What If Free Will Isn't the Whole Story? | Haze & Professor Jon Hanson

0:03 Professor Hanson's Problem-First Legal Education Today we're speaking with Professor John Hanson from Harvard Law School, who leads the Project on Law and Mind Sciences, where law is studied through the lens of neuroscience, social psychology, and the broader mind sciences. He also teaches corporate law and tort law and currently leads the Systemic Justice Project. 0:19 Thank you Professor Hansen for being here. 0:21 Speaker 2 Thanks for having me. 0:22 Speaker 1 I've been such a fan of your approach since I first heard about you through my friends at the law school, and when Simeon I first came to your class, we quickly understood why you're one of the most loved professors here. Personally, I'm always looking for an angle into domains that I wouldn't naturally be drawn to, and you became my angle into seeing something we usually think of as objective, the law, in a completely different way and really into a new way of seeing human behavior. 0:46 From watching you in class and hearing how you teach your sections, you have these really unconventional ways of existing in a law school. At the core, you're working from a more well-rounded understanding of what it means to be human, and that feels connected to the way you bring the mind sciences into law. Most of the time at law school, students are taught to apply doctrine to facts like here are the rules and here's how you apply them. 1:08 Speaker 2 That's right. That's exactly right. And if you were to boil down kind of the traditional approach to law school or to teaching it, it would be that we take students who want to do something that feels like it's good for the world. And we we attract them to our schools. And we say we're going to teach you is the law. 1:24 And so your first year will include a collection of six to seven, maybe eight classes, each representing A doctrinal silo, contracts towards criminal law, etcetera. And each one of those areas of law has a set of questions that it asks in a, in a sort of a explanation for what that area of law does. 1:45 And a presumption in traditional approach is that that law is legitimate, it's doing something good for the world. It may have some problems on the edges, but on the whole, it's a good thing. And so part of what students are learning is how to categorize their world into these doctrinal silos. 2:03 And they're learning that the law as it is, is something they they need to value as a good thing. So day after day, they read several cases and they are taught through the Socratic method. And at the end of the process, they are individually examined. 2:18 So it's highly individualized, it's competitive, and it's very narrow. Along the way, they have an impulse, many of them, to say, ha, I, I hear this policy and it doesn't sit well with me or this seems wrong, or I had this personal experience that conflicts with what I'm learning. 2:35 All of that students are taught to leave to the side. So they're brought into a classroom in a very narrow set of questions that they're allowed to ask with a very narrow set of considerations. And that becomes what law school feels like. What I'm trying to do is to is to disrupt that, to turn that upside down. 2:54 South. I see law not as something that we should be teaching doctrine first, but instead as problem first. Students come to law school because they see a problem they want to address. I try to keep those problems front and center from the from the first day. 3:10 So I teach tort law, but I'm sometimes criticized for not teaching enough of the tort doctrine. But that's because I'm trying to teach tort law as part of a holistic collection of laws and policies and other institutions that are shaping what happens when bad things happen to people. 3:26 They're injured in a car accident, they slip and fall at a grocery store, or they're a victim of an opioid epidemic, right? So this whole collection of these problems. And so focusing on problems and then seeing tort law within it. And then I am not at all interested in teaching a slew of cases, but instead looking at a few cases and understanding what's moving those cases. 3:46 And to do that, I bring in the mind sciences, I bring in history, I bring in sort of cultural studies, all kinds of factors like that to get students thinking differently. And also I try to take them away from their individualistic approach of law school. I try to create a community. I try to get them to think about their whole selves. 4:02 I try to get them to engage on team projects. And instead of just writing an exam that's going to be stacked up and graded and thrown out at the end, I try to get them to produce something that's lasting for the public. Maybe it is a documentary or a white paper. Any number of these things I've tried to use over the years to give them a different relationship to the work they're doing in law school. 