The Law as Vocation
The Law as Vocation
Lewis and Clark Law School Baccalaureate Address
May 25, 2007
Introduction: The Limitations of a Tourguide.
I start by congratulating you on becoming accomplished young lawyers, and more, lawyers with spiritual and religious convictions to temper and guide your professional lives. This is a great achievement; you should be proud. And I also celebrate the breadth and variety of beliefs and practices represented here. As a Christian I enjoy being in ecumenical company. I consider Jews and Moslems and Taoists of all kinds to be my teachers. Christians who cannot learn from these rich traditions are not trying very hard, and I suggest that they reread Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, or CS Lewis’ Last Battle in the Narnia series, to learn something true about diversity. I am always enriched by listening to a devout person speak her truth, and I hope it is so for you today, whatever your creed. As the Catholics like to say, all truth is divine truth.
I find myself wanting to give advice, to try to help you avoid some of the mistakes in life and law that I have made, to guide you in any way I can. But we all know that in the best adventure stories– Lord of the Rings comes to mind-- the heroes must tread their own path, make their own mistakes. Lord knows I have. Much as I would like to be able, I cannot add to your future triumphs, nor can I prevent your coming tragedies. It will be what it will be and there is a time for every season and purpose under heaven. But perhaps a voice of experience can at least describe for you some of the terrain ahead, so that you might recognize the landmarks for what they are and so put your labors, loves and losses into some sort of perspective. For the valley of death really will have a bottom which goes no lower, and the transfigured mountaintop a peak from which you must descend.
The topic as listed is "Integrating Spiritual Values and Career." I will not try anything so tidy as that. Rather, I want to explain ways in which the practice of law is a calling, a vocation, a sacred task given to certain men and women with a love for God-given truth, justice and mercy. I will describe this in three ways. First, that in the law we are called to serve, not to be served. Second, that we are called, as were the prophets of old, to serve our task no matter what the outcome. Third, that in law we are called to a kind of lifetime university for the perpetually curious, seekers of knowledge and understanding.
The Practice of Law is a profession, even a vocation, and not simply a business or trade.
When you spend seven years in a parochial school, as I did as a young boy, the least you oughta come away with is some working knowledge of Latin or Greek. But, alas, mine was a trendy Episcopal school where such things were regarded as dispensable. So I have in the last few years commenced the formal study of both Latin and New Testament Greek. I highly recommend it. But it means that I now have the annoying habit of pondering words. It also means I cannot let phrases like profession or vocare go undefined, for in the definition is much of the point.
It was only a few centuries ago in the Western tradition that to profess something, to engage in its academic study, was viewed as an attempt to know something about God. All the sciences, social or natural, and all the humanities, were understood as merely differing approaches to reach the Divine. Now in this worldview, it was understood that theology was the queen of the sciences; but all disciplines were in the royal palace. When one was a professor, it was because one "professed" a certain academic avenue as his or her way of reaching God. I profess chemistry, for I see this hard science as telling us extraordinary things about God and his universe; I profess literature as telling the story, not only of humanity but of humanity’s Author; and I profess law as telling us about the divine love of justice–and, when that justice seems too impossible, then I profess that there is such a thing as grace or forgiveness. So to profess a subject, to be a professional was to serve as a gateway to God through one’s work. It was to profess that this thing, this study, this practical skill that I do every day…is itself a reflection of the divine order.
And a similar understanding possessed the idea of "vocation," from the Latin, vocare, calling. Some of you may recall that poignant story of Norman Mclean’s, A River Runs Through It. There is a scene when the author, then a young man, comes home from six years of formal academic study to explain to his father, a Scotch Presbyterian minister, that he is not sure yet what he wants to do with all this education. I am sure that parents here today will appreciate the flummoxed reaction of the father, played memorably by Tom Skerritt, as he says, "well, Norman, you’ve had six years to become sure…" And when Norman mentions that he likes teaching, his father jumps to the point, and asks, quite specifically in a way that the boy misses, "do you feel this could be your… calling?" . For he knew that in God’s order, the same hands that crafted the Montana mountains and trout streams also crafted each of us for a particular purpose, and called us out to do that work. My late father, who understood many things intuitively that he never considered theologically, used to say, "boy if you are a carpenter and you were born to be a carpenter, then you’re the luckiest guy alive…." Vocare– to call. Vocation: one’s calling.
