Despite having been right in the middle of the target demographic at the time it aired, I managed to avoid watching the hit Fox show, The O.C. Until last night, that is, when a combination of exam-grading-induced stupor and the modern convenience of video-streaming led me to get acquainted with the world of the Cohens and their neighbours.[1] For younger law students (and older lawyers) unfamiliar with the show, The O.C was perhaps the leading teenage drama of the mid-aughts, centering on a handful of families and their supposedly teenaged offspring in the swanky Southern California community of Newport Beach. (For anyone who spent the 2000’s hiding in a cave in the tribal regions of Pakistan, “the O.C.” refers to Orange County.)
The opening episodes, at least, are well crafted. I have it on my wife’s authority that the show goes downhill in later seasons, but at this point it sure looks like I’m going to end up finding that out for myself. Anyway, the show got me thinking about (what else) the law, and in particular the limits of lawyers’ roles qua lawyers.
[Limited spoiler alert – I’ve only seen three episodes, after all.]
The law figures prominently in the show’s opening episodes. The show’s star, Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie), comes from a broken home on the wrong side of the Southern California railroad tracks, and only comes into the orbit of the Newport Beach elite through his lawyer, Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher). Ryan is a teenager charged for his involvement in the theft of a car. Sandy’s role as Ryan’s lawyer is in principle limited. His job is to uphold his client’s rights and to vigorously represent his interests in relation to the criminal charges. The paradigm of criminal law within which Sandy operates on behalf of his client is all about the individual and his rights vis-à-vis the state. As far as we can tell, Sandy fulfills his professional duties in this regard in a competent manner, but all this seems to do for Ryan is to grant him a temporary reprieve from the grim trajectory his life is on. Ryan needs a lot more than the freedom from immediate interference by the state that his criminal lawyer is able to get for him.
We then see another side of the law when it turns out Ryan may not have a home to go back to once he is released from jail. The law, of course, has an answer for this type of scenario. For a while it seems that Ryan, a minor, will end up being placed in the care of the state and sent to a foster home. Here the role of the law is not about policing the limits of individual liberty, as in the case of criminal law, but rather governing the operations of the bureaucratic state acting in its capacity as caregiver of last resort. This is the proactive state stepping in to provide for Ryan when it seems no one else will. But it doesn’t seem like this will give Ryan what he needs either. He doesn’t want to go into the system.
In the end, of course, Ryan comes to live with the Cohens in Newport Beach. His lawyer, Sandy, effectively adopts Ryan. Sandy steps well outside of his role as a lawyer and gives Ryan what he seems to need above all else: a family and a community (of sorts). To be sure, neither is perfect, and indeed much of the show seems oriented around lampooning the spoiled creatures of Newport Beach society. But there is no denying the sense of relief Ryan feels at being a part of the Cohen family and the emerging circle of friends he starts to form in Newport Beach.
The fact that Sandy has to go beyond his role as a lawyer in order to really help his client points in some sense to the limits of what lawyers do. Lawyers mostly deal in individual rights, on the one hand, and the operations of impersonal government bureaucracies, on the other. Yet so much of human well-being stems from interactions and attachments that lie between these poles, in the structures of family and community that are governed by intrinsic motivation and mutual commitment, rather than individual rights or bureaucratic hierarchy. This isn’t to deny the importance of what lawyers do. Obviously, if Ryan had been in jail, he never could have found his new life. But the law has stark limits in setting the conditions for human flourishing, something lawyers might do well to remind themselves from time to time.
[1] It’s on Shomi.