4:22 So that gives you some sense of what I'm trying to do. 4:24 How Tobacco Challenged the Rational Actor Model You mentioned this idea of the whole human being, and before applying to my masters, I was thinking a lot about what what's at the root of all the problems we see. And I kept coming back to education because to a large extent it teaches us what to value and what to notice and how to relate to power from a really young age. 4:41 There's this idea from Palo Ferre that explains how knowledge gets treated as something you deposit into people, and it shows how our systems are built on a completely misinformed idea of what it means to be human. I noticed that in law as well, so much is also built on systems that don't take into account the full human being, like the rational actor model, the idea that people make choices freely through their own sense of agency. 5:02 What did you start to notice about human behaviour that made you question those assumptions? 5:08 Speaker 2 So you've captured, well, kind of the model of the human animal that informs the approach that I first took when I was coming into legal academia. It does speak to a kind of Western cultural intuition we have that what's moving us is our own selves, our choices, our preferences. 5:27 And so as a somewhat skeptical student, I had real questions about that model. And if you recall my previous answer, I said one assumption of of law school is that basically the legal system and the rules that we're teaching are essentially legitimate. 5:44 My approach to looking at law and teaching it is to flip that presumption as well. So when I was in sort of a young academic, law student and young academic, I kept asking questions like, what about imperfect information? So I wasn't really challenging the basic frame of a rational actor. 6:01 I just said, well, maybe they're not perfectly informed. And because I was asking questions about externalities and imperfect information, when questions about tobacco and cigarettes and the harms they were doing in our world became really salient in the 80s and 90s when different lawyers began saying we should sue these people, and also many people inside the tobacco industry began sharing documents. 6:26 Maybe they were whistleblowers, maybe they were being subpoenaed. I became one of the only legal academics who was asking about what might lead people to smoke other than just their free choice, their own rational choice. And as a consequence of that, I received a bunch of the documents as they were coming out. 6:43 And I received inquiries as to whether I had a view or an opinion on those things. And what happened was I devoted two or three years with students to just throwing myself into the study of those documents. Now, Hayes, this was before really computers were what they are now. 6:59 Like we didn't have, we didn't have it all digitized. It wasn't searchable. There were no even CDs with this information. So I sat with boxes going through reading all of these documents and discovering that the tobacco industry had a two-part strategy that relates to your question. 7:17 One is it presented a a view of the consumer, a story of the consumer that the that the consumer was a free chooser and chose the product because they liked it. They liked the taste, they like what it did for them. But in their documents behind the scenes, they told a very different story. 7:34 They told stories about vulnerable consumers or vulnerable communities that could be targeted. They told stories about how the nicotine rates or other elements of the ingredients could be adjusted to enhance addiction, where addiction itself is something that consumers weren't fully conscious of and certainly contradicts the idea of a rational chooser. 7:52 They talked about how to target young people, children and other people who don't quite fit our rational actor model. So as I immersed myself in those documents, I began to think, wait a minute, This story that we've been telling in law to justify the legal system is also the story that the tobacco tells to justify its product. 8:09 But it knows better. They hired a bunch of social psychologists and other psychologists that would help them learn how to target different groups, to find vulnerable groups, what to say for public relations purposes, for marketing purposes, for packaging purposes. All of those things designed to maybe target a community of colour in an urban area by giving a certain brand or type or look or images with their advertising. 8:32 As I saw what they were doing, I came to believe that I had maybe accepted a set of stories about ourselves that was wrong and I should invest myself in learning the mind sciences, which was the next chapter in my career. 8:44 Speaker 1 Must have been so rewarding to to find so much information that was untapped. 8:49 Ellen Langer's Studies on Framing and Legal Systems He was deeply unsettling. It created a somewhat of an existential crisis for me. And it was shocking in part because I knew people who died of lung cancer. I knew smokers. I had smoked. My life had smoked. We grew up in a space in which smoking was ubiquitous, and there was a sense that what I was witnessing at first was unique to the tobacco industry. 