Chick + time = rooster. You’ve been warned.
Ed. note: This is the first installment in a series of posts from Dads at the Bar, an online community created as a “brother” group to our friends at MothersEsquire, for lawyer dads who want to work for a more equitable world and profession for themselves as fathers, who want to be allies for their coworkers who are mothers, and to build a better world for their daughters and sons. Welcome Dan Canon to our pages.
Two doors down from me, in a part of town where houses are packed tightly together, resides a rooster. The rooster is loud. He does not care when or if the sun is up. He does not seem to care about the municipal ordinance that runs contrary to his existence. He is a howling basilisk who terrorizes the neighborhood with his shrill cries at all hours of the day and night. I hate him.
Everyone here in Indiana is too polite to say so, but it is possible that my three daughters, like our demon neighbor chicken, have attained local-nuisance status. They often shriek at each other. The shrieking happens inside, but only when we can’t convince them to be outside. For what seems no more than three or four blessed hours a night, they sleep. Otherwise? Shrieking.
Concurrent with an increase in telephonic hearings, these noises, along with barking dogs, engine hum, clinking glasses, whining screen doors, and the occasional flushing toilet, became a part of my law practice. Sometimes the noises were mine; sometimes not. For the most part, other practitioners and judges have been too kind to mention any background clamor, if they noticed it at all.
Still, we are embarrassed when we are the custodians of racket. So we do our best to stifle it; we fumble with the mute button, we scurry off to the basement, and we yell uncharitable things at children and pets. We must take these measures because we are Very Serious Professionals. What if our colleagues were to find out that we were real people, too?
Now it seems we lawyers, along with everyone else, are migrating to a place we may never return from; a work environment in which we stay home and our electronic avatars perform all the talking that can’t be eliminated. Even the Supreme Court has burst forth from its ancient, antitechnology tomb to hold arguments via teleconference. At the same time, children have been turned out of schools en masse. All of a sudden, all of our work happens from the discomfort of our homes, and our homes may sound like a drunken food fight in Hell.
Under these circumstances, we would serve each other well by learning to accept background noise as is. To be sure, calamity in the home can pull your attention away from a conference call (especially if you’re trying your damnedest to silence it). Consider, though, that most of us are ardent multitaskers, the kind who make performance art out of getting 20 things done at once. In the morning, you drop off your dry cleaning with your coffee in your lap while checking email at red lights and flipping through discovery in your passenger seat. At night, you drive your kid to soccer with a sandwich in one hand, returning voicemails and anxiously peering at tomorrow’s calendar. But get on a Zoom chat and you can’t handle a little shrieking? A little barking? A little crowing? We litigators are used to all that noise (and not just from opposing counsel).
As much as the incessant screeching of the poultry item down the street haunts my dreams, I think I can learn to work around him. At least I shouldn’t have to be ashamed of him; he is part of what my life sounds like, whether I like it or not. And if I can accept that feathered terrorist, I certainly don’t intend to apologize for my own kids.
My ultimate proposition goes further still, and may seem radical to Very Serious Professionals: The background noise is good for us. You may recall that up until a month ago, day-to-day lawyering was inexorably social. We’d put on nice clothes, show up to court every Monday, wait for our cases to be called, and chew the fat with other practitioners in the gallery, in the hallways, on the street, or wherever. This, in my estimation, was one of the most vital aspects of the profession – one which we were losing even before we were chased indoors by invisible killers lying in wait on every tangible thing in every public place.
By gathering in the courthouse, we had the chance to size each other up. We exercised our mirror neurons. We were forced to recognize our colleagues not as unfeeling robots, hell-bent on destroying their opponents at any cost, but as the earnest, confused creatures we truly are. The courthouse is where we confronted our commonalities. The courthouse is where sympathy was earned. The courthouse is where cases were settled. And now the courthouse is gone.
Background noise is the consolation prize: the belching gulps of the coffee maker; the skitter of Labrador paws on a tile floor; the too-loud laughter of children. Such little blessings allow us to see beyond the avatars we litigate against, to peer into the house of a real person, and to feel the warmth of an inherently communal profession, if only for a few seconds at a time. Crises have a way of making us forget who we are. In embracing the background noise, we can remember.
Dan Canon
Dan Canon is a civil rights lawyer and a Professor of Law at the University of Louisville, Louis D. Brandeis School of Law. Most notably, he served as lead counsel for the Kentucky plaintiffs in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which established marriage equality in all 50 states. He writes on civil and criminal justice issues for a variety of regional and national publications. PLEADING OUT, his book on plea bargaining reform, is scheduled to be published in early 2021. His short documentary series on activists in the Midwest can be viewed at www.midwesticism.org. He lives a noisy-but-great life in Indiana with his wife and three daughters.