Exploring pattern of Thinking

Thinking can be described as the act that produces thoughts, which arise as
ideas, images, sounds, or even emotions. Whereas Pattern of Thinking is a Systemic
Thinking which is a simple technique for making sense of challenging situations and
developing simple interventions for transforming them. Pattern of Thinking enables
people to deliberately and systematically gain significantly deeper insights into
challenging situations and complex domains by surfacing the interaction-patterns
that drive and govern them.

Reason and Thinking

Reason
Reason in professional ethics is a method of thought and argument used by
lawyers and judges when applying legal rules to specific interactions among legal
persons. It is the act of ‘Discussion or Analysis’ in adjudication of a case.
The court gives reason for its legal ruling, and it helps other courts, lawyers
and judges to use and follow the ruling in subsequent proceedings.
A legal reasoning process starts when a lawyer is confronted with a legal issue.
For example, a potential client may visit a lawyer in a legal office and describe a
situation, or a district attorney may put forward an alleged crime before a judge in a
court-proceeding, or a company lawyer may receive a telephone-call from his
manager to be informed of a possible legal problem emerging in a contracting
situation, or a civil servant may find in his morning mail an unusual request from a
citizen, regarding partly classified documents with references to the freedom of
information act.
Rarely does the initial confrontation with a problem give the lawyer enough
information to let him arrive at a legal decision. On the contrary, the lawyer usually
has to find additional information. Depending on how familiar he is with the
situation, the effort that he will have to make may be more or less time consuming.
Two extreme cases are possible to visualize; (i) the case when the lawyer
immediately recognizes the description and makes a decision instantly without any
additional efforts whatsoever, (ii) the case when the lawyer does not recognize any
piece of information at all – everything, the whole situation as well as its elements,
is a total mystery. Between these extremes, a continuum of alternatives can be
imagined, and in some cases, as for instance in the case of court-proceedings, the
lawyer will be obliged to follow formal rules guarding his decision making. As to
(i) it is necessary to underline that it is often possible to arrive at rule applications
quite easily. This is for instance the case in situations in which the nature of the
upcoming issues can be easily determined in advance and in which the law is stable
and clear. In many fields of the law this is not an unusual situation.
Leaving out the unusual case (i), the lawyer normally must try to find more
information. The objective for this initial information search is to be able to make a
legally relevant situational description of the issue. In other words, in order to be
able to reach the norms that are applicable to the situation, the situation must first be
identified. This may be called the identification phase.
On the other hand, "experience" refers to one's level of competence or
expertise, either in general or confined to a particular subject. Experience is
immediate perception of events. Human intelligence draws its conclusions from a
base of experience-generated knowledge. The human's knowledge is always
growing and being modified by his experience. Experience can provide better
understanding in a subject matter. If legal professional is experienced enough
he can deal with a single case from multiple perspectives. He can provide
various ways to overcome from the problem and reason rightfully. Experience
lawyers can prepare weighty documents on behalf of his client so that judge
inside the court can be convinced immediately. Experienced lawyer can reason
in a good way that his argument in the administration of justice is useful and
valuable. When a lawyer is confronted with a legal issue he should have information
regarding the case. Experienced lawyers easily gather the related information to that
which helps him to reach into conclusion. The lawyer must try to form a general
description of the case and this includes a search for relevant facts. At the same time
he must search for a legal norm that is applicable, i.e. a norm that contains a
description of a similar situation. The goal for these search activities is to be able to
subsume the specific situation under a general description of a situation in the norm-
system - to perform a norm-application.
By definition it is impossible to find a prefabricated situational description of
a new situation. Norms cannot be constructed in such a way that it is possible to
perform a direct mapping of new cases. They must be designed so that they can be
used as general descriptions, covering numerous individual cases. From this follows
that actual situations and situational descriptions in the norm-system must be
interpreted. Also, the interpretation is a parallel process. The objects to be interpreted
are prerequisites in the norm system and facts in the current situation. The facts of
the actual situation and the prerequisites of the norm may be concepts, actors, time
aspects and relations. Some of these facts are probably recognized by the lawyer
without difficulties - others may be new to him and therefore demand
conceptualization activities. In this context we may talk about the interpretation
phase.”

