant self, and so I developed an inner punk who dominated my slacker self and educated me while hijacking my identity.
Seeking and Gaining Power in the Arbitrary Realm of Magic
The law punk that I became was at first like a comet, a formless cloud having speed and direction, crashing into experiences, absorbing impacts, gradually accumulating enough mass to start taking shape. I came hurtling out of law school, smoked the bar exam on the first try, and hit the big corporate-firms like a bullet hitting a pot of quantum glue. I came hurtling out the other side three years later, having made the world safe for the wealthy in a number of trivial ways, and feeling the urgent need to collide with some legal issues worth giving a shit about. I found it with three hardcore trial lawyers in Century City intent on suing the crap out of deep pocket defendants and making as many millions as they could lay their hands on. They were busier than warlords in Somalia, and ready to teach me the magical arts if I was ready to learn some actual wizardry.
If you don’t think I mean wizardry, and I’m just being metaphorical, read my lips. Lawyers do almost the only magic worthy of the name, and it requires secret words, magical gestures, and knowing how to influence the hidden forces that control the outcome of human events. Doctors are often called gods, but they heal by the rules of science, knowable to all. Lawyers change reality with the stroke of a pen, and the rules by which they play are known only to the Supreme Court.
Practicing law means making changes in the fabric of human relations. You take a deposition, and reveal the witness for a liar. The case has changed. The witness has been defanged and presents no further danger to the case. Every minute you work at practicing trial law, you are either subverting or countering your adversary’s plans, or you are advancing your own.
The dynamics of law practice cannot be varied to accommodate human sentiment. While we can be humane and decent when we practice law, we cannot be soft to be nice. When our client is relying on us, and is in the right, we have to press their advantage. Legal ceremonies like trials can impose unfair consequences like prison sentences and civil judgments for reasons that are essentially arbitrary. When legal ceremonies are conducted, results can be controlled only by a skilled magician.
A Punk Approach to Accomplishment
The punk music revolution began with a refusal to accept that playing music was beyond the ability of anyone who wanted to play music, and the desire to discover for yourself just what type of music to play. What did we get? We got everything, from impossibly bad to impossibly good, from truly meaningful to utterly ridiculous, from really tight and awesome to hilariously loose and delightful, from industrial nihilism to psychedelic power anthems. We got musicians who made themselves like natural forms arise in nature, organically, from interior desire, assuming unique shapes true to their inner impulse. Punks treated their instruments as vehicles for expression of present creative impulse, not as tools for reproducing past works. They considered their grasp of the instrument sufficient when they were able to express themselves and were understood by their audience. It might not be perfect. It might not be exactly right. But it was done, and on a day when otherwise nothing would have gotten done, it was meaningful.
So punk says it is more important to get the thing done than to do it just like everybody says you should do it. It’s more worth it to do something if you do it your way, even if other people may question whether your way is legit. Punk says you have to pick up the tools of the trade and make them your own.
A Punk Approach to Practicing Law
Our legal system was designed by some people who were pretty punk. They eventually got so punk they told the King to take his Redcoats back to England and ship his Teutonic mercenaries back to their feudal warlords. The Founding Punks ignored those who said they couldn’t beat the King’s well-organized armies, and used the available military hardware well enough to win independence from the crown. When they wrote a Constitution, the more punk among them demanded more magic words to protect them from the new government, and got a Bill of Rights that has been a document dear to punks ever since.
Thanks to all the big talk in that Bill of Rights, African people who were brought here as slaves were eventually able to demand freedom. Since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, more freedoms have been hammered out on the backs of the children of the slaves, making them very important Americans, whose involuntary contributions to our country’s jurisprudence are still being denied. Although the Fourteenth Amendment has been corrupted to provide way too many rights for corporations and their goons, the principles of due process and equal protection are core punk legal principles that every punk lawyer must understand and be ready to apply to protect his clients from injustice.
The practice of law affects human lives. A punk approach to practicing law means remembering that law must serve the people, which it only does when lawyers keep in mind the larger purpose in their work, which is to make life liveable for ordinary people in society. It means keeping it simple, playing it straight, having an approach to the issues that regular people can understand, and doing your best to get the job done. A punk lawyer knows that his clients are looking to him for hope, and if he gives them hope, he has to try his best to deliver the goods. To achieve that goal, he will use every available tool.
by Charles Carreon
June 12, 2014
Trademarkable
Today the lawyer formerly known as Charles Carreon discourses on the meaning of his PunkLawyer moniker. Let’s begin with important matters. Is this a mere descriptive label, or is it trademarkable? It’s trademarkable, because it’s definitely not descriptive. We know what people want when they ask for a tax lawyer, a divorce lawyer, or a criminal lawyer, but no one would know what you were asking for if you asked for a punk lawyer. So I’m right where I like it – defining myself according to my own inclinations. We can assume that a definition for “punk lawyer” will appear in Black’s Law Dictionary circa 2035, so if you can’t wait that long, read on.
