\u00a0Originally Published in the Maryland Daily Record<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 After we leave our places of worship, we lawyers don\u2019t usually talk about our faith much.\u00a0 There are lots of reasons why.\u00a0 Maybe the biggest is the disconnect between the way the faithful think and the way lawyers usually do.\u00a0 Always the pressure on lawyers is to pinpoint the authority for our position, to point to something hard and durable, something objectively verifiable: authoritative precedent, a line of deposition transcript, a clause in a contract, a phrase in a statute, a principle in a written constitution.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For believers — at least for those to whom scripture is a starting point but not a user\u2019s manual for life — it can never be that way: we intuit God in a chain of events, in a feeling inside when we sing a hymn, in something (or is it Someone?) ineffable that occurs as we rub shoulders with fellow believers or pray silently.\u00a0 We sense God, all right, but we can\u2019t prove<\/em> God or pin God down.\u00a0 God is not tame: God could be anywhere at any given moment, but will not be palpably there to check with when you come back later the way a West headnote will always be there.\u00a0 In this sense, the experience of God is not very lawyerly.\u00a0 And it\u2019s disconcerting to drop the a priori<\/em> style of thought and discourse lawyers are trained in, to articulate convictions that just are<\/em>, and may not be based on anything objective.\u00a0 Easier not to talk about it, treat faith as one\u2019s little secret.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And at the same time, being a lawyer in and of itself raises the suspicion of other believers.\u00a0 To other faithful souls, we lawyers appear far too worldly for our own good.\u00a0 And the law thing we do — that\u2019s commonly perceived as having little to do with justice, which is of much greater interest to most believers.\u00a0 And then there are the material rewards that come to many of us, calculated to draw our attention away from more transcendent and important objects.\u00a0 So what makes us think we belong in the community of the faithful, really?\u00a0 If humanity is screened through the eye of the needle en route to heaven, and the well off are least fitted for the process (Matthew 19:24), what are the chances we\u2019ll get through?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In short, our dual citizenship is apt to alienate us somewhat from either world.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Trying to hold both passports myself (born and raised Catholic, an attorney since 1981), I have experienced this.\u00a0 And being (people tell me) less reticent than some about bringing up difficult subjects, I thought I\u2019d share a few insights my situation, both blessing and predicament, has afforded me.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Let me start with this.\u00a0 Most kinds of believers agree that a real and personal God has created, interacted with and continues to interact with us individually and also with human history, and that this God loves and makes demand upon each of us.\u00a0 Most of us believe that the God who created all natural laws can and sometimes does suspend them. And most believers would also agree that God is in our midst and we in God\u2019s.\u00a0 To put it another way: There is no secular, and there is no sacred.\u00a0 The holy and the profane, the miraculous and the mundane: it\u2019s all the same stuff.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A consequence of this sense that sacred and secular interpenetrate is that for us there\u2019s no division between what we do as believers and what we do as lawyers.\u00a0 For me, this cuts both ways.\u00a0 Belief informs my views of law practice, and my legal experiences have a great impact on my faith.\u00a0 In the first part of this essay, I want to talk about the way in which belief influences my views of my profession.\u00a0 Next time I will talk about the influences going the other way.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 First, the easy part.\u00a0 The kind of ethics that my faith and pretty much everyone else\u2019s urge \u2013 truth-telling, treating others with respect, not stealing \u2013 are all reflected in the Code of Professional Responsibility, and if you internalize the first, you\u2019re not going to have much trouble dealing with the second.\u00a0 Despite the largely undeserved bad reputation for dishonesty we lawyers suffer from, most of us acknowledge this code and the Code, and there\u2019s no conflict in that area.\u00a0 A word of obvious caution here: we believers are no more likely to live up to our ideals, personal or professional, than anyone else.\u00a0 This is about how we believers understand our responsibilities, not<\/em> how well we as a group or certainly I as an individual live up to them.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The more interesting conflicts start when you\u2019re forced to take sides in negotiations and disputes.