So with these two rich definitions in hand– to profess and to be called-- let us consider what it means that the law is a profession, a calling, and not merely a business or trade.
1. As Lawyers we are Called to Serve, However Understood.
My first boss in the law, a good old gentleman named Bob Bouneff, sat me down on my first day and told me, "it is important that you are a profitable lawyer, because we need to stay in business, but don’t confuse the business of law to mean that law is a business. It is a profession, not a business or a trade. And that means you have certain duties"– old Bobby was not afraid to speak in such quaint terms as ‘duty’– "to the community, duties that other businessmen and tradesmen do not necessarily have."
To be called to be a lawyer, then, first means to be called to certain things, not necessarily things that you have heard much about these last three years in law school, which has been concerned about more imminently practical tasks. But to be called, to have a vocation, to profess law, means that you are about something noble. I want to say this as emphatically as I can, because I think there is so much mis-imaging out there about what it means to be a lawyer. As a professing lawyer you are not allowed to define yourself by money, or power, or prestige, these sometimes byproducts of the practice of law. For these are the false gods of the law, the idols, the tempters. In the words of a Thomas Merton poem "keep away son, these lakes are salt, these flowers eat insects; Here, private lunatics yell and skip in a very dry country." And I would add that private lunatics is a good description for many lawyers I know, driven it seems by the thirst for more and more of the false rewards.
No, as alluring as these things sirens are, as people called to profess the law, you have a higher purpose; you are about more lofty aims. For some of you it might mean you work for economic and legal justice for the poor; for others it will mean finding ways to convince society’s judges– whether in black robes or in jury boxes– to grant mercy to the criminally accused or convicted; for some it may mean bringing a biblical ethic of stewardship to this fragile earth, our island home; for others it will be fighting to keep sacred either the beginning or the end of life. For all of us this notion of being called to the law, to profess it, means that we work pro bono– for the good– indeed, it means our work is, in a phrase I am using more often these days, pro Deo– for God.
Whether you are an office lawyer or a trial lawyer, an academic or a legal aid lawyer, your vocation is the same: it is to find a way to serve. Just serve. Live out what you know to be theologically true– that God is love, that the Holy One cares about earthly justice and has a special concern for the outcasts of society--the least, the last, the little, the lonely, the lost. Find ways to serve them. That is our profession, this my calling, there your vocation.
2. To be Called as a Lawyer is to be Called as a Prophet.
People of the Book know what I mean when I talk about a prophet, but just so we are clear, let me explain. A prophet is someone called to a certain task no matter what the consequences. For most of the biblical prophets, it had nothing to do with predicting the future; it had to do with speaking truth to power. Their calling was to say it as it is, not as the powers would pretend it to be. So we have Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah in the Hebrew Scriptures, John the Baptist, Stephen and other Apostles in the New Testament. Of course Mohammed is known as a prophet, as could be the Buddha, or Confucius.
I want to use Isaiah as an example for lawyers, especially young ones, eager and visionary about what great things lie before you.
Any of you who have ever read the American essayist Alfred Nock, and his story entitled "Isaiah’s Job" will find these words familiar.
Isaiah, you see, wanted to be liked: he was all eager to preach the word to the masses. He even volunteered for the job. "Who will go for us?" says the Lord. "Here am I; send me" answers Isaiah. You can almost see him smiling as he thinks of how the people will love him. "Here am I; send me."
"Fine, " says The Lord. "Here’s your job: go tell this people that I am really ticked off; that they are blowing it, totally and completely. Give it to them strong and straight; don’t mince your words. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance."
"Okay…" says Isaiah, now pretty well sobered up."I should probably tell you" says God, "that none of this will do any good. The people cannot hear it and the political establishment will not hear it. In fact you will be rejected and despised as irrelevant, impolite, or worse, extreme and unbalanced. Just thought you should know…"
"Well, then," stammers Isaiah, dreams of stardom now all dried up… "What’s the point? I mean, why do all this if it won’t do any good?"
