W. Greenhouse Gardella on his decision to not study intellectual property law in law school
“I think I was a small ant with high hopes. I think I I imagined that the field was at a more progressive place and that it would be less depressing to represent freedom of information and freedom of access. I thought it would be less depressing. If I’m going to work in a field that will cause me to despair, I at least want to have clients that have more serious and tangible problems. That sounds awful, but… There’s some combination of there’s no hope for it right now and there are more urgent human needs that I can get involved with. I guess I assumed that ideas like copyleft and defensive patent litigation, which is where, among other things, you’ll try in advance to have someone else’s patents invalidated before they actually sue you for infringement. That’s something that IBM has done on behalf of the FLOSS community at times. I thought that the legal community at large was more aware of the sort of deep human significance of these things than it turned out to be. And I thought they had more of a constituency than they turned out to have…I could have become the only FLOSSie IP lawyer to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh that year and Pitt is a kind of prestigious IP school. I don’t feel not guilty about it. I feel deeply guilty about it. In fact it’s one of those things that I think that in some alternative hypothetical world I could have done, but I just don’t have the chutzpah to keep at it. The policy side of it fascinates me. The law that implements that policy is horrible. What I mean by that is that the effects are important and I’m deeply passionate about them, but it’s hard to be intellectually engaged and reading thousands of pages and doing other things lawyers do when you hate everything you’re reading and thinking about. Every time I thought [this is stupid]. And the other thing is that the most essential ability of a lawyer, besides just research, is the ability to put yourself in the adversary’s position and think about what would make sense to them. This helps with both settlement and avoiding conflict in the first place and also with responding to arguments. And my scorn for patent lawyers is so enormous that I wouldn’t have been effective at that. There’s a difference between not liking an area of law and thinking an area of law shouldn’t exist.”