\u00a0 My particular faith is not thrilled with disputes, with disharmony between people, with self-seeking to the detriment of one\u2019s neighbor or, worse, the common good.\u00a0 (See St. Paul\u2019s distrust of lawsuits in 1 Cor. 6.)\u00a0 By lending myself to one side in a \u201ccase or controversy,\u201d by putting forward only one point of view regardless of the merits of the other side\u2019s view or of the common good, I am quite arguably at odds with the outlook of my faith.\u00a0 After all, what about the importance and dignity of the side I am opposing?\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 C.S. Lewis said it very well in his great sermon The Weight of Glory<\/em>: \u201cThere are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal . . .\u00a0 It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit. . . . Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.\u201d The Society of Friends, or Quakers, say the same thing, I think, in their maxim that \u201cThere is that of God in every man.\u201d\u00a0 And though I do not always live up to this view, I agree with it.\u00a0 How can I, then, oppose the interests of anyone?\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I have to start answering this question by reminding myself that my neighbor can be at one and the same time both divine and wrong about certain things.\u00a0 I remind myself that God has for some reason placed us in a world where there is constant dissension and competition among even those creatures created in God\u2019s likeness.\u00a0 There had better be some kind of system for ironing these things out (exactly as there had better be a system for curing the disease God has also allowed in our midst), and there had better be people like me who specialize in making that system work.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fine, but does that mean this system<\/em>, where advocates compete to put the best face on each side, where dueling biased views are presented as bases for resolving disputes?\u00a0 I think it does.\u00a0 While I lack the hubris to say ours is necessarily the best system \u2013 and like any thinking person I certainly object to many aspects of the way it is run \u2013 I do believe this system is, spiritually speaking, adequate.\u00a0 There is always a finder of fact and law, be it judge, arbitrator, or jury, who has the responsibility of looking out for the ultimate truth and the just solution.\u00a0 And that finder gets the last word.\u00a0 Meanwhile, and no matter how counterintuitive it might be, the finder observably benefits from the interplay of the biased presentations.\u00a0 The apparently uncontrolled dialectic of partial views somehow leads to an impartial synthesis that usually gets it whole and gets it right.\u00a0 By taking one side, therefore, I may help all sides get past a dispute.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I also don\u2019t want to overstate the one-sidedness in advocacy.\u00a0 The most effective advocates try to foresee what the referee, the judge, jury, or arbitrator, will demand and will think, and not advocate things that the referee will reasonably reject as nonsense.\u00a0 They also recognize a responsibility to the common weal that conditions and informs their loyalty to any client.\u00a0 Together these tendencies keep them from grossly misleading any party to the process, especially the referee.\u00a0 I have never felt that the role of advocate made a liar of me.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In sum, I do not necessarily do violence to the immeasurable dignity of every other man and woman, or of the society of which we are all a part, by taking the part of some of them against others of them.\u00a0 In the end, we are all equal in God\u2019s eyes, I am quite sure, but after much thinking I have concluded that this does not mean I cannot be partisan at certain times and for certain purposes.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But let\u2019s pull back further.\u00a0 Most believers, I among them, derive from their estimate of human divinity certain conclusions about the way law should structure society.\u00a0 Actually, certain competing conclusions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To illustrate, my Church has advocated a \u201cpreferential option for the poor,\u201d meaning we are urged to try to steer social policy in the direction of alleviating the burdens of the needy.\u00a0 Some quantum of property seems to be critical to the fully realized life of any and all human beings, and the absence of property literally defines (though it does not by any means fully capture) poverty.\u00a0 Thus, part of a program of according the poor the more fully realized life their dignity demands would seem to indicate seeing to it that the poor get more property than they presently possess.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But we need to be careful about this.\u00a0 The world\u2019s poor are so very numerous that satisfying their property needs on a wholesale basis would inevitably require mass transfers of wealth which would certainly trench on the property rights of those who have much.