Different kinds of lawyers and their thinking

Our legal system has now reached a point where, if you're a client, your basic expectations of justice are so far off track that attorneys will sometimes laugh at you for expressing them. It's not necessarily that the attorneys don't wish they could do something for you; it's just that the functions you would like to use are, like the cab's radio, kaput.

I'll try to make it a bit clearer. Let's suppose you go out, today, and sue someone. You don't realize it yet, but you're about to begin working with judges and attorneys who, when they speak of "justice," do not mean the same thing as you. What they mean is "the justice that this legal system will produce." What you mean, by contrast, is "the justice that God would render if He were in charge of this case." You may not know that what you mean, but you'll find out.


And here's how you'll find out. You'll slowly see that what you get from the legal system is not at all what you'd get in heaven, or even in some far-away country where attitudes may be different. And that will frustrate you. But, as you'll learn, it's silly, in the eyes of lawyers and judges, for you to act as though there's some kind of alternative, perfect justice system to which you can easily refer if you don't like this one. This is the only one we've got; it's the best we could do; and it's all you're going to get. For your purposes, Sir or Madam, this is justice.

It's mistaken to think that the justice system is concerned with the things you want it to be concerned with. It happens to be a system of justice, rather than a system of religion, or a system of finance, or a system of partying and good times.

But it is, first and foremost, a system. It may have looked like more at the outset, but appearances are deceiving, to say nothing of the people involved.

So you take your number and you wait in line. We're used to complaints about the service. If you aren't happy, chances are that the problem is in your head. The system is doing what it's supposed to do, or at least it's doing all that it's capable of anymore. We lawyers realize that there will be imperfections, and since we have no alternative, we accept them (except when clients will pay us to challenge them, or, more rarely, when we have time to devote, as volunteers, toward reforming them). Our justice system is just a system, not to be confused with a just system.

I wish I could give you better news. I'm not even asking you to believe me. Go out and talk to some attorneys. Talk to some people who've been through lawsuits. If you ask the right questions about whether justice was done and how much it cost, in dollars and in tears, you'll almost certainly find yourself engaged, not only intellectually, but also emotionally, with the problems of the legal system.

In law school, I was introduced to the head and heart of the law, and I found it disturbing. I couldn't begin to get personally attached to it. And I think I wasn't alone. It seemed to me that few of my classmates believed in what they were doing. We all just wanted to get jobs and make money, without trying to make sense of the bigger picture.

I had one additional problem when I was dealing with this notion of ethical compromise. It will take a moment to explain the underlying concept, but it's important to do so.

I don't know whether you've ever had the experience of talking about something you don't understand. I have. And when I do, I tend to go on and on about the things I do understand, and talk as though this blank spot in my knowledge is just a minor annoyance. But then, when I get to know the subject better, I realize that there are whole dimensions, of which I never dreamed, within that little blank spot.

Attorneys do this sometimes, and it's a peculiar sight. After all, they're normally the first to focus on the details. Somehow, though, lawyers who can think for hours about how a staircase was designed will not hesitate for a moment when they face huge gaps in their understanding of who they are and what they're doing. Instead, they flit right across, as though there's nothing to talk about. I call this phenomenon the "Lawyer's Black Hole of Confident Ignorance.''

Those Black Holes pop up all over. And there's one right here. Look again, if you will, at the last quote I gave you. Is it OK to do something that makes you "uncomfortable" if you only have to do it on a "relatively infrequent" basis? Like murder - maybe if I keep it down to one a month, nobody will mind? The author of that quote didn't seem to have any urge to dwell on the ambiguities in it. And how do you feel about a law professor who refers, almost contemptuously, to people whose sense of honesty follows "the rural God-fearing standard/ so exacting and tedious that it often excludes the use of lawyers." He makes it sound like a headache, right? It's easy to dismiss these things when they don't interest you.

I'm sorry, folks. To me, "moderation in all things" is a pain in the neck, and particularly when we're talking about ethical behavior. I don't feel like a better person for going out and deliberately ignoring my principles once in a while. Who invented this notion that compromise and flexibility can take care of the lawyer's ethical concerns?

I repeat, there are all kinds of lawyers, and many of them are genuinely honest people who struggle with difficult issues of right and wrong. But the foregoing attitudes came up far too often for my taste in law school, and I heard far too few people, among faculty or students, daring to defend the moral against the ethical.

Needless to say, by this point I had a real problem with law school. My stubbornness turned these ethical questions into solid barriers for me. I was never able to form an attachment to the study of law, perhaps because I think I really did love the underlying principles that it claimed to serve.

I was far from the only one who felt this way. Some dropped out because of their feelings. Others stayed in, as I did, and survived law school. For us, the end of that three-year period marked the end of our formal classroom education. It certainly did not complete the task of turning us into lawyers.