lawyer as historian

Reading again. And, no, this time not just drooling over the males in “Surfer Magazine.”

I picked up Gordon Rhea on the Wilderness today and started to carefully read it. I haven’t carefully read a Civil War book since I started law school. I have breezed through many history books during law school, but my careful reading for pleasure days were lost in a sea of poorly written and edited cases that I was forced to read until my eyes nearly bled.

One reason I chose Rhea — I also strongly considered Freeman’s “Lee’s Lieutenants” and I imagine that set will be next (I absoutely refuse to read an abridgement) — is because he’s a lawyer just like I now am.

I think lawyers bring an interesting set of skills to historical writing. To have even made it through law school and the bar exam, all lawyers have to be good readers and at least fairly decent writers. But beyond that, law school teaches us a different way of thinking. We refer to this as “learning to think like a lawyer.” Law school isn’t really about memorizing a body of law. Oh, sure, we do memorize the basic rules of the “black-letter” law in particular areas. But mostly, law school is learning to question, to think carefully and critically, to consider options, to research a problem thoroughly. The art of law is taking a legal problem, knowing where to look for the answer, finding what the law is, and then carefully applying the law to that particular problem. We learn to build arguments and argue our side zealously, but we also learn that you cannot ignore contrary evidence: you have to either distingush it or show how it does not apply to these particular set of facts. (In fact, as lawyers, we have an ethical obligation to disclose adverse authority.) We also learn when its simply not worth making an argument because we cannot win. With those skills in place, you can tackle any area of the law or any legal problem.

Anyway, that’s an interesting set of skills for a historical writer. Different from say, a journalist writing history.

I’d love to someday tackle the task of telling the story of A.P. Hill’s Light Division; I’d like to someday write a book. I have my website on Hill; if I had the time and inclination I’d rewrite the entire thing, foot-noting it and inevitably changing and reconsidering some of my conclusions and choice of words. Mostly created when I was an undergrad, it’d reflect someone who now thinks like a lawyer. I’m still kind of proud of the site even though I feel it deficient in many respects. But I’d like to make it better. Perhaps that’s a task I’ll try and at least start on since I don’t have a job and the hiring season is probably going to be dead until January now that the holidays are rolling.

But for now, I’m just enjoying carefully reading Gordon Rhea, a lawyer-historian, with a slightly new set of eyes and a new way of thinking.

Tags: A.P. Hill, battlefields, history, lawyers, The Law, wilderness