Letters to a Young Lawyer (free sample)

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COPYRIGHT
Letters to a Young Lawyer by Alan Dershowitz. Copyright 2001 by Alan Dershowitz
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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Introduction

Giving advice is among the most hazardous of undertakings. I know because I have received much bad advice and because I have almost certainly given some. During the thirty-seven years I have been teaching law at Harvard, I have probably been asked for advice thousands of times.

Most advice turns out to be a series of instructions about how to become the person who is giving the advice. People seem to have a powerful need to re-create themselves (perhaps that�'s why we worry so much about cloning). I recall vividly being told by one of my mentors, a distinguished professor, the order in which I should publish several writings I was then contemplating. It soon became clear that he was merely recounting his own publishing biography. He wanted me to become him, just as several of my other mentors wanted me to be them. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, for whom I clerked, was always giving me career advice directed toward me becoming a judge--a position to which I did not aspire. Professor Joseph Goldstein, who was my mentor at law school, pressed me to limit myself to academic and theoretical work--but I loved having one foot in the hurly-burly world of practical law and politics.

I believe strongly that imitation is not the highest form of flattery, because truly unique individuals can never be imitated. But you can learn from them, so long as you realize that you are a different person, with your own dreams, backgrounds and priorities. Understand the differences and extrapolate from their experiences and aspirations to your own unique life.

Be careful, however, about accepting anyone�'s advice--including my own--on the basis of "years of experience." Before you put too much stock in experience, make sure the person offering the advice has learned from his or her own experiences. Most people don�'t. They simply repeat their mistakes, over and over again. Their "years of experience" are little more than years of making the same mistakes over and over again without realizing that they are mistakes.

It�'s particularly difficult to know as a lawyer whether you�'ve made mistakes, since there is little correlation between a job well done and a successful outcome. There are simply too many variables at play.

I recall as a young lawyer reading an appellate brief written by an "experienced" lawyer. It contained a section that was anachronistic, citing lines of cases that had been either overruled or disregarded. Moreover, it was poorly argued and even more poorly written. Since he was representing my client�'s co-defendant, I pressed him about why he had included that section. He told me that he always included that section in every appeal that raised Fourth Amendment issues. "It�'s based on experience," he assured me. "I�'ve been citing that section for twenty years." I asked him if he had ever won a case based on that section. He paused, thought for a moment, and said "No, not yet." Recently I read another brief by this now elderly lawyer. It contained the same section. He had not learned a thing from his years of mistakes. That kind of experience you can do without.

Also, beware of "wholesale," "off-the-rack" or "one-size-fits-all" advice. The best advice is always retail, custom-made and particular to the person seeking it. Yet there are some general principles that may prove useful so long as they are supplemented by retail advice specific to you.