Description
Book SynopsisThe professional discontent of lawyers in contemporary society is introduced via an account of the long friendship of Ezra Pound and Archibald MacLeish; then the authors suggest how critical legal theory might advance both legal thinking and the impoverished intellectual/ creative lives of lawyers.
Trade Review“Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado offer an innovative approach to integrating a great career in the law with an examined, moral life. The authors make profound connections between law and literature, scholarship and practice, and the personal and the political. The book is an exciting combination of a self-help manual and cutting-edge scholarship. Stefancic and Delgado write with the insight and creativity that they will certainly inspire in lawyers and others who choose careers hoping both to live well and to do some good in this world.”—Paul Butler, George Washington University Law School
“Through the correspondence between the poet-lawyer-statesman Archibald MacLeish and the poet–modernist master Ezra Pound, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado brilliantly give expression to one of American law’s central metaphors: our lawyers who have lost their way.”—Lawrence Joseph, St. John’s University School of Law and author of
Before Our Eyes, a book of poetry
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements ix
Introduction: Why Are Lawyers So Unhappy? xi
Part I: Panthers and Pinstripes 3
1. The Caged Panther: Ezra Pound 5
2. Pinstripes: Archibald MacLeish 12
Part II: Discontents 31
3. Formalism: A New/Old Disease 33
4. Lawyers and Their Discontents 47
5. Lawyers’ Lives 62
6. Other Professions: Medicine 72
7. High-Paid Misery 77
Notes 87
Index 135