As I progress through my metamorphosis into an adult human, I have ruminated on my life’s desires. One of the aforementioned desires, among the foremost, is to become some permutation of civil rights lawyer. This is a broad term which, as broad terms do, needs some whittling down. The more specific version, which is hopefully the version I embody, is that of a lawyer that fights for rights in the digital realm, a “digital rights” lawyer. Careers in this vein generally involve such things as net neutrality, the openness of software, and privacy in this digital age. Earth, with each inexorable rotation around the sun, will see its population of this particular form of lawyer increase as, proportionally, associated complex problems arise.
A problem, resolvable by this profession, endemic to the Northeastern/Boston locale is hard, to me, to pin down. Broadening my metaphorical search area to those of generic civil rights gives one more choices to choose from, while having the related effect of being somewhat disheartening. The problem that one can fairly easily hone in on, is that of class relations, and the disparity associated with it. World-wide dominance of societal stratification, as a subject, is essentially intractable and cannot be tackled as a whole. From this ramble, at long last, a problem statement: how can a digital rights lawyer effect change in this university, this city?
How, if at all, could one with my desired profession affect the lives of the of the, by birth, disenfranchised? An obvious avenue would be to supply these people with the the benefits of the technological revolution. However, another, more in the realm of lawyers, course of action presents itself, litigating in defense of the weak. In order to effect this social change, one could directly start a lawsuit against some company, or individual, which is blocking the benefits of the modern era from reaching the lowest layers of society. A somewhat less direct, but possibly more sweeping, way to change people’s lives for the better, is in the drafting of amici briefs. Amicus curiae, Latin for “friend of the court”, references an outside entity who advises the court to make a ruling one way or the other, in the form of a paper referencing the potential ramifications of a ruling and relevant laws and statutes. Class structure and its repressive effects to the lower reaches of the world, or Boston in this case, should be minimized if not eliminated entirely. A potential path to this state of enlightenment is through the work of lawyers, ensuring the the judicial system works in favor of the huddled masses.