"Ah" responds the Lord warmly, "because I know something you don’t. There is a Remnant--a small, small core of the faithful, who will hear your word and will heed it; and when it all goes to the dogs later on, it is this Remnant that I will use to raise up a new and sparkling society."
"Great!" says Isaiah, brightening considerably. "So how about I just go talk directly to this--what did you call it--this Remnant? I should just go talk to them and skip all the folks who won’t listen."
"Yeah, well, that won’t work," answers God. Because you do not and cannot know who they are. In fact, they don’t know who they are."
"Then how do I find them?"
"You won’t; they’ll find you."
"Well," persists Isaiah, "then how do I ever know if I am getting through? How will I know if any of this is successful?"
"Success is not your job and it is not your worry", answers the Lord somewhat bluntly. "Faithfulness to the word is your worry. You preach it; the Remnant will hear it; and I’ll take it from there."
So Isaiah’s job was faithfulness to the task regardless of the outcome. Ouch. It means that if you are a criminal defense lawyer, you come to grips fully that your job is to serve your clients, even the guilty ones, knowing that, in one sense, it won’t do much good. It’s not like those who are so broken or wicked that they need to commit crimes will be magically transformed because of you. Or, you cannot be so naive to think that you will often save the plainly innocent from convictions based on human prejudice. Atticus Finch– that great role model from To Kill a Mockingbird-- was under no illusions that Tom Robinson would go free. But he did, you do, great lawyering anyway, because that is the job and because, somehow, God will use what we do to fulfill God’s own purposes. Good lawyers I know step up to represent the mentally ill, or the hopelessly addicted, in their many scrapes with society, knowing they will see them again in six months. Civil rights lawyers do what they do because it has to be done, not necessarily because it will change the world.
There often is a cost to this prophetic call. It means sometimes you represent not only the underdog, but the unpopular cause as well. You will do work that will cause those around you to raise their eyebrows and whisper gossipy things about you, questioning your motives or your judgment or your character. I didn’t want to sue Multnomah County and get dragged into the politics of gay rights– I have often been a supporter of equal treatment for gays– but how the County did what it did was an affront to everything I believe as a lawyer who cares about our fragile experiment in constitutional democracy. Nor was I thrilled about suing the Catholic Church– one of the only institutions I know that regularly stands against the excesses of our age– but fifteen years ago a young man came to see me and told me a compelling story about abuse of power, and about cover up in high places, and the advocate in me could not let that go unchallenged. In fighting the spread of casinos, I don’t want to be crossways with Native American tribes, but I am outraged that my government is using the vice of gambling as a revenue raising tool, with the added fraud that they call it a voluntary tax. Tell that to the hopeless gambling addict. These are not easy cases, they are not popular cases, but they are, in my honest judgment, causes for which I am called to fight. Whether or not we win.
Rabbi Hillel says, "It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task; but neither are you free to desist from it." Or, as Mother Theresa, gentle prophet, used to say, we are not called to be successful; we are called to be faithful." Tough job. Who is up for it?
Well, probably at this point many of you are about to run shrieking from the room and go sign up to be a stockbroker. But wait. Let me offer you some sweetness and light, some magic dust sprinkled on us by our forebears in the law.
3. As Lawyers, we Profess Lifetime Learning as our Path to Wisdom and Understanding.
One of the many gifts given to Western culture by the Jewish religion is a love of learning, a vocation to study the Book. I think I have never been in the home of a Jew who did not have his walls filled with books. "Do not say when I am at leisure I shall study," says Hillel, "for perhaps you shall never be at leisure." In the Hebrew Bible, the books of the Psalms and Proverbs together teach us that the love of God’s law and the love of wisdom are two sides of the same coin. This is but one of the reasons I have never had any patience for the anti-intellectualism of some American fundamentalists. How can you claim to be a people of the Book and not be in love with learning?
The law gives us a very great privilege– people pay us to learn! Cherish that for a few minutes. Lawyers are called to be people of the Book, or at the very least people of books. The fact that most of the books now are electronic does not change the point. As an aside, I once wrote a short story of an aging trial lawyer who, the night before every trial, insisted on "one last check of those 1880’s cases, all the way to the back stacks, ignoring neon plastic computers to pull the creaking leather wisdom".
