COMMENTARY: The moral failure of America’s lawyers

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.) UNDATED _ The lawyers of the land have climbed into a barrel to make it easier to shoot them […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ The lawyers of the land have climbed into a barrel to make it easier to shoot them for committing an ethical failure so great that it must be considered a moral lapse as well.


They have seriously damaged their claim to authority by violating their own standards with their recent invitations to President Clinton and Webster Hubbell to address the convention of the American Bar Association.

This president has caused the already blind goddess of Justice to wear her arm in a sling because of the multiple fractures he has inflicted on her, including alleged perjury and obstruction of justice. Invitee Webster Hubbell only betrayed his colleagues on billing practices in Little Rock.

Glancing across the pantheon at her sister Justice, the goddess of Irony looks up from the lawyer’s Code of Professional Responsibility, smiling ruefully. It reads that a”lawyer shall not … engage in conduct involving dishonesty … deceit, or misrepresentation,”nor”engage in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice.” Justice and Irony now embrace each other like family members at a disaster scene. They weep for a loss that transcends by far this careless and needless taking by lawyers of Clinton and Hubbell to their bosom in convention. The real damage, as thousands of outraged lawyers understand, is to authority in general and to that of the law in particular.

That is a major moral issue because, like it or not, the law is the last standing institution in the barroom brawl atmosphere of contemporary American life.

As other institutions and national reflexes have faltered _ Education and Religion on the one hand, the Arts and Sports on the other, and do not omit Medicine either _ they have lost their own voices of moral authority and recruit the Law as a substitute speaker.

They ask the Law to use its authority in place of their own. But substitute speakers, like understudies, never deliver the performance of the star we paid our money to see.

The Law’s authority has, nevertheless, become America’s authority. When will school open and who may attend? Judges decide routinely on when the game may be played or whether the trade was legal or what the rights of the players are. Most institutions and para-institutions outsource their authority needs to lawyers to keep order within their domains. Neighbors turn to the law to settle disputes that they should work out on their own, face to face, in a human fashion.


Businesses hire lawyers as their chief executives. Professional societies invite lawyers to sit on their ethics panels”to insure fairness,”as one group put it. Art no longer lets its creations speak for themselves with their own unique authority. Lawyers speak on their behalf and the artists do not seem to realize how dependent they have become on the law to judge their value and arbitrate their disputes.

People look on the Supreme Court for far more than its judgment on the constitutionality of laws. It has become, because of the decline in the authority of the churches, the presumed source of ethics and morals for the nation. This substitution of the law of the land for its morals leads to expectations the courts and judges, in the long run, can never fulfill.

And there are side-effects. Lawyers, by trade, never”insure fairness.”Quite the opposite, they are advocates and their fierce style is to pit parties against one another. Translate everything into law and you end up in a legal maze, just where many Americans feel they are today, with diminished trust in each other and an unprecedented readiness to sue on the slightest provocation.

So the danger is that, until other institutions regain their own authority, the law stretches like a vast net beneath the country. If it begins to fray, as it does when it publicly snaps the threads of its own ethical codes by inviting disgraced and disgraceful Americans to address it, then the safety net breaks, its anchors pull out of the earth, and we are in free fall together.

The great moral failure of the lawyers lies in their inability to understand how and why they possess so much practical authority over the nation’s life. And how, by publicly saying their ethics no longer express their ideals, they commit themselves to another corrupt and corrupting ideal: Then nothing really does make any difference anymore.

DEA END KENNEDY

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