Patriotism

Like any good liberal artist, the personified LSTC is familiar with a random smattering of important short fiction, including Yukio Mishima's Patriotism.  In Patriotism, an army officer commits a visceral, detailed seppuku instead of choosing between rebelling against his emperor or leading a counter-insurgency against his neighbors and comrades, selecting the method of self-execution preferred by samurai when necessary to preserve honor.  The case brief-level moral of the story is that when faced with moral dilemmas, one can always killself, just as the author himself did a few years later.

Often, I like to think of lawyers and law students as samurai warriors living by an ancient code, the Constitution our emperor and the rules of professional conduct our bushido.  In the face of certain danger, like rational statistics saying law school is NO NO NO, the best ones wear the kimono of courage and charge headlong towards hundreds of thousands in debt screaming BANZAI like cliched motherfuckers.

With that I give you this:

Melchor Matias flew from Seattle to Detroit every weekend to study for his J.D. at WMU-Cooley Law School-and graduated in January.

A CPA at Boeing in Seattle, Matias did licensing audits on royalty and technology contracts, and designed audit programs. His interaction with the lawyers of Fortune 100 companies sparked his interest in earning a law degree.

This sort of effort is true patriotism in modern America.  For the legal samurai in our times, thankfully no impassable dilemma exists.  In no way does taking an established career for a major company in an in-demand professional certification to Cooley resemble cutting open one's belly for the entrails to disembowel while praying the head is soon mercifully chopped off.

But being a legal samurai paying homage to our Constitutional emperor requires effort.  This gentleman, deprived of an appropriate, accommodating law school west of the Mississippi, flew to Michigan to earn his juris doctor.  Unfortunately, lots of people feel a school like WMU-Cooley is completely unnecessary, a fifth tier toboggan turd sliding out the crusty, wart-lined anus of legal education.

Yet it obviously fulfills a valuable function for people who require a law school for working professionals near major airline hubs and tourist destinations.  Anecdote, you know, is the singular of fact.  To deprive people like this of that opportunity would be to create a moral dilemma for the patriotic legal samurai to choose between his heart and overwhelming rational consensus telling him a lower-tier law school is a stupid idea.  And various feasibility studies show there are literally hundreds of thousands of people interested in signing up for that training.

Perhaps our best and brightest, when deprived of a place to learn The Law, would not resort to actual seppuku.  Perhaps it's more akin to one of them metaphor thingies.

But the truth, as cutting and adamantine as an expertly forged katana, is that if you get in the business of closing law schools, you've eventually got patriotic blood on your hands.  A spoiler for your Lady Macbeths out there: it don't wash out.