Legal Commentary

So I?ve been distressed a little this political season.  All the law professors doing all the political blogging stuff ? all the discussions among my lawyer friends and I that suddenly, out of nowhere, got a little too passionate.  And I couldn?t exactly pin down what was bothering me, until I was reading last night about Phil Ivey.  Phil Ivey has nothing to do with politics or law.  He?s a professional poker player.  Maybe the best one in the world.  (That?s a beauty of poker; no one ever knows for sure who?s really good and who?s just good and on an extended luck session.)  Anyway, it was reading Ivey?s story that made it click for me.

Ivey?s a really good poker player.  He?s won 5 World Series of Poker Events.  He?s a regular in the Big Game.  Though my mom may think differently, poker isn?t a game of chance.  It certainly involves chance.  But over the long run, chance equalizes out ? and your skill is what will determine whether you make a long-term profit or not.  Ivey?s whole professional life has been about picking up that skill, about understanding the slight differences that separate marginally profitable moves from marginally unprofitable ones.  But Ivey also is a gambler, in the old-school sense.  He has, for example, dropped a million in an evening on craps.  He makes ridiculous proposition bets.  And this all boggles my mind.  How can Ivey do this?  He can calculate better than anyone precisely how much he is likely to lose at the blackjack table or the roulette wheel.  The skills he?s spent a lifetime developing should cry out against him doing this.

And then it clicked for me.  Lawyers and law professors are supposed to be lucid and critical, to see things from all sides, to be able to separate convincing arguments from unconvincing ones.  For law professors, that?s part of what we?re supposed to be teaching our students.  So maybe there?s no huge problem with people in general making arguments that have obvious rejoinders, or bashing the other side?s candidate with arguments that would apply equally to their own.  But when I see lawyers and law professors do it (when I see myself do it), I just think of Ivey at the craps table.