9:14 But as I learned more about the mind sciences and began studying other industries, what became clear was this is not an exception. This is the rule. This is what a lot of large corporate entities, not all of them and industries are committed to. 9:29 And we have whole fields like public relations devoted to figuring out how to help industries manage the stories they tell and a story they tell again and again. Is that something like the rational actor, something like the individual chooser, while in the background they influenced the situation? 9:46 There were other social scientific fields that have devoted themselves to studying these very questions. Are we rational? Are we even actors in the sense? Are we agents in the way that we know? And part of what was being discovered by that time was we're not. We think we are, and we tend to think we are, but that's the point that can be leveraged against us, and what's actually moving us has much more to do with our situation, our context, our circumstances, or maybe implicit motivations or implicit biases that could be tapped into. 10:16 Speaker 1 Many people would look away when they see how insidious these industries are, so I applaud you for tackling that. 10:23 Speaker 2 Well, thank you. There is a there are downsides there and definitely moments where. 10:27 Speaker 1 Like my AKA existential crisis. 10:30 Speaker 2 My family would be like, you know what, I don't think we want to talk about industry, Malfi, since at the Thanksgiving table. Thank you very much. So there was that. But on the whole, part of my job is sort of engaging with students who come to the a place like this hoping to do better. And I just felt like what I was seeing had to be told. 10:46 And to the extent that it was meaningful to them, that helped, that helped make it possible. 10:51 Speaker 1 And you brought up the mind sciences. Last semester I started working with Doctor Ellen Langer in her research lab, and I noticed that you reference her along your work. And actually working in her lab helped me understand the cases you brought up in your corporate law class, like Pillsbury versus Honeywell and Chevron versus Conservative Caucus. 11:09 Both cases where the facts were almost identical, but the outcomes changed based on how the story was framed. And it actually made me think of one of my favorite studies of Doctor Langer's the Chambermaid study, where one group of hotel maids was told that their work counted as exercise, and even though nothing about the job change, a couple weeks later, that group saw their health outcomes improve. 11:32 Was that something you started noticing in those cases that the framing was doing more of the work than the facts themselves? 11:39 Speaker 2 Oh, I have so much to say. So let me let me break it down a little bit. So first of all, Professor Langer, Ellen Langer's work has been really influential and, and, and the chambermaid study, as you call it, is an example of just how important frames are to us, right? 11:54 And if we, if we think of ourselves as engaged, say in exercise or something like that versus vacuuming, what its consequences for how we feel about ourselves and literally maybe our bodies will shift. This strikes me as a really important reminder of how important these frames are. 12:11 One of Ellen Langer's earliest experiments before she was into this, but it really was a precursor for this work, was a study she did at a copy machine. 12:21 Speaker 1 Oh, I know this one. 12:22 Speaker 2 It's a great one. So you can help me with the details, but this machine, this story basically was you had a line of people. This again, this is back in the bad old days when you actually had to use like 1 copier for a lot of people and there weren't printers everywhere. And so you'd have someone would be come to the queue and say basically, excuse me, I need to use a copier. 12:42 That was one possibility. Another one would say, excuse me, I have to use a copier because I have copies to make. And the third one would say something to the effect of, excuse me, I need to use a copier because I've been asked to do this within the next 10 minutes by so and so. So you one was actually a really good excuse. 12:58 One was nothing, just like I need to use a copier. And then the middle 1 was like a really empty excuse. Like I need to use a copier because I need to make some copies is really just not a story, right? Everyone needs to make copies. But the point that she that, as I recall, the study it illustrated was that that second story really an empty story, but story nonetheless carried a lot of weight. 13:20 How whether people were willing to give up their point in the in the line, how they felt about being cut and all of that. And to me, that's a really revealing story about how just the presence of stories matter to justify or legitimate what's about to happen. 13:35 And one way of looking at the legal system is that it is it is sort of operating somewhere in that space. And there's three options. 1, you can just do it. That is a kind of the authoritarian tendency. Another one is you can give meaningful reasons that actually would justify you're taking that place. 