by Scott Turow
Finally, I am sure that there are those who will say that, in attempting to inspire adherence to the larger values of the legal profession, I risk becoming an apologist for the evil that lawyers do. The kind of legal education I endorse would teach students to be ethical but zealous advocates for leaky waste dumps, for rapists, for discriminatory hiring policies, representatives of the inexcusable whom I would forgive for just doing their jobs, a horde of happy hired guns, blessed by their professors to pile the bucks high in the name of the lawyering process.
There is no doubt that I believe more than I did as a law student in the notion that all clients, even the louts, deserve vigorous representation. On the other hand, the purest pleasure of the profession is reserved to those who bring justice to those who’ve long deserved it. On either side, the baseline assumption is the same: the justice system, that lumbering rhinocerous, is not so weak-sighted that gross injustices, whatever the occasional mishaps, are routinely made invisible by ardent advocacy. He who represents the Huns had best be prepared to lose—and to lose fairly—while just triumphs warrant celebration, for in them the law accomplishes its clearest purpose.
The real rub of the hired-gun mentality is that it erases any sense that the advocate’s loyalty in the end is to the legal system, ahead even of the client. Lawyers are obliged sometimes to be the ambassadors of the legal system who tell their wrongheaded clients that limits exist to what can be done in their zeal to win, guides who point the wayward to a straighter path. It is this part of the professional obligation that legal education can be expected to emphasize.
Institutions, particularly ones as hoary as legal education and the law, have their own persistent character. I do not believe much in panaceas, and certainly the proposals ventured here, individually or taken as a whole, do not amount to one. If every curricular reform I suggest were implemented tomorrow, I know that lawyers would not skip to work down LaSalle and Wall Streets whistling “Zip-A-DeeDoo-Dah,” or turn their faces to heaven to shun every temptation. The law is a tough business, full of striving souls, and our hungers and ambitions will ever drive us. But law school remains the great common ground of the profession; before we begin a life of sparring with one another, this much is shared. What can and should be commonly instilled is a sense of mutual enterprise, a vision of the worthy, if complicated, ambitions of the profession, and the freedom to take pride in this difficult and venerable calling. If perhaps lawyers will never quite learn to do good and to do well, the law schools, at least, can do better.
Last, since this book was a work of autobiography, I take it that I have the right to end on a personal note. Wherever I have gone for the last decade, whenever I meet readers of One L, they inevitably ask the same question, often with some measure of disbelief: Is it possible, they ask, that that woman is still putting up with you? The answer, remarkably, is yes—and with three children as well. Twelve years ago, when this book was completed, there was one conceivable dedication: to Annette, in recognition of her enduring wisdom, strength, and inspiration. Whatever the rest of it was worth, that has remained a sterling idea.
S. T.
Chicago
