For all of you lawyer / artist types, here’s an inspiring tale, from the San Francisco Chronicle. Meet José Klein, a recent Harvard Law grad who does plate art on the side. The truly inspiring part of the tale is how Klein found time during law school to make all these “Learned Handmade Plates”!

Klein spends nearly every free minute making magic marker drawings.

Not just any magic marker drawings, but drawings that are converted to dinner plates — Make-a-Plates, specifically, that cheap craft store staple where marker drawings are transferred permanently onto melamine dishware. Klein had never been a drawer, but something swept over him. It wasn’t landscapes and still lifes that emerged, but the figures and doctrines that comprise the jurisprudential canon. With a savantlike intensity he began translating law school into odd and remarkably lovely images you can eat off of.

There’s “Planned Parenthood v. American Coalition of Life Activists,” part of the First Amendment series. There’s the Punitive Damages collection. There are six plates commemorating the Interstate Commerce Clause. Then there’s each of the Supreme Court justices, lovingly rendered.

We won’t say Klein has totally uncapped his artistic free spirit. The plates are art, but they’re practical art. You can eat off the final product.

Additional discussion, below the fold.

Klein explains his art here. We like that he calls his plates featuring the SCOTUS justices “fetish objects.” Indeed. He also says his plates “turn the act of eating into an act of civic engagement.”

We’re a little worried about Klein’s attitude toward food. His description of the law school experience sounds eating disorder-esque:

The plates are snapshots from the core of law as it is taught. Most law students have been expected to memorize most of the cases depicted here. They have been evaluated on the basis of how well they can reproduce the information these cases contain. Twice a year, the American Law Student binges on these cases and others like them, ravenously cramming them into their minds, only to purge them out again onto the pages of a final exam.

We admire attorneys who don’t let their artistic sides get subsumed by legal work. But there are limits. Don’t try to pawn your band’s cd off on R. Kelly mid-trial (see Lawyer of the Day: Mike Roman). And don’t insert artistic renderings into your legal filings and call it a “children’s picture book for adults” (see Lawyer of the Day: Jack Thompson).

Now, go out and buy some markers!

Justice is served: A Harvard Law grad develops an odd obsession [San Francisco Chronicle]
Serving Cases On a Plate [Concurring Opinions]