13:53 That's the image of the law that we hope it has. And then there's that middle position. The middle position is give reasons that are really quite empty. And part of what I'm interested in doing is interrogating law itself. And what I'm finding is that much of the time, its reasons are empty, right? 14:09 But it gets the legitimacy. It gets it's enough. It's enough for people to be satisfied with. And if you think about what law is, law is a collection of frames that pretends to be all about facts. Usually what law students study will be the versions of the facts, not that come from some objective high place that, you know, knows what the facts are, but facts that have been interpreted by, say, an appellate court judge or a Supreme Court Justice. 14:36 And those are the facts we're presented with. A lot of times those facts are made-up. I mean, some of the facts are just made-up now by design. They're not really supposed to be made-up. And even when they're not made-up, they're highly selected. They're what, you know, what version of the facts you're going to take, what you're going to foreground, what you're going to put in the background. 14:57 The other thing is that law basically is telling these causal stories. So when something bad happens, the loser will be the one who made the choice. The loser one will be the rational actor. And basically this, the frames that the law is giving us are these highly constrained sort of lenses that we apply. 15:15 At which point we also take cultural narratives, cultural biases, and we decide who is the person who's going to be accountable. And we say that person was the agent and was choosing and who is the person who is not going to be accountable. We say that person really was being moved by context or situation, just as with tobacco, when the story in public was you're smoking because you chose to, but the actual fact was many people were smoking because they've been targeted as consumers to smoke as children, manipulated, addicted, etcetera. 15:45 Like 2 very different stories. The culturally dominant story is often in the legal stories, often an incorrect story. So part of what I try to do and get encourage my students to do is to really carefully examine those stories and to be conscious of them. Because to your question, the facts aren't determining anything. 16:03 Milgram Experiment and Systemic Problems in Law The frames and the interpretations of the facts are determining everything. So in a criminal law case, people arrive at the doorstep or in the Chamber of, of, of a courtroom with a whole bunch of predetermined stories that are just ready to be activated. 16:22 And so those are often just tapped into. Maybe there's a, an element of the story or something that is presented as evidence that caps into that to that whole collection of stories that are out there. But it's not like that's being told fully. It's being activated the same way in advertisement. 16:38 You know, you, you get images on advertising that are, you know, 30 seconds to give you some real deeper story and with very little time, but the proper imagery, maybe some sound, maybe the some interaction or some words between people and we can fill in a vast, you know, story. 16:55 And that's kind of how it happens. It's mutually constructed. 16:57 Speaker 1 And I feel like what you just explained could also be mapped on to everyday situations, like when people use manipulation to activate different stories. 17:07 Speaker 2 I think that's right. I think, I think we are storytellers. We are in the in the game, often unconsciously, of manipulating other people. We're trying to be persuasive. We're trying to be effective as speakers or as communicators. 17:23 We're trying to change our life circumstances or the outcome of some event. So we are engaged in storytelling. I also think we're telling stories to ourselves. There's as much self deception through storytelling as there is deceiving others. 17:40 So there's nothing new. And part of the question you asked earlier about who is doing this and part of my response is, well, we're all kind of Co conspirators in this process. It's just part of what it means to be human. It's part of, it's part of how we communicate. We communicate through not just shared grammar, but shared stories, shared stereotypes, etcetera, which can be really damaging and harmful, right? 18:02 These things can be wrong, but nonetheless, they're kind of common ground on which many of us are operating all the time. And part of what I think is important, especially in law, where the stories we tell matter so much, is people have to be really attentive to that. And I think a problem with legal education traditionally is it doesn't make us attentive to it. 18:20 It makes us accept it and somewhat numb to the consequences. 18:23 Speaker 1 That brings me to the classic legal case where someone ties their boat to a private dock in a storm, and technically it's trespassing, but the law allows it because survival in that moment matters more than the rule. But in real life, most of the time we do the opposite. 