The Profession of the Law

The word profession suggests a certain stature and prestige. It implies that
the activity to which it is attached possesses a special dignity. For centuries, the
practice of law has been considered a profession, both by lawyers and laypeople,
and legal education has always been thought of as a form of professional, and not
merely vocational, training.
The practice of law has four characteristic features that make it a profession
and entitle those engaged in it to the special respect.
The first characteristic is that the law is a public calling which entails a duty
to serve the good of the community as a whole, and not just one’s own good or that
of one’s clients. What we mean is that lawyers, like judges, are bound by their
position to look after the soundness of the legal system and must take steps to
insure its justice. This is not to say that lawyers are exclusively concerned with the
public good. Lawyers represent clients and causes whose partisan interests often
contribute nothing to the public good and sometimes conflict with it. But a lawyer
must always keep at least one eye on the public good, and make sure it is well
protected against the assaults of private interest, including those of his own clients.
And a lawyer must do this not just occasionally, not just in the fraction of time he
devotes to pro bono activities, but constantly and consistently, in every moment he
is practicing law. A lawyer who is doing his job well dwells in the tension between
private interest and public good, and never overcomes it. He struggles constantly
between the duty to serve his client and the equally powerful obligation to serve
the good of the law as a whole.
The second is the non specialized nature of law practice. The legal
profession remains, to a surprising degree, a generalist’s craft, whose possessor can
move from one field to another—from criminal law to civil law. The law is not a
form of technical expertise but a loose ensemble of methods and habits easily
transported across doctrinal lines, and a lawyer is not a technician, trained to do
one thing well, but a jack (or jill) of all trades. Lawyers, by contrast, perform a
range of different tasks—counseling clients, drafting documents for them,
negotiating and litigating on their behalf, touching, in the process, on a dozen
different areas of law—and move about among these tasks with a flexibility.
A third source of the lawyer’s professionalism is the capacity for judgment.
This means the goal of legal education is not to impart a body of technical
knowledge but to develop certain general aptitudes or abilities: the ability, for
example, to see facts clearly, and to grasp the appeal of points of view one doesn’t
embrace. To do this requires more than intellectual skill. It also requires the
development of perceptual and emotional powers, and hence necessarily engages
parts of one’s personality other than the cognitive or thinking part. A good legal
education is a process of general maturation in which the seeing, thinking, and
feeling parts of the soul are reciprocally engaged. Who lacks the ability to
distinguish between what is important and what is not and cannot sympathetically
imagine how things look and feel from his adversary’s point of view, is not a good
lawyer. He is, in fact, a rather poor lawyer, who is more likely to do his clients
harm than good. The good lawyer—the one who is really skilled at his job—is the
lawyer who possesses the full complement of emotional and perceptual and
intellectual powers that are needed for good judgment, a lawyer’s most important
and valuable trait. The good lawyer knows that he needs all his human powers to
do his job well, and the knowledge that he does gives his work a dignity no
expertise, however demanding intellectually, can ever possess. This is the third
feature of law practice that entitles us to call it a profession.
The fourth, concerns time, and the location of law within it. Every activity
has a past. The law has a special relation to the past. The law’s past is not only
something that can be observed from the outside; it also possesses value and
prestige within the law itself. In pin making, the fact that pins were made a certain
way before is no argument at all for continuing to make them this way now. We
may do so, out of habit, but prior practice has no normative force in pin making, or
computer chip making, or any other line of manufacture. By contrast, precedent is
a value in the law: not always the final or weightiest value, but a value that must
always be taken into account. The fact that a law has been in existence for some
time is always a reason for continuing to respect it, and this reason must be
considered and weighed even when we reject it.
Together, these four features give the practice of law a dignity that is the
source of the lawyer’s professional pride, of his belief that what he does for a
living constitutes a way of life with special worth. They form the basis of the
culture of professionalism in which this approving self-image is anchored and
through which it is transmitted from one generation of lawyers to the next.
Polarities and Paradox
Polarity
In case of a polarity the two sides have a high degree of contrary tension
making them polar opposites. In extreme cases, they may become mutually
exclusive (e.g. day and night, life and death) In other cases, the contrary tension
may be strong enough to make us believe that there simultaneous existence is
impossible (e.g. masculine-feminine etc.)
 This also means that in a polarity, the two sides are intertwined and
interdependent. They are like two sides of a coin which cannot exist without each
other. The relationship here is not of “either-or” variety but of “foreground-
background ” variety. While one side becomes prominent, the other does not
disappear, it only gets relegated to the background. Thus the feminine side of a
visibly masculine person, does not vanish, it merely remains in the background,
exercises its influence in an indirect and invisible manner and occasionally shows
itself. Just as during day time, the night does not cease to exist, but only remains in
the background.
A polarity does not necessarily create a dilemma. The person who has a
strong leaning towards either of the two poles, sidesteps the engagement with the
dilemma through suppressing/repressing either of the two poles. The dilemma is
only experienced by the individual who does not polarize (i.e. have a marked
preference for either of the two sides) . For example, the person who embraces
both the masculine and feminine side, will face many more dilemmas than a person
who embraces only one of the two.
In other words, non-engagement with a polarity becomes a way of avoiding
the dilemma. Engagement with a polarity entails understanding the
interdependence of the two sides, acknowledging the significance of each side and
working towards a more supportive relationship between them. Consequently,
engagement with a polarity means readiness to face more dilemmas than side
stepping them.
Paradox
The situation in case of a paradox is altogether different. A paradox does not create
dilemmas, it creates double-binds i.e. situations which lead to the same conclusion
no matter what alternative is chosen. For example, when someone is asked “Have
you stopped beating your wife?”, both answers (yes or no) are an admission of
guilt. Similarly a paradoxical injunction can neither be obeyed nor disobeyed. If a
parent tells a child ” Don’t listen to me”, the child can neither obey this command
nor disobey it.
Paradoxes arise through “self-reference” i.e. the statement being applied to
itself. Thus, when a paradox is engaged with at the level at which it arises, one
keeps going round and round in circles. Engagement with paradoxes necessarily
entail transcendence in level of thinking or consciousness. A paradox which is
frequently encountered by most of us is that “the more we hold to a person/object,
the more it slips out of our grasp”. Unless we shift the terms of reference and
focus on our “compulsion to hold”, we can never release ourselves from the
paradox.