The Lawyer's Myth: Reviving Ideals in the Legal Profession

• Author: Major Gretchen A. Jackson
• Pages: 08

228 MILITARY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 179 THE LAWYER'S MYTH: REVIVING IDEALS IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION1

REVIEWED BY MAJOR GRETCHEN A. JACKSON2

The incapacitation for moral growth . . . begins in law school. It is replicated in the profession and is the primary reason many lawyers are ailing in their personal and professional lives.3

The popular perception of lawyers today is of devious insiders who manipulate the system for their personal benefit by feeding off of the misfortune of others. This perception is perpetuated in books, television, and movies, and in reality, by multi-million dollar verdicts and sleazy law firm advertisements. Walter Bennett issues a challenge to fellow lawyers to join him on his quest to revive ideals in the legal profession by seeking moral purpose, "If the legal profession is going to save itself, we are the people who must do it."4

The author began his own search for professional ideals when he left thirteen years of trial practice to go back to school for his LL.M. He hoped to escape his "self-made rut" of long hours and intense preoccupation with cases.5 He observed that there were accomplished lawyers living balanced lives, but could not see how to emulate them. After completing his LL.M., Bennett took a job as a clinical professor of law at the University of North Carolina Law School.6 Although his task was to teach the skills of lawyering, he felt he owed his students something more.

I knew by that point in my life that there was much more to living a lawyer's life than graduating from law school and being minimally competent at practical skills. I knew, or at least suspected, that in order to do it well and

to avoid the descent that so many lawyers take into the narrow tunnel of one-mindedness―of thinking like a lawyer and doing or being little else―a reorientation of the soul was required, a reopening of the intellectual and emotional gates that so many people begin to shut in law school.7

In the process of teaching legal ethics, Bennett discovered two fundamental attitudinal problems in his students; compulsion to moral minimalism and feelings of impotency and loneliness.8 Moral minimalism derives from a law school focus on repressing morality in order to keep it from complicating legal analysis.9 Moral impotency comes from law students' realization that, burdened with enormous educational debt, they will not have the luxury to control their own moral decisions and will have to play by the moral rules fashioned in the real world.10 Loneliness is a function of an adversary system where young lawyers are consumed with winning as the measure of success.11

In an attempt to insert a moral dimension back into legal training, Bennett sought to expose his students to "morally meaningful narrative."12 This narrative came from the stories of fellow lawyers guided by a moral purpose and a commitment to professionalism. Bennett accomplished this by developing a course on oral histories of lawyers and judges in North Carolina. By having his students interview prominent members of the legal community, he gave the students the opportunity to exercise those moral predilections set aside in the remainder of their law studies. Through their reports on fellow lawyers and judges, the students gained insight into how lawyers can achieve balance in their personal and professional lives. Bennett offers excerpts of these narratives throughout the book, which provide vivid accounts of North Carolina lawyers incorporating their beliefs and values into their practice of law.

Central to the author's analysis of the legal profession is his reliance on the importance of myths in any society. "Myths are narratives, but they are narratives of a special and powerful kind . . . . Myths help us define ourselves in relation to our communities and to our greater society and help explain our and our society's eternal significance."13 In addition to providing this orienting function, myths serve a community on a primal level, which C.G. Jung called "the dark realm of the collective unconsciousness."14 The tools for myth formation are already present in this collective unconsciousness, "[b]ut the shape of the myths which evolve and manifest themselves, and how we use those myths and what they teach us, depend upon real-world experience and the conscious act of valuing myths and their teaching power."15

The author relies heavily on the myth of the Fisher King and Parcival's search for the Holy Grail as an analogy to the myth of the legal profession.16 As the story goes, the Fisher King...