Me: I’ve got an appointment with the crazy professor,

Despite this quote, and despite your ostensibly "far-out" approach, your method is about balance.

It’s a balance between faith and fear. Specifically, faith in oneself and fear of failure. In feedback memos, you asked each of us, "What is your worst fear?" The thesis put forward by this question—for every query veils a thesis with a question mark—was subtle but palpable:

Don’t expect to be fearless, and do not ask yourself to be so. Turning from your fears is inviting them to blindside you. Ignoring them is guaranteeing they’ll return, demanding your full attention.

But don’t be hypnotized by fear, either. Recognize it only long enough to confront it, deflect it. Use its energy to propel you past it—the way a judo student turns an adversary’s lunge against him, or the way a space probe catapults itself by teasing a planet one million times its size, using the gravity that would smash it against the surface to send further than its own engine ever could.

Prof. Nesson, your answer to the question, "When do you fail?" illustrates the pitfalls of too little fear. Your failures come when you are certain you’ve succeeded, you say. Narcissus becomes transfixed by his image in the lake, forgets the dangers involved in doing so, and falls headlong into the water.

My problem is different, though I also flirt with a watery doom. For me, the representative fable is one of Peter’s trials in the New Testament. Jesus invites him out of their fishing boat, out onto the water. Peter is faithful, steps out, walks on the surface, yet only moments later his rationality weighs him down, his fear of the impossible becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and he sinks into the water. Not that I pretend to have ever walked on water—I’ve never even dared step out of the boat.

It also seems to be a balance between power and passivity, action and inaction. It’s about being a person of peace without being a pacifist. About pull rather than push, or maybe a nice combination of the two.

John Doar’s (sp?) closing arguments would invite the jury to reach a certain conclusion, not insist that they do; in the Woburn case, Schlictmann’s closing took the opposite tack, and suffered for it—must, must, must, you wrote on your notepad, people don’t like being told they must do something. Both were using powers of persuasion, but Doar’s had the lighter touch. He certainly didn’t sit back, silent. He brought fact after fact to the jurybox, like offerings to an altar, and let them decide for themselves. He showed that pure description, storytelling, can be much more persuasive than pointed puffery, obnoxious thesis-making. (In a way, Doar’s approach was about fear as well; where most lawyers recoil at the notion of leaving their fate to the jury, Doar recognized this fact and made the most of it, like the aforementioned space probe.)

The ethical advocate must strive to be the warrior poet, capable of using potentially destructive powers creatively. Sometimes, the best one can hope for is to check destruction. C. Day Lewis, a British volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, once wrote:

It is the logic of our times,

No subject for immortal verse,

That we who live by honest dreams

Defend the bad against the worse.

Lawyers must learn to use their skills with restraint. So, too, must society come to employ technology wisely, to find a balance between enjoying the full potential of technology without becoming slaves to it or using it for destructive purposes. In Dr. Strangelove and 2001, Stanley Kubrick warned of becoming overreliant on technology. Dr. Strangelove’s "Doomsday Machine"—a device that could automatically end the world with no human oversight—and the computer HAL stand for the dangers of eliminating human discretion from decisionmaking processes.

This problem extends past the realm of what is traditionally thought of as "technological." Law itself is a technology. Just as many bemoan the "tyranny of code" in the world of cyberia, so, too, do many legal commentators fight against overly rule-based decisionmaking mechanisms, like mandatory sentencing in criminal law, or knee-jerk textualism. Like software, the law is a machine made of words. Like any technology, it ought to be employed only when a human judge weighs the benefits and detriments of its use.