Cedric Bond’s Post

“If you’re trying to understand the past, the present often gets in the way and the past often gets rewritten to make itself useful to the present.” This quote from Professor Seth Tillman got me thinking. I came across it in a biographical essay on Tillman in Tablet Magazine. You can read the essay here: https://lnkd.in/gKGHehhB. Despite its title, the article has little to do with politics. Instead, it is a portrait of an independent thinker and legal scholar who dispassionately approaches his work without fear of parting from prevailing views. (For a TL;DR summary, see Josh Blackman’s Volokh Conspiracy post about the “thinker whose mind hasn’t been corrupted by politics”: https://lnkd.in/gCXzNi3Q.) There is much to admire in the man. From Tillman’s careful approach to scholarship to his personal piety, he is someone worth learning about. It was this quote, though, that jumped out at me. It reminded me of the excerpts my undergraduate history professor Dr. James Buss had me read in David Lowenthal’s book The Past is a Foreign Country. It is so easy to see whatever we want in the past. But this confirmation bias is but a symptom of a deeper problem. We take this cheap, flea-market approach to history because truly studying the past is hard. Just think of the swirling milieu of influences at work on us now. Internal, external, local, regional, national, international forces all impact our daily lives. And yet we barely know half of them. To study the past, then, requires us to detatch ourselves from these forces and inquire into the forces and actions at play at a different time and place. No wonder the past is more foreign than we realize. The lesson Dr. Buss was teaching (as I recall a decade removed) was the need for humility and detachment when studying the past. The same holds true for lawyers. Most of what we do as lawyers, and especially as litigators, involves competing views of the past. As we gather facts it takes conscious detachment to evaluate them. As we build our cases, it takes cold analysis to scrutinize the evidence and law. And as we uncover more evidence, it takes humility to recognize that our initial impressions could be wrong. It’s not easy. But humble detachment is as necessary for lawyers as it is for any other student of the past. It’s just part of the job. #LawyersofLinkedIn #History