Thank goodness for blog readers. You people keep me inspired.
When I first posted about my predicament, Scheherazade Fowler responded immediately with a thoughtful email about how to act as an advocate, how to adopt my client's voice and concentrate on my client's needs. She also posted to her blog.
Following her advice, I started thinking of myself as the police detective in this case, rather than an outsider.
"You're not yourself," I lectured myself. "You're a police detective, trying to solve a murder, and unsure and unable to guess how old this kid is. You want to solve a murder, not intimidate a kid. You didn't know he would spill the beans. You were nice to him!"
It sounds silly when I write it, but it helped and it's how I started. I made myself into somebody I wasn't, somebody who didn't give the 17-year-old his Miranda rights, but thought it was okay.
Then I thought about what J Strizzy had to say, about how I should view this as practice for standing up to a judge with her mind already made up. She's right. I have to persuade my moot court professor, a supposedly impartial adjudicator who in reality is already decided on this case.
Finally I thought about what everybody else had said: This is practice. It's supposed to be hard. It isn't easy.
I got fired up.
I pored through the evidence we had, and read all the cases on point that I could find. I found law review articles that were related. I reread the cases, highlighter and sticky tabs ready. WestLaw feared my queries.
Slowly, it came together.
I don't think it's the most persuasive piece of writing I've ever done, or the most well-crafted. It's not going to win the moot court writing contest. However, I think it's the first serious piece of writing I've done where I argued for a side that was completely at odds with where I started. I advocated.
3 comments:
This is exactly the type of mental activity I enjoy but rarely get to experience. I write code, so thinking about the wrong way to do something and advocating for it never crosses my mind (For example, I can't imagine trying to advocate for using global arrays to store variable data in a multithreaded program). In engineering everything is so cut and dried, it’s either right and good or wrong and bad. Can't wait to wrap my mind around some gray area material and step outside my skin for a bit.
You GO, girl! Advocate the piss out of 'em!
Andrea -- thanks. :)
Chris -- I think you'll like it. Very different from coding, and a little strange at first, but a great feeling when it is done.
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