18:40 We judge the act in isolation, almost, almost in a canteen way, as if the rule alone is what matters and we don't take into account the context, so we're quick to see the boat and miss the storm. How do we train ourselves to see the conditions behind an action before we judge the action itself? 18:59 Speaker 2 Good question. So first, if I could just toy with the metaphor a bit. We say you can't use someone else's dock. It's their dock. The only way to get them to let you know, let them use your dock is through their consent. Well, no, no, there's a threshold. 19:14 There's a threshold where we say you don't have to go and actually ask for their permission. You could just use the dock. What are those moments when the situation is so salient and so evident that we can't deny it? The law will make that exception. 19:30 It will say, yeah, that is a time when we're not going to require you to get permission. It's OK to use the dock. You can see this all over the legal system right now. It's playing out in voting rights. When you see the Supreme Court of this rating voting rights on the theory that racism is no longer an issue, but what they mean by racism when they say that is a version of racism that is very blatant, very open. 19:59 And there where there's animus that's expressed, it's the old style, Jim Crow, bad old days racism that we associate with someone like Bull Connor. Then the law will say, wait a minute, that's racism. But when laws and policies are designed systemically to produce consequences that advantage, say, generally white people and disadvantaged people of color, the legal system doesn't see that as racism. 20:27 That is a choice it's making, and your question really speaks to that choice. How is it that we can can sort of prepare ourselves to get off the cultural sort of starting point and to really investigate carefully, like what's really moving things? 20:42 So some of the answer is to know that before you even get to that judgement, you're already judging, You were already operating with a set of presumptions about what's moving people. So being aware of that is step one and sort of now stepping back and asking a question. 20:58 Wait a minute. Strongly as I feel about this, on what basis am I making that judgement? That's one thing. Another thing to do is what I was suggesting a moment ago, which is to look at consequences and not what people say, not their stories, helps you understand what may really be going on because we're self deceivers and then trying to understand that a couple of things are true about our tendency. 1 is it's kind of built into us. 21:24 So mind scientists call this the fundamental attribution error. This error is so basic that we call it the fundamental attribution error. If it's that fundamental, then maybe we should be, you know, protecting against it. And so one question you can always ask yourself anytime you're telling a story or hearing another story told is wait a minute, is there another version of this story that can make that person not a dispositional actor, but a situational character, someone who's moved by context? 21:53 And what would that story look like? What would it take for me to believe that that person was moved by context? Now that practice is really good in with my students. That's what we do all the time. And I also try to come up with some ways to make it easy. So I had these little handy analogies. 22:08 I talked about the dispositional actor as a stick, a stick figure pursuing their, say, pursuing their stable preferences. So that stick and then you've got ball. Ball is being moved by situation. So if you have a really simple way to just say what's the story here? Is it stick or is it ball? 22:24 It sort of simplifies the cognitive sort of tax that comes from thinking off the default, the fundamental attribution error. I'm interested not just in asking this question, but asking about what are motivations. So the stories we tell are coming often from motivations we're not conscious of. 22:42 It might be easy to see that someone being paid to take a position will take that position and you can discredit it accordingly. But many of us are subject to motivations about which we're unaware, and so being sensitive to motivation and really importantly, to manipulation. 22:58 So if we are feeling, for example, that we are under threat or our system is under threat or our group is under threat, we tend to turn dramatically what kind of stories we're willing to accept. So it's so now someone can simply create the perception of threat and dramatically alter what stories we're telling, which then should make us more cautious about the stories we tell when we're under threat. 23:23 So just knowing some of the ways in which we are biased and some of the tools with which we can be manipulated doesn't completely insulate us by any means, but makes us a little better able to sort of navigate the space in a way that seems more accurate. 