An Original Strain
It’s night time on the freeway in 1986, coming off the summit of Grapevine pass, starting the descent into the LA basin, watching two streams of lights, red and white, flowing past. I am letting no cars get between me and the red lights of a blue and white 1961 Ford Econoline window van, piloted by my wife, packed with three kids and all our worldly possessions aside from those stowed in the 1965 Dodge pickup that I am driving with a rocking chair tied on top. I am on my way to start the semester at UCLA Law School. We have enough money for a couple months, and my wife plans to get a job as a legal secretary, something she has never done before. However, she types 90 words a minute without a mistake, comes from top cheekbones, and is 29 years old.
My wife immediately turned her employment aspiration into a reality, and began pulling more than her share of the weight economically. My transformation into an LA wage earner was much slower. Before I could be worth a dime, I need to make a big change in my mental infrastructure and outer appearance. I began the process of developing from a hippie into a lawyer. I had an inkling early on that it might be easier if I first became a punk.
Mutation by the Magic of Law
When a person goes to law school and works hard at it, they change every day. They change more than other people are changing. They are thrown in with other intelligent people and told to figure it out, to talk it out, to slug it out with words and proof. Day by day they absorb words and magic lore, words and magic lore that create and dissolve the bonds of social relationships. Marriage, divorce, business relations, employment, crime, accidents, all are regulated by codes that overlap and interact, and are controlled by invocations of magic words in legal ceremonies.
We are learning magic words and lore not to be repositories of information, but to practice law, which is magic. To practice law means to do law. A judge does law by deciding cases and issuing orders. An advocate does law by arguing one side of the case. The other advocate does law by arguing the other side of the case. You need three years of special education and a license that they don’t give out very generously before you are allowed to do law. When you have the license, you are allowed to do magical acts.
Every practicing US lawyer practices magic in two ways — by creating legal relationships through legal ceremonies, or by petitioning the courts to alter legal relationships in a litigation ceremony. Most legal ceremonies create legal documents that provide evidence of what ceremony was performed. Marriage licenses, incorporation documents, jury summonses, subpoenas, all these documents are notices that the ceremonies have begun, or are being conducted, or have concluded. Magical acts can be undone, because they are merely conceptual. Magical acts need not conform to reality. The innocent can be adjudged guilty, and regularly are. The guilty can be acquitted, and regularly are. The irrationality of a judgment is in most cases, no basis upon which to attack it. The courts could order that a dead man be brought back to life, but only if it were persuaded that there was some likelihood of the order being obeyed.
Crystallization of the Punk Mindset
Understanding how the courts worked did not excite my interest to work in them. Courts are places filled with dread anticipation. Places where final outcomes are generated by the ream cannot be fun places. Arguments, hearings, decisions, orders, judgments, sentences, appeals. Not one of those words conjures a happy thought, like “iced gelato” or “cold lemonade.”
So my wife sent me off to law school every day, and she went off to work in the litigation offices of Century City. The first day I went, I was an Oregon hippie so fresh from the piney woods that my classmates secretly called me Johnny Appleseed. The day I left, I was an extremely confused, terrified person facing a qualifying exam, the California Bar, that had a less than 40% pass rate for first timers. Second timer pass rates dropped to 28%, I recall. Odds said, if you didn’t pass the first time, you might not pass until the third or fourth time, or never. I was about $60,000 in debt, so failing that bar exam was not an option. This is the type of pressure that crystallizes a punk out of a hippie. I never took punk for a license to hate anyone, but I did take it for permission to hate stupid bullshit standing in my way. And fear was the first thing standing in my way.
I needed to getaway from that crazy scene at the law school. Heads were baking in that library, arteries were pulsing close to the bursting point. A motorcycle is the remedy for all of that. With a motorcycle, there is no one next to you for long. You can always get to the head of the line. In LA, lane splitting is legal, so arrival by motorcycle was much swifter than anything I could pull off in a four-wheeled vehicle. In exchange for risking my life, I was allowed to leave my fellow Angelenos ensnared in the bowels of the permanent traffic jam that is LA. Riding downhill out of the scoops and dips of Sunset Boulevard, it was something like liberation rounding the last cure to where it opens onto Pacific Coast Highway. The cool wind blows up the canyon like a chimney, you can see the sky meet the sea, you can taste something truly delicious, evanescent yet settling in around you like the bright diffuse light that scours the beachfront boulevards.
Self-Indoctrination as Preparation for Practice
From pressure come insights. Preparing for the bar exam creates pressure, and it causes people to have insights, to make transformative jumps in how they think, analyze, and produce legal effects. When I rode my motorcycle down to the sea, I’d do the rote memorization work that is required to pass the bar exam. I didn’t know that I was indoctrinating myself in the Anglo-American concept of justice, but I was. I was learning to give the right answers to legal questions – with the magic words! For example: What is a contract? It’s “a binding legal obligation arising from mutual agreement to reasonably specific terms that manifests an intent to be presently bound to those terms.” Every word of this answer is significant, provides the code for cracking contract questions, and is the first bit of knowledge you need to get the highest possible grade on a law school essay exam.