The law has called us to be lifetime learners. I imagine Cicero, Tertullian, Francis Bacon, Jefferson, Lincoln– lawyers, all–hunched over their scrolls or books, expanding their minds as they practice their craft and prepare their speeches. I see Clarence Darrow or Gerry Spence– for my money the two most brilliant trial lawyers America ever produced– out in the fields, talking to farmers about why the crops failed, or in the factories to workers learning how the machine works, and then back in their studies pouring over the technical reasons why. And they take as much joy in the learning as in the lawyering. In my practice I have learned about about government, about farming, about flooding, I have understood how an airplane engine can shake loose a screw inside, I have learned about schizophrenia, depression, addiction and the workings of the human mind, I have finally begun to get something of finance and economics. And I now know about dirt– all kinds of soil and clay and sand. I love it all. As in the University, all subjects lead to God.
And make no mistake about it, in this culture of materialism and narcissism, a fierce commitment to the life of the mind is the most spiritual and prophetic stance a person can take. It is a perfect example of how, to quote St Paul, we can "be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of our minds…" This is a spiritual gift, a by-product of our vocation as men and women of the law. And as with all spiritual gifts, we use it or we lose it. Unfortunately I know lawyers who have allowed themselves to get stuck in a rut and who therefore have become flat and lifeless, now practicing only boredom. It is a sad thing to see.
I read for an hour every night before I go to sleep: it helps me unwind. But now, in the weeks before a big trial, I am often torn by whether to read some rich old treatise on evidence, or Shakespeare; to re-visit Great Trials of History or Huck Finn; to immerse myself in Darrow’s closing arguments in a capital case, or in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars. Of course, at that point it doesn’t really matter, does it? For my mind is alive and curious, and no matter what I choose to read in those weeks. I inevitably find some pearl of wisdom that, believe it or not, I can offer to a jury in closing argument to illustrate some universal truth.
So, friends, we are incredibly honored to stand in a long line of women and men who love the life of the mind, curious and learned and wise lawyers, Abraham Lincoln and Atticus Finch. What a noble company we keep. So keep it well.
Conclusion: The Common Sense of Success.
Let me conclude with a story that illustrates the final thought I want to leave with you. It is a story about my law partner, Mark O’Donnell, one of the finest business lawyers I have ever met. He and I formed our firm in 1998. Mark had been the senior partner in a 22 lawyer firm, and in the last year he was there, his practice was responsible for 40% of that firm’s billings. Obviously, a huge chunk of that work had been actually done by other lawyers in the firm, but he was the rainmaker. Turns out he was more than that. See, I think the old firm thought that most of the clients would stay there. After all, we had 2 lawyers, and they had 20. But client after client called up and said, "send my files with O’Donnell and Clark." To which, we learned later, the response was often: "but I have been doing your work for the last few years…" And invariably the client would reply, "yeah, but Mark is my lawyer…He is the one who came to my daughter’s graduation." Or, "Mark calls me every year on my birthday." Or, "You didn’t come to my mother’s funeral, he did." And this: "Mark has gotten me through every legal scrape I have ever had, for thirty years now. You may have been doing the work lately, but Mark is my lawyer."
So my last observation is quite practical, about success and failure in the practice of law. I have written and spoken extensively elsewhere about How to Fail– since I consider myself an expert on that topic. And it is true that, at one level, success and failure are in the eye of the beholder. We have already established that success for us cannot be defined in the same terms as many in law define it. But whatever success might be for each of us, I have noticed that the lawyers who seem to have it are not necessarily the most intelligent, the best writers, the ones who got all A’s in law school or who edited the Law Review– although those are all qualities that are no doubt very helpful in law. The lawyers I am talking about, though, are the ones who are the most grounded, the most consistent, the hardest working, who understand that their job as a lawyer is really no different than their job in life– to love and serve others as they would be loved, to practice compassion, to fulfill their vocation with patience and fierceness, regardless of whether it changes the world in ways they can see. They keep learning, from books and from life. They allow themselves to be continually surprised by wonder. These are the ones who in the midst of the human struggles and tragedies that are our work, retain some sense of perspective and humanity and joy. These are lawyers who profess, and prove, that the vocation of law is a pathway to God. My prayer is that each of you will be one of these. Godspeed to you in your vocation.
