 How the Legal Profession Contributes to
Our Society 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. Speech Ideas/Talking Points Home | Tips on Volunteering Home |