The anvil on which the law is pounded out is the human mind. There may be a way of learning law without getting all pumped up, but I never discovered it. Since I had to inhale all of these meanings and concepts, I found it easier to do with a dose of loud punk rock to overcome the mental noise in my head that wanted to do things other than become legally educated. The aggression in the punk rock turned into aggression against my resistant self, and so I developed an inner punk who dominated my slacker self and educated me while hijacking my identity.
Seeking and Gaining Power in the Arbitrary Realm of Magic
The law punk that I became was at first like a comet, a formless cloud having speed and direction, crashing into experiences, absorbing impacts, gradually accumulating enough mass to start taking shape. I came hurtling out of law school, smoked the bar exam on the first try, and hit the big corporate-firms like a bullet hitting a pot of quantum glue. I came hurtling out the other side three years later, having made the world safe for the wealthy in a number of trivial ways, and feeling the urgent need to collide with some legal issues worth giving a shit about. I found it with three hardcore trial lawyers in Century City intent on suing the crap out of deep pocket defendants and making as many millions as they could lay their hands on. They were busier than warlords in Somalia, and ready to teach me the magical arts if I was ready to learn some actual wizardry.
If you don’t think I mean wizardry, and I’m just being metaphorical, read my lips. Lawyers do almost the only magic worthy of the name, and it requires secret words, magical gestures, and knowing how to influence the hidden forces that control the outcome of human events. Doctors are often called gods, but they heal by the rules of science, knowable to all. Lawyers change reality with the stroke of a pen, and the rules by which they play are known only to the Supreme Court.
Practicing law means making changes in the fabric of human relations. You take a deposition, and reveal the witness for a liar. The case has changed. The witness has been defanged and presents no further danger to the case. Every minute you work at practicing trial law, you are either subverting or countering your adversary’s plans, or you are advancing your own.
The dynamics of law practice cannot be varied to accommodate human sentiment. While we can be humane and decent when we practice law, we cannot be soft to be nice. When our client is relying on us, and is in the right, we have to press their advantage. Legal ceremonies like trials can impose unfair consequences like prison sentences and civil judgments for reasons that are essentially arbitrary. When legal ceremonies are conducted, results can be controlled only by a skilled magician.
A Punk Approach to Accomplishment
The punk music revolution began with a refusal to accept that playing music was beyond the ability of anyone who wanted to play music, and the desire to discover for yourself just what type of music to play. What did we get? We got everything, from impossibly bad to impossibly good, from truly meaningful to utterly ridiculous, from really tight and awesome to hilariously loose and delightful, from industrial nihilism to psychedelic power anthems. We got musicians who made themselves like natural forms arise in nature, organically, from interior desire, assuming unique shapes true to their inner impulse. Punks treated their instruments as vehicles for expression of present creative impulse, not as tools for reproducing past works. They considered their grasp of the instrument sufficient when they were able to express themselves and were understood by their audience. It might not be perfect. It might not be exactly right. But it was done, and on a day when otherwise nothing would have gotten done, it was meaningful.
So punk says it is more important to get the thing done than to do it just like everybody says you should do it. It’s more worth it to do something if you do it your way, even if other people may question whether your way is legit. Punk says you have to pick up the tools of the trade and make them your own.
A Punk Approach to Practicing Law
Our legal system was designed by some people who were pretty punk. They eventually got so punk they told the King to take his Redcoats back to England and ship his Teutonic mercenaries back to their feudal warlords. The Founding Punks ignored those who said they couldn’t beat the King’s well-organized armies, and used the available military hardware well enough to win independence from the crown. When they wrote a Constitution, the more punk among them demanded more magic words to protect them from the new government, and got a Bill of Rights that has been a document dear to punks ever since.
Thanks to all the big talk in that Bill of Rights, African people who were brought here as slaves were eventually able to demand freedom. Since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, more freedoms have been hammered out on the backs of the children of the slaves, making them very important Americans, whose involuntary contributions to our country’s jurisprudence are still being denied. Although the Fourteenth Amendment has been corrupted to provide way too many rights for corporations and their goons, the principles of due process and equal protection are core punk legal principles that every punk lawyer must understand and be ready to apply to protect his clients from injustice.
The practice of law affects human lives. A punk approach to practicing law means remembering that law must serve the people, which it only does when lawyers keep in mind the larger purpose in their work, which is to make life liveable for ordinary people in society. It means keeping it simple, playing it straight, having an approach to the issues that regular people can understand, and doing your best to get the job done. A punk lawyer knows that his clients are looking to him for hope, and if he gives them hope, he has to try his best to deliver the goods. To achieve that goal, he will use every available tool.