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St. Thomas Law Review

First Page

469

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Legal ethics is about injustice. My effort here is part of the broad, modern academic enterprise, and of the broad, modern professional enterprise now usually called professional responsibility. Both date from the Watergate scandal in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, and the rejection, by legal academics and practicing lawyers, of the behavior of the President and other lawyers in that affair. Our modern enterprise, like the biblical Exodus, was born in outrage at the abuse of legal power. In university law schools such as this one, legal ethics is now a discipline characterized by schools of thought on ways to be a lawyer and a good person, both at the same time. The school of thought I belong to answers the question theologically: the way to be a lawyer and a good person, both at the same time, in teaching or writing about or practicing law is to be, at the same time, a Jew faithful to Torah, a Christian who follows Jesus. The present project explores such an undertaking with reference to the prophets of Hebrew Scripture - Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, Ezekiel, and the rest. I argue that the Hebrew Prophets, these biblical prophets, are sources of legal ethics and of jurisprudence for Jews and Christians. As I try to persuade you of that, I want also to make the suggestion that the biblical prophets were lawyers more than anything else. My favorite Old Testament scholar, Professor Walter Brueggemann, who trains Presbyterian ministers, makes a connection like the one I am suggesting to you - between morals in a calling such as the practice of law and the morals of the biblical prophets. "[P]rophecy," he says, is "an assault on public imagination, aimed at showing that the present presumed world is not absolute, but that a thinkable alternative can be imagined, characterized, and lived in." But, of course, as Calvinists tend to do, he finds that we have put obstacles in the way of thinking of our work from a prophetic focus. Brueggemann thinks, and I think, our neglect of a prophetic focus has to do with the facts that we are too well off, and that we manage the system we benefit from. We lawyers. We lawyers, who have deceived ourselves. We have lost (or have never developed) our ability to be angry at the injustice around us. First, we don't see the injustice around us, as the Prophets did, because we are too comfortable - so that seeing injustice, and naming it for what it is, would disturb our comfort. And then, even if we do see the injustice around us, we take it in stride. We say it is intractable; we are doing as much as we can about it; the injustice and the pain of exploitation is part of the way things are; the tide is rising, thanks to us, and a rising tide lifts all boats.

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