Opening Remarks:

Committee on Contemporary Spiritual-&-Public Concerns

Presidential Introduction of Professor David Hall

                                                                                 Friday, 20 October 2006,

                                                                                      Feast of St. Acca

            Ladies & Gentlemen, welcome to this, the second offering of our second year. Tonight, we are privileged to present a Law Professor, of whom the Harvard Law Professor and leading Civil Rights figure, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., remarked, that he is “one of the most important leaders in legal education today.” He is none other than David Hall, who, it is even fair to say, has ennobled Northeastern University, having served it  most recently as Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs from 1998 to 2002, and, before that, having served as Dean of its Law School from 1993 to 1998. What’s more, in recognition of his national reputation, a hard-won reputation that grew over the decades of accomplishment that took him from the segregated lawns and schools of Savannah, Georgia, to one of the pinnacles of the legal profession, President Bush appointed him, in 2003, to serve on the Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation.

            The focus of Professor Hall’s talk tonight derives from his recent book, The Spiritual Revitalization of the Legal Profession: A Search for Sacred Rivers (a few copies of which are available at the front table). The title is fairly indicative of how rare, indeed, shocking, the thesis of Prof. Hall will be – and, I submit to you, shocking twice over.

            It is shocking, first, because it departs from our wariness of lawyers, our long-held wariness. Rich Barlow, reviewing Sacred Rivers in The Boston Globe in March, opened with a famous exchange quoted in Stephen Vincent Benet’s The Devil and Daniel Webster.

            Daniel Webster; “You seem to have an excellent acquaintance with the Law.”

            The Devil: “Sir, that is no fault of mine. Where I come from, we have always gotten the pick of the Bar.”

            We need hardly dwell on the degree to which the Law and lawyers have fallen into popular disrepute. Everyone knows those statistics – lawyers are about as esteemed as … Congressmen!

            More pertinently, we acknowledge the toll that the current method of practicing the Law takes on lawyers themselves. In Prof. Hall’s book, at p. 56, he quotes Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon: our American lawyers are
“Wealthier and more powerful than their counterparts anywhere else in the world,” yet, they are “in the grip of a great sadness.” The stats that Prof. Hall compiles on lawyerly depression, alcohol abuse, substance abuse, to say nothing of lawyerly misbehavior in court and out of court, are simply horrendous. We’ll take that as read: we’ll simply stipulate to those stats and prepare ourselves for the second shock. We move on.

            As we move, what we discover is what Abraham Lincoln might well have described as a “house divided.” Lincoln used the phrase in June, 1858, to describe the results of the United States Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Quoting Scripture, he observed, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He referred, of course, to a government that was half slave and half free. But note what Lincoln was doing in that context: he was applying a spiritual understanding to a personal and social, a political and legal, disaster - and he was doing it in a non-denominational way. It was almost as though Lincoln had foreseen a photograph of two towers, had seen them as they really stand, had seen them together: Harvard’s Russian Belltower and St. Paul’s Belltower, a photo, our photo, symbolizing not only the concomitant and well debated realities of Church-and-State, but also the much more subtle and pervasive realities of a spiritual-and-public calling, a calling that each and every one of us experiences.

            This is a calling that does not die when we leave the mosque on Friday, or the synagogue on Saturday, or the church on Sunday. Unless we are broken people – people who break and fall into the abuse of alcohol or the abuse of the Law – these calls live on in us throughout the week … and yet, though they live on, we professionals must ask ourselves, personally, ‘How do we honor these calls, how do we heed them in our litigation and our legal counseling?’

            I suggest, Ladies & Gentlemen, that these calls, these concomitant realities, spiritual-and-public, are existential facts, and yet are facts that are ignored in our legal training and our subsequent legal practice, a practice that we might call a form of “professional schizophrenia.” We are made to live as though our Sunday life had absolutely nothing to do with our Monday life: as though we were two people in one! In the Culture of Disbelief, Yale Law Professor Stephen Carter notes that lawyers are forced to relegate “religious belief to the status of a hobby” – a point Professor Hall develops on p. 329, as he prepares us for the stunning proposal, the proposal that is the predicate for his presentation tonight.

            For Professor Hall dares to suggest “[T]hat we practice our faith as we practice law, as opposed to practicing our faith through the law.” Now that is a subtle distinction, but it is the key to the book. Professor Hall adds: “To practice our faith through the law … means that law is the object that our faith redeems or transforms. To practice our faith as we practice law means that the law is the subject of our faith. It sits at the center of our understanding of what we are called to do as human beings…” (pp.339-40)

            That professional subject-object distinction is one we are more familiar with in terms of our Catholic priesthood. We would say that for a priest, the faith cannot simply be the object of his life; it must be the subject of his life. It is the singular gift, the genius, of Professor Hall to argue that a lawyer is a priest of the Law, that she, too, must make the Law not merely the object, but the very subject, of her life.

            That distinction, that the Law is not merely an object of professional practice, but a subject of fulfillment, a subject of personal fulfillment, a subject of spiritual fulfillment, is, Ladies & Gentlemen, nothing less than stunning.

            For it points a long-lost moral. A house divided is not just the nation, then or now. A house divided is, fundamentally, no less than we ourselves.

            To address our divisions, professional and personal, to utter a rare and healing word, Ladies & Gentlemen, on behalf of the CSPC, I give you, the quiet, ennobling stunner himself: we give you Professor Hall!

                                                                                  Jerome D. MARYON, Esq.

                                                                                  President, the CSPC Committee