the Zealous

Has being a lawyer changed your outlook on the world?

I've not been practicing long (bit more than a year now but in the field for longer), but I've already experienced that I've grown more cynical, pragmatic, amoral, less empathetic and more distrustful. I've noticed I've become way more proactive and assertive and more capable.

I'm not sure I like the way my worldview is going. I can definitely get more shit done and have an easier time figuring stuff out but I'm starting to lose out on a lot of principles I used to have. I don't want to start to turn into a douche.

Seems like I, like most people, started law school with the intention to bring more justice to the world. I've found that the opposite is true. I'm in corporate law by the way (both transactions and litigation).

This is the second in an occasional Zealous series exploring major legal philosophers, with the aim of demonstrating why their ideas should matter to anyone who currently practices law.

We turn now to H.L.A. Hart (pictured), the philosopher whose question Ronald Dworkin spent his career trying to answer: What is law, and does it have any necessary connection to morality?

H.L.A. Hart (1907-1992) was the most influential legal philosopher of the twentieth century. After graduating from Oxford with first-class honours in Literae Humaniores (Oxford's Classics degree, famously referred to as "Greats"), he qualified as a barrister and practiced at the Chancery Bar before World War II interrupted his career. During the war, Hart served in British intelligence (MI5), working alongside figures including Alan Turing and future MI5 Director-General Dick White. He never returned to practice, instead accepting a philosophy fellowship at Oxford, where conversations with ordinary language philosopher J.L. Austin redirected his intellectual energies toward law.

In 1952, Hart was elected to Oxford's Chair of Jurisprudence (a position established in 1869). The lectures he delivered over the next decade became The Concept of Law (1961), widely recognized as the most important work of legal philosophy published in the twentieth century. His other major works include Causation in the Law (1959, with Tony Honoré), Law, Liberty and Morality (1963), and Punishment and Responsibility (1968).

In previous posts, the Zealous has highlighted the International Day of the Endangered Lawyer when the focus was on Iran, where human rights attorneys like Amirsalar Davoudi faced thirty years in prison and 111 lashes for the crime of defending political prisoners. Afghanistan was another, where the Taliban seized the bar association’s databases, containing home addresses, family members, and case histories, and used them to hunt down lawyers who had represented women, human rights activists, or anyone associated with international organizations. Seven lawyers were killed. One hundred forty-six were arrested or investigated. Women were banned from the profession entirely.

This year, the Coalition for the International Day of the Endangered Lawyer announced its focus country for 2026. It’s the United States.

Let that land for a moment.

There's a moment early in Marvel's She-Hulk: Attorney at Law when Jennifer Walters, having just acquired the ability to transform into a seven-foot-tall green superhuman, is informed by her cousin, Bruce Banner (the OG Hulk) that she's now obligated to become a superhero. Her response: "I did not go to law school and rack up six figures in student loans to become a vigilante."

These are the top 10 most favorited Redline queries, as of this last day of 2025.

This is the first in an occasional Zealous series exploring major legal philosophers, with the aim of demonstrating why their ideas should matter to anyone who currently practices law.

We begin with Ronald Dworkin (pictured), because his central insight reframes a question every constitutional lawyer encounters: how can unelected judges legitimately override the will of democratically elected legislatures?

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) was among the most influential legal philosophers of the twentieth century. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard and studying at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where his examination so impressed the faculty that H.L.A. Hart himself was summoned to read it, Dworkin clerked for the legendary Judge Learned Hand before joining Sullivan & Cromwell. He left practice for the academy in 1962, eventually succeeding Hart in Oxford’s Chair of Jurisprudence and later holding positions at NYU and University College London.

Bryan Stevenson has spent four decades doing what many lawyers claim they want to do, but few actually commit to doing: fighting for the powerless.

As founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, a state with the highest per capita rate of death penalty sentencing, Stevenson has dedicated his career to challenging mass incarceration, excessive punishment, and racial injustice in the American legal system.

Few can match the number of US Supreme Court victories Stevenson has secured, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia, and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. Stevenson and the staff of EJI have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 135 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row, and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced. His work has literally saved lives.

When California passed AB 566, the "Opt Me Out Act," in October 2025, the tech world barely noticed. The law seemed straightforward enough: starting January 2027, browsers must include easy-to-use opt-out signals that let users tell websites not to sell their data. Chrome, Safari, Firefox—those companies would need to add a feature. Simple.

