ADVOCATE, IT'S A CHOICE...

Advocate is just a occupation. It's a choice to be good advocate's or devil's advocate. Don't think too much that you could change Indonesia law's what is already too ramshakle.

There are two principle in law that we must carriage. Those are "equality before the law" and "presumption of innocent". Defense our client blood by blood.

There are times we win, there are times we must and have to win, there are time we loose.

That's all just a long process to makes us better and more terrific.

It's always have a risk in every job. We're not living in UTOPIA ISLAND, don't you think so?

BLINK

To over-generalize, there are two types of nonfiction books worth reading: those written by an eminent specialist summarizing the current state of his or her field, often focusing on the singular idea that defines the author's career; and those written by a journalist without special knowledge about the field, tracking a particular idea, crossing the boundaries of disciplines when required by the pursuit. Malcolm Gladwell's Blink is a bravura example of the latter sort of book: he ranges through art museums, emergency rooms, police cars, and psychology laboratories following a skill he terms 'rapid cognition.'

Rapid cognition is the sort of snap decision-making performed without thinking about how one is thinking, faster and often more correctly than the logical part of the brain can manage. Gladwell sets himself three tasks: to convince the reader that these snap judgments can be as good or better than reasoned conclusions, to discover where and when rapid cognition proves a poor strategy, and to examine how the rapid cognition's results can be improved. Achieving three tasks, Gladwell marshals anecdotes, statistics, and a little bit of theory to persuasively argue his case.

Gladwell's discussion of 'thin slicing' is arresting: In a psychological experiment, normal people given fifteen minutes to examine a student's college dormitory can describe the subject's personality more accurately than his or her own friends. A cardiologist named Lee Goldman developed a decision tree that, using only four factors, evaluates the likelihood of heart attacks better than trained cardiologists in the Cook County Hospital emergency room in Chicago:

For two years, data were collected, and in the end, the result wasn't even close. Goldman's rule won hands down in two directions: it was a whopping 70 percent better than the old method at recognizing patients who weren't actually having a heart attack. At the same time, it was safer. The whole point of chest pain prediction is to make sure that patients who end up having major complications are assigned right away to the coronary and intermediate units. Left to their own devices, the doctors guessed right on the most serious patients somewhere between 75 and 89 percent of the time. The algorithm guessed right more than 95 percent of the time. (pp. 135-136)

The secret is knowing which information to discard and which to keep. Our brains are able to perform that work unconsciously; when rapid cognition breaks down, the brain has seized upon a more obvious but less correct predictor. Gladwell examines how race and gender affect car dealers' sales strategy, the effect of height on salary and promotion to top corporate positions, and unjustified police shootings of civilians to demonstrate that our unconscious biases have genuine and sometimes tragic consequences. He also examines how the wrong thin slice, in focus groups or in a single-sip test of soft drinks, can lead businesses to mistake consumer preferences.

There are things that can be done to redirect our mind along lines more conducive to accurate thin slicing: we can alter our unconscious biases; we can change products' packaging to something that tests better with consumers; we can analyze numerical evidence and make decision trees; we can analyze all possible facial expressions and their shared meanings, then watch for them on videotape; and we can evade our biases by blind screening, hiding the evidence that will lead us to incorrect conclusions.

This whirlwind tour of rapid cognition, its benefits and pitfalls, has only a few pitfalls of its own. Written in a forthright and conversational style, Gladwell makes friends with his readers, but rarely challenges them. This is science writing for the broadest possible audience; people with scientific training may chafe at the substitution of anecdote for study results, and may wish that the author had gone into greater depth with any or all of his examples; others may wonder how they can broaden the reach of their own attempts at rapid cognition. Gladwell may whet their appetites but will not fully satisfy those readers. His focus is narrow, and this helps him meet his goals; perhaps this is appropriate for a book titled Blink.

THE STREET LAWYER

For those who have learned to love Grisham's formula of the small guy bringing down the giants, this book will not disappoint. As usual, his hero -- in this case young attorney Michael Brock -- uses the law effectively against the big lawyers to achieve justice. Also typically, the research into the subject of the book is thorough. The crime this time, though, is one of omission: we, as a society, are ignoring and criminalizing the homeless. Michael Brock is about to put us on notice that we'd better start noticing their plight and doing something about it.

Brock begins the book as a practicing anti-trust lawyer, on the fast track to partnership and a million-dollar annual salary in the nation's fifth-largest law firm. But he has three problems: 1) his marriage is on the rocks because of his commitment to work; 2) he really doesn't like his job; and 3) he's currently being held hostage at gunpoint with eight other lawyers in his office. The gunman is a street person who smells bad and goes by "Mister". The confluence of these three problems creates an epiphany for Brock. He determines to discover the forces that drove "Mister" to his suicidal mission, and finds that his own law firm had evicted "Mister" and sixteen other citizens from a run-down warehouse in the middle of the winter. He also is given a hint that the eviction was illegal, and then discovers that some particularly sympathetic evictees subsequently died on the streets in midwinter. His personal struggle with guilt leads him into the streets to become an advocate for the homeless citizens of our nation's capital, and to take on the very powerful firm that recently owned him.

Along the way to righting this social (and legal?) injustice, Michael Brock meets an array of colorful individuals who provide refreshing relief from the uniform greyness of the corporate lawyer types in the book. Noteworthy among these is Mordecai Green, a heavy, loud, six-foot five-inch black street lawyer. Mordecai becomes Michael's mentor and partner as they take on the arrogance and indifference of the power class by suing his former firm.

We hear many stories and statistics of the homeless in this book, which are both touching and frightening. However, some readers may be offended by Grisham's overtly political characterization of the problem. He implies that we are all symbolized by the law firm in the book, and that we are all guilty of making difficult lives worse through indifference and governmental action. Although he's not so naive as to think we could eradicate homelessness, he advocates pretty strongly for a more liberal approach to the problem. After reading the book, the chances are good that you'll either find yourself rushing to the nearest soup kitchen to volunteer, or that you'll resent being guilt-tripped by a rich and famous entertainer cum self-appointed social critic.

But in addition to the sermonizing, the story moves on quickly to a creative and suspenseful resolution of the legal issues involved in the specific case, where Brock is both attacker and defender because much of his evidence of wrongdoing was illegally obtained from his old company. As usual, Grisham ultimately grounds his stories in detailed inside knowledge of law firms and legal machinations; and his basic David and Goliath trope, while hardly original, keeps the reader in suspense as it moves to an exciting and satisfying close. The writing also shows real sensitivity in several areas: for instance, Grisham describes racial and class fears and stereotypes honestly, without either sensationalizing or denying them. He also speaks to the real conflict many people face today of trying to maintain a balance between their personal values and the demands of an intensely competitive workplace. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Grisham manages to maintain a positive, optimistic tone about the possibility of making progress against homelessness instead of being overwhelmed by it. Even if many of the homeless characters are never going to have a "normal" middle-class life, they can at least have a place out of the snow in which to sleep, a hot meal every day, and some help with their ongoing problems. It's actually a very warm book, in spite of the social problem and the lawsuit. The book is good as a topical tract on homelessness; even better as a typical wild-but-plausible Grisham adventure.