What Do Lawyers Leave Behind?

• Publication year: 2000
• Pages: 47
• Citation: Vol. 29 No. 10 Pg. 47

29 Colo.Law. 47 Colorado Lawyer 2000.

2000, October, Pg. 47. What Do Lawyers Leave Behind?

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47

Vol. 29, No. 10, Pg. 47

The Colorado Lawyer
October 2000
Vol. 29, No. 10 [Page 47]

Features
CBA President's Message to Members
What Do Lawyers Leave Behind?
by Dale R. Harris

As we address the very serious challenges facing our profession,1 we must not forget the enormous contributions lawyers have made and still make in our society. I recently came across an outline of some thoughtful remarks on that subject delivered by then U.S. District Judge Jim Carrigan to the CBA convention in 1986. Judge Carrigan eloquently spoke about the importance of our profession, and I thought I would share a few of his thoughts and some of my own with you.2

In a famous poem,3 Carl Sandburg asked "when the lawyers are through, what is there left, Bob?" Sandburg suggested that lawyers?unlike bricklayers, masons, farmers singers, and even dreamers?leave so little behind that not even a mouse could "nibble at it," and that even the "hearse horse snickers hauling a lawyer?s bones."

Judge Carrigan offered this rebuttal to the poet "Lawyers do not build of steel or stone, but of sturdier stuff. We build monuments of ink on paper, of ideas jotted or even less, words wafted on the wind."

The Greatest Monuments

Of course, Judge Carrigan was right, and sometimes we forget that lawyers?as much or more than people from any other single profession or calling?have been at the heart of virtually every great and enduring event in this country. Half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were lawyers, and many the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were lawyers. Born of ideas debated by lawyers, in treacherous, fragile and ambiguous times, these documents, eloquent in their simplicity, stand today as the greatest monuments ever built in this country. And they were brought to us mostly by lawyers.

Justice John Marshall said the Constitution was the supreme law of the land, a permanent not temporary declaration of fundamental principles, and that courts, not the legislature or the executive but the courts, were the final interpreters of the Constitution. And the courts make their decisions after listening to the ideas and arguments of lawyers.

The Constitution was saved by another lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, and countless other lawyers through the ages have kept...