No one ever really seriously asks this question in law school. A 1L diet of Civil Procedure, Criminal Law, Torts, Contracts, Property, Constitutional Law and Lawyering Skills is pretty filling, but it still leaves you (or some of us, anyway) with an unsatisfied deeper hunger. Of course, the intense workload and the superficiality of the law school culture (grades, corporate jobs, L. Rev., etc.) tries to distract you from that hunger, dissuade you from asking those deeper questions:
What is justice? What is the purpose of the law? What is our role as lawyers? If you are a person of faith, how does your faith intersect with your practice?I believe this is to the detriment of a legal education. In order to avoid controversy and accusations of indoctrination, the law school curriculum steers clear of these vital questions. Perhaps it's a consequence of the prevalence of legal positivism (the law is what the empirical facts say it is) or a general acceptance of relativism and subjectivity (there is no right or wrong answer about justice, or justice is whatever you think it is). But I sincerely and passionately believe that this leaves us impoverished. When we don't ask the hard questions and examine our own beliefs, thoughts, and practices, we settle for an ignorant acceptance of whatever comes our way and whatever we are told, by our families, communities, churches, schools, politicians, media, world.
This past week,
a friend and I attended a conference put on by the
Institute for Law, Religion, and Ethics at
Pepperdine University, entitled: Lawyers, Faith, and Peacemaking. The lawyer as a peacemaker. Anyone ever heard of that concept in law school? Yeah, that's what I thought. But it was an intensely enriching experience. Some highlights, in no order of merit:
- Collaborative law. Both parties to a dispute hire attorneys, but in their contract with them, stipulate that neither lawyer has the power to go to court - litigation is not an option. This forces the lawyers to collaborate to craft a settlement, an agreement that both parties will like. This necessarily involves compromise. And the lawyers soon find that in order to reach satisfactory compromise, they need to collaborate, and engineer a solution that best meets the needs of both parties (and a utilitarian might argue, that creates the most overall utility).
- Restorative justice. This one was powerful, so powerful that I started to cry. The first speaker to introduce this topic was a woman who had seen her husband killed and her daughter raped in front of her eyes, in an attempt to coerce her to reveal the location of a safe that she did not have; the robbers had the wrong house. She candidly and bluntly shared her story, the terror, the shock, the pain. And then she shared about the forgiveness. The healing. How she fought the system to meet every single one of the teenagers responsible. How she wrote to them, told them she was watching their behavior in prison, that she wanted them to do well, behave well. Called them "my boys." That she forgave them, did not hate them though she hated what they had done. She spoke of the need for the criminal justice system to change, to be an instrument of healing for victims and offenders, not an unfeeling imposition of the state's disapproval. She said that every victim should have the right to confront his or her attacker, to be involved in the justice process from the very start. She vigorously refuted the "you're one in a million" argument; it may take time, but forgiveness is necessary for a victim's healing. You don't ever really forget, you can't really ever move on. And she refused to paint her attackers as "the other," as "them." They too are part of us.
- Laying down one's life. No speaker mentioned this explicitly. But as I sat and listened to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim speakers hold forth on what it meant for a person of faith to practice law and be a bringer of peace, what I constantly returned to was Jesus' command to lay down our lives and follow Him. A life of gift and sacrifice. Whether as a public defender, willing to sacrifice the glamor and lucre of a high-paying private firm job to defend the desperate, poor, often guilty and sometimes ungrateful; a judge who every single morning puts on that black robe and steels herself for the pain and hurt that will come through her courtroom doors; a civil litigator who tries to achieve an outcome that meets his client's needs; a corporate lawyer who tries to add more than just monetary value to a deal.
I'm just inspired by being around lawyers and judges who have gone through so much more than I, seen so much more than I, and yet refuse to give up believing in the existence of a good God and the goodness that has been implanted into every human heart. Who do not hesitate to correct wrongdoing by imposing punishment, yet pray that punishment may lead to redemption. It's good to be around deep people who
care, who are
passionate about what truly matters. It is too easy to forget these things in a legal education system that worships the idols of accomplishment, self-sufficiency, prestige, power, money.
If you're a law student... don't buy the hype. Don't buy into the false and pretentious lies that really mask deep insecurity and fear. You are not in law school to get a good GPA, to get on Law Review, to get a high-paying 2L summer job or a federal clerkship upon graduation. A sufficiently intelligent automaton could do any of those things. What a robot cannot do, is to feel, to care, to be passionate about not the law (for the law is a dead thing), but about people who are affected by the law.
