 How the Legal Profession Contributes to
Our Society
Law Day oration given to high school seniors in Washington, D.C.
By Van Caldwell, Esq.
Law is so important that we should have a month rather than a day.
The rule of law makes all the other things we value possible. I am going
to e-mail my delegation to Congress and the Maryland General Assembly
and ask them to turn Law Day into Law Month with one day off to celebrate
the most valuable achievement of humankind.
For about five years I was a Foreign Service Officer. I served in places
where there was no rule of law or organized bar to buffer the power
of the state and the individual.
Over the years I have spoken at many career days about lawyering.
Of course, I have been asked the obvious questions: How do you become
a lawyer and what do lawyers do?
The complexity of my answer depends upon the age and grade. You are
seniors, so today I'm going to give you a typical college lecture, since
most of you will be going to college and teachers will be less concerned
about entertaining you. From now on you will have to get it on your
own. Education is a verb; no one can give you more than you give yourself.
The simple answer to the question is that the study of law is graduate
education, which means one must first spend four years earning a Bachelors
degree before going to law school.
But like all learning and life, an ending becomes a new beginning.
After working long hours for three years to finish law school and passing
the bar exam, the new lawyer begins again working day in and out to
master hard earned skills that will require all of her intelligence
and most of her energy.
In a society based upon the rule of law, those who have studied it
have played a role far out of proportion to their numbers in the population.
We were present at the creation. Out of the fifty-five member of the
1787 Constitutional Convention that created the nation, thirty-one were
lawyers.
From the beginning, because of the nature of our training in analysis,
synthesis, critical thinking, and method of practice in a licensed profession,
lawyers have been found in elected and appointed office far more than
any other profession.
Law is a capstone to a liberal education because it touches on and
involves all other intellectual disciplines, starting in the "A's" with
anthropology through "Z", zoology. So even if you never intend to practice,
studying law can be useful. In most parts of the world, the study of
law is considered a liberal arts education that every educated person
should have.
For me trial work, especially criminal defense of the poor, is the
most exciting and the most important work we do. Preparing for trial,
especially a criminal trial, requires all of my intelligence, energy,
and all I have learned since birth. It can consume the soul. Many trial
lawyers suffer from mental health problems associated, I believe, with
the extraordinary responsibility of representing others who are facing
lost of liberty or life itself.
A trial is a drama in which the criminal defense lawyer is the writer,
director, producer, and actor. Trial advocacy has eluded theory, abstraction,
and speculation more than any other area. It is and always has been
acquired primarily through experience and practice.
It requires an apprenticeship of watching, waiting, searching, reflection,
humiliation, and an amateur expertise in everything. It is called an
art, not a science, and is still for many a professional mystery.
If the trial involves, for example, questions about DNA, I am at least
for that trial an expert in DNA. If it involves evidence from a laboratory,
I will become an expert, at least for the case, in laboratory procedures
and protocols, with the assistance of a chemist of biologist or other
expert.
Things change. The law changes with new legislation or new court decisions;
science changes with new discoveries. Thus, keeping up requires daily
reading and study in law, history, science, philosophy, logic, language
arts and all the ancient and new arts and sciences. For a superficial
knowledge may make a complicated situation appear simple. Only the learned,
clear, and informed mind can cut through complexity and achieve something
of the true simple elegance.
History and anthropology shed light on the origins and evolution of
ideas and concepts.
Philosophy generally, but especially legal philosophy, forces us to
grapple with hard, evolving fundamental legal concepts such as freedom,
justice, equality, consent, and dignity.
Linguistics, language arts, logic—all are essential intellectual
tools, because lawyering is about reading, writing, and listening. In
the words of William Strunk, we must be precise, concise, simple, and
clear.
I like to think of myself as an attorney and counselor-at-law. Lawyers
are at their best when they offer wise counsel, but it is the most difficult
skill to master because it requires more than a passing acquaintance
with psychology and the psycho-therapeutic techniques and theories of
Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, Karen Horny and
many others.
These are difficult skills to master, but are not taught in most law
schools and are often difficult to apply with someone facing the loss
of freedom or loss of life in a death penalty case.
All of this education, training, and study, however, means little unless
it is used to improve the quality of community, national, and world
life by providing high quality moral leadership whether as President
of the United States or President of the local PTA or other civic association.
In community building, in creating and maintaining a civilized community
with a high standard of living, imparting the moral values of our civilization
is as important as assuring its material wealth.
An education, especially a higher education, is about more than getting
a job; it is about getting a life. Its goals must be to produce social
and civic--as well as intellectual--capital. Thus, character and moral
values become especially important, especially for lawyers in a society
based on the rule of law, especially since people often look to us for
leadership.
But this is true for all professions. In this age of knowledge, knowledge
has always been power, and despite the mixed feelings and barely concealed
resentment many have about learned professionals, the nation, indeed
the world, looks to us for leadership. And despite these mixed feelings,
parents are still pleased when their child chooses to become a theologian,
teacher, doctor, lawyer, scientist, or professional in one of the many
other fields that require years of study, hard work, and continuous
learning, and whose duties to society outweigh the making of money.
Citizens need to trust us.
Despite all the lawyer bashing and jokes, most parents are still pleased
when their children choose this profession.
But, more than any other profession, lawyers have a special obligation
as guardians of democracy, of the "rule of law", a rational scheme of
justice rather than the capricious and arbitrary rule of dictators and
monarchs. Consequently, we must be "role model citizens". I would hope
that even if the military failed, lawyers would man the barricades and
fight to the last to defend the last best hope of humankind that has
taken billions of years to create and the shed of much blood to keep.
We must be "role model citizens".
I end with the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., an American
hero and hero of the profession, in a speech to the Suffolk, Massachusetts,
County Bar Association in 1885:
"And what a profession it is! No doubt everything is interesting
when it is understood and seen in its connection with the rest of things.
Every calling is great when greatly pursued. But what other gives such
scope to realize the spontaneous energy of one soul? In what other does
one plunge so deep in the stream of life—to share its passions,
its battles, its despair, its triumphs, both as witness and actor?
…When I think on this majestic theme my eyes dazzle. If we are to
speak of the law as our mistress, we who are here know that she is a
mistress only to be wooed with sustained and lonely passion—only
to be won by straining all the faculties by which man is likest to a
god."
This, of course, applies to anything worth doing, to any craft or profession.
Remember that the key to genius is intense effort, hard work, work,
work, and more work. And it seems to be a law of nature that when one
door closes another one opens and every ending becomes a new beginning.
Your high school days are ending but the doors to higher education
are beckoning, bidding you to come in and prepare, to partake of the
tree of knowledge, which, to paraphrase A. E. Houseman, I hope will
remain forever, as it was in the beginning, a tree to be desired to
make one wise.
Van Caldwell, Esq., delivered this speech on Law Day 2000 to a group
of high school seniors in the District of Columbia. It appears here with
his permission.
In addition to many other civic activities, Mr. Caldwell led the effort
to start a Teen Court in Prince George's County Maryland. Teen Court
is a diversion program for juvenile first offenders. He is also a co-founder
of the Innocence Project of the National Capital Region, whose mission
is to assist the wrongfully convicted in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.
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