... The regular practice of selflessness transforms one’s soul. In the transformation, one becomes more aware and respectful of others. For the lawyer who takes this path of human flourishing, it nourishes a deeper respect for each person’s fundamental human rights. The right to life is the most fundamental of human rights. All other rights depend on the right to life. The Torah contains many provisions about the right to life. In the development of Western culture, the Jewish respect for life stood in contrast to the pragmatic brutality of Greek and Roman antiquity. The Talmud famously states: “one who saves a single life, saves the world.” (Talmud, Sanhedrin, 4:5). The way that a society treats the child in the womb, the severely challenged human being, and the elderly and infirm is the measure of that society’s commitment to fundamental human rights. It follows that a different kind of lawyer serves as the advocate for society’s poor and powerless and especially for those whose very right to life is questioned. Imbued with the sense of justice that derives from self-donation, a different kind of lawyer knows that there are no disposable human beings.
Second, to give one’s self away for others makes one more merciful. In the Quran, we read that Allah is all merciful, and he tells the Prophet: “We sent thee as not but as a mercy for all creatures.” (Quran, 21:107). Saint Thomas Aquinas distinguished between mercy as mere sentimental emotion (misericordia passionis) and mercy ruled by reason (misericordia rationis) because he understood mercy ruled by reason to be the perfection and fullness of justice. (Summa Theologica, II-II, 30, 3). In the immortal English prose of the bard Shakespeare, mercy “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven . . .Tis mightiest in the mightiest. . . mercy is above this sceptered sway. . . It is an attribute of God himself; And earthly power doth then show like God's when mercy seasons justice.” (Merchant of Venice, Act iv, Scene 1, Lines 180-192). The libertarian secular ethicist, Jacob Appel, observes: “One of the glaring -- yet too often overlooked -- failings of contemporary America is that we have become a nation obsessed with justice and retribution. . . .What a sea change it might be in our public discourse and our civic life if we focused instead upon mercy and forgiveness. A merciful and forgiving culture might find itself with less anger, less social disruption, and even less crime.” (available at: www.huntingtonpost.com/jacob-m-appel). I neither agree with all of Appel’s libertarian and secular views, nor do I necessarily think his quoted words are necessarily an adequate description of American social reality. Nonetheless, I think his words invite reflection by attorneys. It seems to me that a different kind of lawyer would be concerned with mercy for the immigrant, the imprisoned, the isolated, and the broken. To be sure, I agree with Thomas Aquinas: “that mercy does not destroy justice, but in a sense is the fullness thereof.” (Summa Theologica, I, 21, 3).
That is from the May 21, 2011, commencement address given to graduates of Notre Dame Law School by Fr. John J. Coughlin, O.F.M., who is Professor of Law and Concurrent Professor of Theology. His good words, of course, apply just as well to non-lawyers as lawyers. The entire address is available as a PDF file from the Notre Dame website.
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