INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice Read Online Free PDF

the country. That summer, from my aerie on the forty-fifth floor with the commanding view of midtown Manhattan, I got my first taste of what “legitimate” success felt like --and it felt good. Plied with expensive food and name-brand liquor, I spent a summer wrestling with my identity as I shuttled between Wall Street, Broadway shows, and Yankee games. It’s not bad being treated like a king. And as it turned out, I didn’t mind making an ocean of money. But the vertiginous experience of being a bit player in the big world of commerce never quite sat right. Partly it was my insufferable lack of deference, partly it was my defiant streak, and partly it was just because, looking around the firm at my high-powered colleagues, with their sophisticated airs and entitled perspective, all I saw were slaves.
     
           In Discipline and Punish, the brilliant meditation on the history of penology, Michel Foucault suggests that the more advanced a society is, the more subtle the modes and means of penal control. If a summer at Dewey Ballantine showed me anything, it was just how controlling an advanced society like a law firm could be and how brilliantly, brutally subtle penal control could be. Almost every day, one or another of my bright-eyed colleagues would rush into my office detailing in a barely controlled whisper what partner had assigned what task to what associate, who had gone where, and whose fortunes were rising and whose were falling. It was as if we were back in junior high school, except that instead of gossiping about whether Nadjia Neherniak really made out with Mark Burnett, we spent every minute trying to ensure that no one else was making corporate inroads any faster or more effectively than anyone else. To keep tabs on this, summer associates spent an inordinate amount of energy considering how much “face time” was optimal --“face time” being time spent in the office irrespective of whether or not one had work to do.
     
           In between visits to client-subsidized shrimp bowls, Broadway shows, and box seats at ball games, I reflected on the meaning of the experience. I concluded that though it was undeniably tasty and lucrative, to me it was all lifestyle and no life.
     
           It was that realization that animated my stride in November of 1990 as I walked into the offices of the Criminal Defense Division of the Legal Aid Society of New York City and announced, with more confidence than I felt, that I was there for an interview.
     
           “Second or third?”
     
           The woman behind the desk glanced up for a fraction of a second, taking my measure with practiced disdain. The question completely puzzled me, and at first I wasn’t even sure what she was talking about.
     
           “There are three?” I asked, my too-cool-for-school laconic delivery quickly giving way to a more familiar boyhood schoolyard panic.
     
           “Yeah . . . three,” said the receptionist, not at all impressed with my performance so far. “Who did you interview with on campus?”
     
           “Ahhhh . . .” I stalled. “I don’t think you come to Wisconsin. I just sent in a letter and résumé and was told to show up today.”
     
           This unusual way of doing things seemed to flummox her, but after taking my name, motioning me to a chair, and muttering into a telephone for a few seconds, she managed to say what I’d hoped to hear at the beginning of our conversation: “Someone will be right with you.”
     
           The “someone” quickly morphed into four people, who led me into a nondescript room and mercilessly fired contentious questions at me for forty-five minutes. It was utterly unlike the law firm interviews, which seemed to be structured around the idea that no question was too stupid and no topic too inane to elicit a warm smile and a firm handshake. The people around the table (half of them in jeans) seemed to suggest that