23:38 Speaker 1 It feels like once you start paying attention to context in that way, it shows up in more than just a legal context. It starts showing up in the way that we live our everyday lives. Kind of like the Milgram experiment where people were told to give electric shocks for wrong answers, and even as the person protested and was in visible pain, the participants continued giving the electric shocks whenever the researcher said please continue. 24:02 So in this situation, it's easy to say those people chose to hurt someone, but when you look at the bigger picture, the authority, the pressure, the structure of the situation, you start to see how much the situation was determining the actions. So how does that change the way we hold someone accountable? 24:19 And is the law capable of holding that complexity? 24:24 Speaker 2 1st, that was a perfect encapsulation of sort of the insights of Stanley Milgram and much of social psychology. So whatever you think of the Milgram experiment, a great deal of social psychology confirms this idea that we tend to see the disposition and the bad actor here, someone shocking someone to 450 volts and to miss the situation. 24:43 And the whole message of the Milgram experiment was that's backwards. It's not the kind of person you are, it's the kind of situation you're in now. To be sure, the kind of person you are will still have some effect, but we are exaggeratedly focused on the person. 24:59 So our legal system, to your final question, is very poorly designed to deal with situational factors, which is one reason why many of our problems right now are systemic. We don't have tools to address systemic problems. And by the way, I think this is by design, The ability to construct situations that lead to behaviors that then we can blame the person engaged in the behaviour as the problem is a way of insulating ourselves from the way in which we're implicated in the production of that behaviour and the way some institutions and actors benefit from it. 25:34 And part of what you want to do, if you really want to be sensitive to the situation, is to be very attentive to the way in which powerful actors have a stake in the stories of blaming the person. So our criminal legal system is itself a reflection of powerful actors saying we need to criminalize more people, more of the time, at the same time that they were doing taking steps to further exploit the planet, the future, current generations, their workers, etcetera, and to create conditions that would lead people to engage in the very behaviour that they've now criminalized. 26:11 You might think of our coexisting in Amilgram experiment. 26:16 Resisting Compartmentalization and Public Interest Drift That's what we're that's where we live. We live in a Milgram experiment and the question is how many people are going to call it that? 26:23 Speaker 1 We're doomed. 26:25 Speaker 2 We're doomed unless you can begin to take that insight really seriously. And now you can ask to your I think this goes to your question, what do we do about in the law? We have to resist this tendency to find the bad apple, and we have to ask what is producing the barrel or what's producing the tree or the orchard. 26:46 One thing we also have to do is be much more attentive to the inequalities in our society, inequalities and wealth, all kinds of inequalities, including inequalities of power. I teach corporate law precisely because I think corporate law is is one of the areas of law that doesn't just help corporations, it empowers them individually and collectively against many other weaker stakeholders. 27:08 It's not that hard to reimagine corporate law, to change it so that it wouldn't do that. So the more we can be conscious of this, the more we can see that the tools are at hand to do something about. 27:18 Speaker 1 It so if we're living in a Milgram experiment, we're really not acting from our whole selves on a day-to-day basis. It makes me think of the question of what it means to be a professional and how being a professional a lot of the times, or even being an adult, means learning to split ourselves into these roles like work, social, family. 27:35 What is that compartmentalization actually doing to us, and are you cognizant of that in the way that you approach your teaching and your learning? 27:44 Speaker 2 So yes, and everything you've asked before also connects to this question when you ask about frames. Frames were often the compartments of the categories that we use to understand our world and to understand ourselves. I teach students and have taught students over the years who have come to law school full of a sense of hope and belief that what they will do with their life will have purpose and will help lead to some better world that they're capable of imagining when they arrive here. 28:13 And by the way, we tell them that law school is a good place to do that. We advertise ourselves that way. When they come to law school, what they discover is silos and questions and frames. And on top of that they learn it's not your whole self that is to show up in class. 28:32 Speaker 1 Because it's unprofessional. 