Do You Hear the People Sing?

Wednesday night Maria and I saw Les Miserables at the Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Ave. in London. It was phenomenal! The first act was powerful. I admired the wonderful voices and enjoyed the story. The second act was heart-wrenching. I was crying by the end of On My Own. I really think Eponine was surprisingly good. Valjean and Javert were amazing, but they have to be. Without them, the show goes nowhere. But Eponine was the first to make me cry. I was sobbing by the end of Little Fall of Rain, and inconsolable for the rest of the show. I wasn’t impressed with Marius in all the love songs, but Empty Chairs and Empty Tables was wonderfully tragic. The only respite was Beggars at the Feast which managed to draw a laugh through my tears. By the last song of the show I could hear sniffles and sobs all around me.

I don’t know what else I can say about this show, except that I believe I could watch it every night for the rest of the month and not get sick of it. I’d be broke, but I’d love every minute of it! I’m hoping my law school friends will decide to see it so that I can have an excuse to see it again.

I think my classes have made me especially sensitive to the word law, and so every time Javert said the word law, it made me think. The hypothetical problem from Wednesday’s class kept running through my head, and I made Maria listen to it during intermission:

A man has a thirteen year old son with his wife and he also has a mistress with whom he has fathered three year old twins. The thirteen year old is found to have leukemia and will die within a year without a bone marrow transplant. The chance of a random donor being found in the general populace is essentially zero. The chance is much higher that his half-brother and sister, the twins, would be compatible donors and could save his life by a bone marrow transplant. To be found compatible, they would have to have blood drawn, and to give bone marrow would cause them temporary discomfort, but no lasting injury. They are young and would not even remember this pain. By giving bone marrow, they might save their half-brother’s life, but without them, the brother will almost certainly die.

If you were the mistress, would you allow your child to be tested to try to save the boy’s life? This is the easiest of the questions. Everyone in my class would do this if they were in the place of the mistress.

The mistress refuses to have her children tested for bone marrow compatibility. Would you represent her? Would you argue morality, right to privacy, etc, to the best of your ability to win her case? How far would you go?

What if the mistress is still worried about her chances? Would you delay the proceedings so that the boy dies before the case is finished? If you have thirty days to submit something, would you submit it on the first day or the thirtieth? Would you wait until the thirtieth to submit a petition for an extension of another thirty days? These are legal procedural steps. Would you do this? Would you use all of your legal knowledge to delay the case so the boy dies?

This was a real case which went to court. The mistress won, and the day the judgment was pronounced, the boy died.

Most of my class would defend the mistress. A majority would even delay the case so that the boy dies and the mistress’s children are not touched. I want to say that my classmates are like Javert, so concerned with the pursuit of justice that they cannot see justice clearly. They believe that the law is just, and as long as they work within the bounds of the law, they cannot be wrong. I want to call them Javert, but I’m just as single-mindedly convinced that I am right and they are absolutely wrong. I guess we all just have to make our choices as well as we can.

Regardless, I’d rather be Valjean than Javert, but I’m reconciling myself to the fact that I’m really just one of the background singers. I just hope I’m one of the honest women and not Mme Thenardier.