Meeting with Prof

Ventured into The Square to their Aveda Salon for a routine trim. The woman who cut my hair is my age and a graduate of a regional art institute. She was nice and we got to talking... Her mom came from the town I graduate high school from. Freaky! The haircut was satisfactory and I scheduled another appointment for this Saturday to get some highlights in my hair.

After that, wandered for a few hours in downtown looking at different stores. Bought an umbrella with the school insignia, and walked home.

I started getting nervous about the meeting with my crim law prof about 30 minutes before I had to leave. The reasons I wanted to meet with him were not the most conducive to conversation. I have been increasingly confused by his class and the way he conducts his classes. He would ask questions such as "Is this fair?" "Should we abolish the felony murder rule?" "Should we just not punish criminals based on the often fortuitous events of the resulting harm?" "Should we allow a battered woman to claim self-defense when she killed her husband in his sleep?" and other similar questions on which I just have NO INTUITION. Other classmates seem to be able to just immediately come up with an answer or at least an argument, my mind would be a swirl of arguments and counterargument and counter-counter arguments... in short, a mess.

How does one develop legal intuitions? And WHY is he asking us all these questions? Why does it matter what we think? Is he really just interested in having us rattle off predicable and often cliched arguments from both sides? Is that all we were supposed to do? Were we not supposed to be learning about some meta-rule that would help us decide among competing values of social policy, economics, morality, psychology?!? Is all we need to do making adequate arguments?

Anyway. To calm myself, I drank some camomille tea and listened to soothing music on my iPod. I calmed down gradually as I walked towards his office, and then --

The meeting went well. I won't go into details for fear of boring you (as if I haven't already done so with the previous paragraphs. :) ) but suffice to say that he was very friendly, very reassuring, very complimentary, even, certainly not awkward or strange. But, he didn't say anything terribly useful, nothing that I hadn't heard before, I guess, and the gist of his argument was just that I was doing fine, I was doing great, I was giving good comments in class, I should relax, and those legal intuitions will come to me sooner or later, and that any rate, the law is not a place to look for normative judgments. It looks to other discipline, such as sociology, or economics, to supply it with the empirical data to decide on the normative arguments. The law, said my prof, is a very "parasitic" discipline.

(And no, he is not talking about lawyers.)

On some level, I was strongly reminded of a similar conversation I had with another one of my professors, MR, when I was a freshman in college. At the time I was very distrubed, even distraught, about the possibility that there may not be an objective truth in philosophy. Yes, I know, how young I was!

As I left Professor M's office today, I thought to myself: how little I've come in 8 years! I am still troubled by the same things and never got over the lack of answers in some questions! I think I even said some of the exact same things as I did 8 years ago.

On a whim, I looked up MR. He had left my undergraduate college after my freshman year, supposedly to work at a vineyard in California. He remains one of my favorite professors in college, and I always wanted to write him a note to let him know how much I enjoyed his class and ow much influence he's had on me.

Google is awesome. In under 2 minutes, I found that MR is working now for a Canadian private girl's school, teaching Latin and philosophy.

Perhaps I should drop him an email, just to say hi...?