28:33 Speaker 2 It's unprofessional. You bring your professional self, which is a highly limited self that basically is designed to play a game, comes with a uniform, comes with a whole set of rules and procedures designed to play a game in which you will only ask these kinds of questions and bring this kind of evidence to the table. 28:52 You are here in part to serve to legitimize what's happening in the world. So you have students who come to law school believing there's something wrong with the world, believing law and and the legal profession would be a place where they can do something about it. Who in some sense are being taught that that's not the case. 29:09 And that happens through compartmentalization. So really interesting research on how students in their first semester feel one way and by the time, you know, they graduate, they feel a very different self and how their third year self, the graduating person is not at all in communication with their first year self. 29:27 So part of what I try to do from the very beginning is I have students talk about what brought them here. I asked them to write an essay on what are their values. And I give those those essays back to them at graduation, which I'll be doing in a couple of weeks to try to keep these things central. When the research on what happens to law students as they move from say, justice centred public interest oriented young people to legal professionals about to go in a particular direction that they didn't anticipate. 29:55 That research sometimes called public interest drift. It's the drift away from public interest over year, three years. That research suggests that when students come to law school and you ask them to sort of draw a circle in which their core values are in the centre, the me who is me, and the things that are less important to them, they draw less far from the circle. 30:18 And you trace that over three years, what you will find is my job, my role as an attorney gets further and further from the center, from who they are. And for many of them, by the time there are two L's, it's outside the circle. 30:34 And it's hard to keep that centered. If you're being told that you can't do justice, then you can't do meaningfully good things from a legal system. And by the way, I think law school is getting better. Last 5-10 years, it's getting better and helping students narrow that gap to get it to bring it closer. 30:51 But for the most part, I try to treat my students as whole people. I get to know their families when I can. I get to know their hobbies when they can. I get to know as much as I can about them. And they unfortunately have to get to know about me as well. And so they get to know about my wife, my kids, my dog. 31:07 The dog comes to class sometimes. And so there's a whole, there's a whole way in which I try to remind students that we are whole people and we need your whole person here. 31:18 Speaker 1 What does that do to us as a society when we hold so many parts of ourselves back? 31:23 Speaker 2 I think it numbs us to what's happening around us and leaves us to go back to Ellen Langer's work. It it leaves us kind of mindlessly participating, but our systems are very elaborate and in part I think are that way to contribute to kind of the distancing. 31:42 Speaker 1 In some moments I've I've felt that myself where caring about justice or people gets minimized and you're reduced to that person that cares about justice. So how do we make sure we don't become numb? And what are the signs that we are? 31:54 Speaker 2 The very idea of justice is discouraged in law school. You're discouraged from really engaging on that question that justice is associated often with feelings or something that is subjective and therefore renders us are unable to make what feel like objective, independent judgments based on justice. 32:14 Meanwhile, look at our website, look at our, you know, look at, look at the our shield justices all over it. So we have a kind of mixed relationship with justice in law and in law school. 32:25 Strategies for Staying Attentive and Forming Opinions To your question, how do we as individuals kind of keep ourselves from turning off that side of us? I think there's a bunch of different little things you can do, and one of them you're doing, you're asking these questions and you're asking the questions kind of at a meta level. How is it that systems might be operating? 32:42 How is it the frames and stories might be operating to discourage this kind of thinking? The more you understand that, the more you're kind of protected against it. But each of us can do much better by staying proximate to to problems to suffering. 32:58 Bryan Stevenson writes about proximity and putting yourself close to real world issues. Bryan Stevenson is a great civil rights lawyer and thinker about issues of justice. And one of his strategies is to stay close, to stay connected. Another practice, I think, is to ask a set of questions that I associate with the problem of injustice. 33:18 Make a habit of asking where is power operating in a particular space or in a story. I think similarly, looking at inequalities and looking for inequalities and suffering, we have institutions that distance us from those things. Frankly, they're often unpleasant to to sort of confront. 