\u00a0 Property is itself a specifically legal construct: a bundle of rights to various tangible and intangible things which the law will enforce.\u00a0 To effect such a transfer would therefore require amending the law. But amend the law and destroy property rights, and we will also destroy the incentive system dependent on those rights.\u00a0 And that incentive system drives commerce without which there is no property for anyone, never mind for all. As lawyers, accustomed to dealing with the very world of wealth and commerce that makes some fellow-believers so suspicious, we understand this full well.\u00a0 All else being equal, we know, mass property transfers would therefore simply make everyone poor and not achieve the desired end, the demise of poverty, but tend in fact in the opposite direction, making poverty even wider-spread.\u00a0 (A classic recent example is the forced land transfers in Zimbabwe, which have largely destroyed agriculture there.) Which is why religious belief does not make socialists of most believers, and especially not of the lawyers among us.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 All the same, when the legal systems we presently have \u2013 and in one way or another they are worldwide \u2013 routinely support the existence of large pockets of the poverty, most faiths still say that something is very wrong.\u00a0 Maybe outright redistribution in the teeth of both legal title and market forces won\u2019t solve the problem, but that doesn\u2019t mean there\u2019s no problem or that we don\u2019t have to worry about solving it.\u00a0 We are called upon to address at least the effects of poverty, and better yet the causes.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Addressing the effects<\/em>, for a lawyer, certainly includes representational pro bono work, generally recognized in the profession as a moral obligation for each of us.\u00a0 It probably means donating to charities as well.\u00a0 Addressing the causes<\/em> calls for political action, in which we lawyers must also be concerned, though as much in our status as individual citizens as in our status as attorneys.\u00a0 But as we know the most about the laws, and as the laws are intimately involved in the problem, we ought to be using that expertise in the project of bettering the laws. Which is perhaps a bloodless way of saying that each of us believing lawyers needs to break off a chunk of the laws that are responsible for poverty and try to do something about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is a similar story with the over-militarization of the world and the ongoing destruction of the environment.\u00a0 Most believers recognize the wrongness in the way these things have developed, and most recognize the special role of law in perpetuating the wrongness.\u00a0 We lawyers thus must play a special role in the fix.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But in contemplating that role, we must recognize that uncompromising rejection of the status quo is not an intelligent or productive alternative, either.\u00a0 Armies exist and are used for good reasons as well as bad, and we humans cannot simply turn on a dime and stop all destructive and unsustainable activities on this planet.\u00a0 So a rigid \u201cno\u201d is no more correct or religious an alternative than uncompromising acceptance.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Faith, then, calls for an uneasy maturity.\u00a0 We cannot be complacent or resigned, either as lawyers or citizens, and indeed our faith calls us to critique our system and its laws from a profoundly humane perspective.\u00a0 Most faiths teach that the world is imperfect (a Fallen World is the phrase I learned in my tradition), and that the divine plan and destiny is for a better one, a juster one, a safer one.\u00a0 We must hang onto and try to bring about that vision, recognizing, as we do so, that our present system is not the unalloyed result of sheer stupidity or evil by any means.\u00a0 Our faith should never allow us much comfort; while on the other hand our legal training should never permit us to overdose on discontent.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Critiquing our world and trying to improve it, we must sort out wheat and chaff as best we can.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t easy, and there are no guarantees we will do it well or successfully.\u00a0 But for lawyer-believers, sorting it out and then acting on what we see — that is our task.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To Be A Lawyer and a Believer: A Two-Part Series Part 1: Lawyer \u00a0Originally Published in the Maryland Daily Record \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 After we leave our places of worship, we lawyers don\u2019t usually talk about our faith much.\u00a0 There are lots of reasons why.\u00a0 Maybe the biggest is the disconnect between the way the faithful think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1608"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1625,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions\/1625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}