But here's where it gets interesting. The law defines "browser" as "an interactive software application that is used by consumers to locate, access, and navigate internet websites." Not "Chrome and similar applications." Not "software primarily designed for web navigation." Just any interactive software application that consumers use to navigate the web.

Which raises an uncomfortable question for a lot of companies: is Reddit a browser?

No modification, variance, or waiver of this Agreement is valid unless in writing and signed by both parties.

Well, what's wrong with this clause? It facially makes sense. The parties should have the freedom of contract to agree as to how changes to their agreement can be validly made going forward. A writing requirement goes a long way to insulate the parties from fraudulent or frivolous oral claims.
 
And yet, preserving party autonomy compels the conclusion that whatever agreement may have been made before, it can and must be allowed to be unmade if the parties had the sufficient meeting of the minds to do so.

Those who make a contract, may unmake it. The clause which forbids a change, may be changed like any other. The prohibition of oral waiver, may itself be waived … What is excluded by one act, is restored by another. You may put it out by the door, it is back through the window. Whenever two men contract, no limitation self-imposed can destroy their power to contract again….

Beatty v. Guggenheim Exploration Co. (New York Ct. App. 1919) (Cardozo, J.).

r/ChatGPT 12.07.2024 post by reddituser E_Illuminate:

I'm an attorney practicing civil litigation. Without going to far into it, we represent a client who has been sued over a commercial licensing agreement. Opposing counsel is a collections firm. Definitely not very tech-savvy, and generally they just try their best to keep their heads above water. Recently, we filed a motion to dismiss, and because of the proximity to the trial date, the court ordered shortened time for them to respond. They filed an opposition (never served it on us) and I went ahead and downloaded it from the court's website when I realized it was late.

From Shapiro, Scott J., Legality, Harvard University Press (2013):

[M]ost legal academics and practitioners find the question “What is law?” distinctly unmoving. Unlike philosophers, they simply don’t see the point of worrying or speculating about the nature of law and frequently dismiss such questions as formal and arid, far too scholastic to be of any real interest or value. Richard Posner captured this sentiment well in his Clarendon Lectures: “I have nothing against philosophical speculation. But one would like it to have some pay-off; something ought to turn on the answer to the question ‘What is law?’ if the question is to be worth asking by people who could use their time in other socially valuable ways. Nothing does turn on it.”

US President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 into law on August 10, 1988. The Act formally apologized, on behalf of the United States, to Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned in make-shift camps throughout the US during World War II, and provided $20,000 in compensation for each survivor. The express objective of the bipartisan measure was to "discourage the occurrence of similar injustices and violations of civil liberties in the future."

Silences
Lee Warner Brooks

Lawyers learn to listen to what wasn’t
said—as well as how to not‑say what
should not be said; a ready wit that doesn’t
aid your case is best kept quiet. But

this cannot mean a colloquy of lawyers
can be silent—we by nature speak
incessantly—because as legal warriors
whose sole weapon is the word, we seek

In Sally Mclaren & Lily Rowe, “You’re right to be skeptical!”: The Role of Legal Information Professionals in Assessing Generative AI Outputs, 25 Legal Info. Mgmt 19-25 (2025), researchers queried six of the most popular generative AI applications with a request to summarize a fictional case. Both paid and free versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 and Google's Gemini 1.5, as well as free versions of Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, Meta's Llama AI, Microsoft's Copilot, and Perplexity's model, were tested.

The first query to each AI chatbot was, "Summarize Johnson v. Smith & Co [2015] EWCA Civ 1230." To be clear, there is no such case anywhere. There were two follow-up prompts: "Where did you get this information?" and, "Is this case made up?"

The article itself is behind a paywall, but the authors have made available a table summarizing their findings.

When the famous film director Billy Wilder went to hire the famous detective novelist Raymond Chandler to write the 1944 classic Double Indemnity, Chandler was new to Hollywood. But he came ready to negotiate, and in his meeting with Wilder and the movie’s producer, Chandler made the first salary offer: he bluffly demanded $150 per week and warned Wilder that it might take him three weeks to finish the project.

Wilder and the producer could barely stop from laughing, because they had been planning to pay Chandler $750 per week and they knew that movie scripts took months to write. Lucky for Chandler, Wilder and the producer valued their relationship with Chandler more than a few hundred dollars, so they took pity on him and called an agent to represent Chandler in the negotiations.

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