33:34 And so even if it's about knowing people who are close to it, talking to journalists for some that might be reading a book or even art can get us closer to forms of inequality that we otherwise will miss. Similarly, I think we should not trust the stories we tell in law meant to legitimize outcomes. 33:52 We need to really be interrogating the stories that we tell when we say there was consent and therefore we don't have to look closely at something. Let's see if there really was consent and what what is meant by that consent. And can we imagine instead of consent as a binary different levels of consent? We think this process was democratic, but really, how democratic was it? 34:10 We're in the midst of these debates right now in our own legal system. I think another strategy is to surround ourselves with people who share our sense that this is OK to talk about. These are communities we want to be part of and to run our own ideas through them and around them. 34:26 To say, am I wrong? Am I getting this right? Get some support from them, but also push back from them. And I think another final thing that I'll say is we shouldn't hide this stuff. We should be quite open and honest about where we sit. As a teacher, my students don't have any doubt about my views on the world. 34:43 I also hope that they know from that that I see myself as a whole person who is evolving, who is a work in progress, who will and is interested in learning and changing his views. But I'm not going to pretend that I'm somehow objectively above my positions. And I think most of us are in the habit of operating in a space where that these issues are somewhere back in the background. 35:05 And then there's other people where it's so much in the foreground that there's nothing else for me. I want this to be something about which people know I have a view. And yet I also am in a relationship with that person who may not share that view. And that's fine with me. And I also like the Red Sox. And I also, you know, have a whole bunch of other qualities about myself that I'm not solely defined by these things. 35:23 But putting them and hiding them and concealing them, I think makes us ourselves not tend to them. And if we're not tending to them, they're kind of dying. And that's something I think we should resist. 35:36 Speaker 1 You seem like someone who is really reflective and takes a lot into account when you're thinking through something, so how do you approach forming an opinion? 35:43 Speaker 2 Well, I think I've my last answer to some degree, answers those questions. I want to look at the consequences. I want to know who has a stake in the answer. Where is the dominant conventional wisdom coming from? Are there players in the system that are telling a particular story? 36:01 Doesn't mean that it discredits them if there is, but it's something I want to be conscious of. What are my motivations? One of the things that I think my friends find, I don't know, maybe it's annoying, maybe it's endearing, but it's certainly a little odd as I often will just sort of start by saying, here are my motivations. This is what I this is, this is what I want to believe. 36:18 This is the conclusion I want to get to. Now let's have a conversation about it. We should try to think about what are the perspectives of those who are disadvantaged by the system and they don't have a veto power, but certainly their voices should be considered knowing that the voices of others get centered much of the time. 36:35 I also think something that Professor Lonnie Guinier, who was here for many years and just a amazing lawyer and teacher, and now her son teaches the same lesson. He's also here named Nico Bui, splendid scholar and teacher. Talk about having a board of directors. So this is analogy that comes from corporate law where the idea is that you have selected people in your life. 36:55 So for me, it may be a couple of friends. That is certainly my wife. Key people in your life who, when you're making major decisions, who presented to them. So I think the idea of a certain humility about who should be making our decisions is a healthy thing. And finally, I think a constant awareness that we're being shaped by forces about which we're often not conscious gives us the right attitude, gives us the right mindset for approaching all of the important questions in life. 37:21 Speaker 1 It feels like that ties everything together that we've been talking about, this idea of staying attentive to context and not mistaking the surface for the whole and not reducing people to a single dimension. So thank you so much for your time and for this thoughtful conversation. 37:35 Speaker 2 Well, thank you for having me. I'm sorry I'm so exuberantly excited about these ideas and. 37:39 Speaker 1 Excited about this? 37:40 Speaker 2 It's been a joy and I really liked your point about the importance of humanization. That's one way of encapsulating so much of this. Staying attentive is key. Thanks for letting me share some of what I do. Thank you.