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In Praise of a Gentle Soul*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
Extract
It was a bad summer for lawyers. Just when we were getting used to the possibility that Tom Cruise might be a fine young JAG lawyer capable of ferreting out evil in high places in “A Few Good Men,” it seems that he's just another Harvard lawyer on the make and on the lamb both from the Mob and the FBI in “The Firm.” And who can forget the scene in “Jurassic Park” when a mouthy lawyer gets et alive by tyrannosaurus rex redivivus, to the cheers of the vulgar mobs in the theaters? The good news is that the consumption of the lawyer occurs off camera.
Last summer 6,321 new lawyer jokes were added to the genre. My favorite asks why lawyers are buried 20 feet down instead of 6, with the reply that deep down lawyers are really good.
It wasn't much better two summers ago, when one of the most famous of the lawyer jokers, J. Danforth Quayle, gave his “too many lawyers” speech at the summer meeting of the ABA. Actually I thought the Vice-President made some good points, but was quite unfocused, omitting any consideration, for example, of the maldistribution of lawyers in our society that causes many real needs for legal services to go unmet. Those of you with an empirical bent will be pleased to learn that shortly after Quayle's speech, his statistics were repudiated as wildly inaccurate.
- Type
- First Annual Journal of Law and ReligionAward Ceremony
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 1993
Footnotes
*
Text of remarks at the Annual Banquet of the Journal of Law and Religion held on October 14, 1993, at Hamline University School of Law, honoring Tom Shaffer with the First Annual Journal of Law and Religion Award. I want to thank my colleague at Washington and Lee University School of Law, Professor Andrew W. McThenia, better known to his friends as “Uncas,” for helping me with part of Section II of this essay. I am also grateful to my friends, Bruce Berner, Curtis Cichowski, Laura Gaston Dooley, Afne O'Healy, and Tom Porter, for reading these remarks before I delivered them. And how can I thank Tom and Nancy Shaffer for inspiring so many of us in so many ways, but most of all by their simplicity and their constant fidelity?
References
1. The text of Vice President Quayle's address to the ABA Litigation Section on proposed legal reforms was printed in 137 Chicago Daily L Bull, Oct 29, 1991, at 2; it was also reported, along with the opposing comments of the President of the ABA, John J. Curtin, Jr., in 77 ABA J 36 (Oct 1991). The next President of the ABA, Talbot D'Alemberte, who had served as Dean of Florida State University College of Law, also assailed Vice-President Quayle for this address; see, for example, D'Alemberte, Talbot, Seeking Fairness in Justice Reform, 78 ABA J 10 (01 1992)Google Scholar; and D'Alemberte, Talbot, Justice for All: A Response to the Vice-President, 28 Trial 55 (05 1992)Google Scholar. For further comment on Quayle's speech, see Hensler, Deborah R., Taking Aim at the American Legal System: The Council on Competitiveness's Agenda for Legal Reform, 75 Judicature 244 (02-Mar 1992)Google Scholar; but see Brill, James E., Dan Quayle Was Right; Too Many Lawyers Focusing on Fees, Not Clients, 78 ABA J 86 (02 1992)Google Scholar.
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18. Id at 66-68. For a thoughtful effort to rescue this category from the charge that it is little more than slick PR gimmickry, see Gordon, Robert and Simon, William, The Redemption of Professionalism? in Lawyer's Ideals/Lawyers' Practices (eds Nelson, Robert L., Solomon, Rayman L., and Trubeck, David M., Cornell U Press, 1992)Google Scholar.
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20. Thomas, and Shaffer, Mary, American Lawyers at 58–63 (cited in note 10)Google Scholar.
21. Id at 64.
22. Id at 65.
23. Id.
24. Id at 68.
25. Id at 72.
26. See, for example, Percy, Walker, Signposts in a Strange Land (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991)Google Scholar; Percy, Walker, The Second Coming (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980)Google Scholar; Percy, Walker, Love in the Ruins (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971)Google Scholar; and Percy, Walker, The Last Gentleman (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966)Google Scholar.
27. Thomas, and Shaffer, Mary, American Lawyers at 43 (cited in note 10)Google Scholar.
28. For a thoughtful critique of the ways in which talk about “rights” can readily become solipsistic and destructive of authentic human communities, see Glendon, Mary Ann, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (Free Press, 1991)Google Scholar.
29. Thomas, and Shaffer, Mary, American Lawyers at 13 (cited in note 10)Google Scholar.
30. Id at 39.
31. Id at 13-28.
32. Id at 30-46.
33. In an early case of sexual harassment, two elders wanted to have sex with Susanna. When she refused them, they falsely accused her of adultery, which under applicable biblical law at the time entailed the death penalty (Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22). Upon hearing the testimony of the elders, the community court was prepared to impose the death penalty, until a young lad named Daniel loudly dissented from the judgment, wanting “no part in shedding this woman's blood.” Daniel 13:46. Daniel then demonstrated to the assembly the falsity of the elders' testimony by separating the witnesses and cross-examining them about the place where he allegedly saw Susanna lying with her lover. Daniel 13:51. One elder said it was under a mastic tree, Daniel 13:54, and the other said it was under an evergreen oak, Daniel 13:58. Since the penalty for false testimony in biblical law was the same as that for which the testimony was offered (Deut. 19:16-21), the assembly put the lustful and lying elders to death. The story concludes: “thus innocent blood was spared that day.” Daniel 13:62. The Susanna story was added to the book of Daniel when it was translated into Greek. Hence some Bibles include it within the canon, for example, The New American Bible (1970) includes the story as the 13th chapter of Daniel. Other Bibles regard the story as non-canonical, but sometimes include it within the Apocrypha. For example, the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (1991) includes the story as Susanna.