“Yes, I’d give the Devil the benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.”
So answered Sir Thomas More to an unscrupulous lawyer trying to trick him into admitting he was a traitor and heretic in the powerful, thought provoking 1966 Academy award winning film, A Man for All Seasons.
In a famous scene, More, a leading lawyer, scholar, author and King Henry VIII’s lord high chancellor, refuses to arrest a man accused of being bad in the eyes of God who has broken no law of England.
More explains, that the bad man “should go free, even if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law.” He adds, “What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? … And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide … the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast, and if you cut them down, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil the benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.”
More’s steadfast principles cost him his life. He refused to recognize the King as a supreme unaccountable leader who could bend or ignore the law to serve his own purposes. Martyred by the Tudor despot, canonized by his church, and to this day the patron saint of government leaders and politicians, Sir Saint Thomas More also observed, “When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”
More lived in tumultuous and dangerous times. So do we now.
At present in America, we the people have arrived at an inflection point where we cannot take for granted our established democratic institutions, norms, liberties, safety and even our very existence.
This pivotal moment is a dramatic cue for 21st century heroes.
Answering the call, enter lawyers stage right and left in our real-life drama.
By upholding the rule of law, practitioners, legal educators and future lawyers can play a critical role, making both history and the future. They can help us prevent the story of our long-standing democratic republic coming to a tragic end, remain on the right side of history and keep on track for better tomorrows.
That is the essence of what lawyers do by remaining true to themselves and the people they serve while reconciling disagreements and solving problems. They do so as teachers, exemplars and advocates for the shared values of our Constitutional democracy in pursuit of effective limited self-government, equal justice and the well-being of all people and the world we share.
To succeed they must be lawyers for all seasons who can adapt to rapidly changing circumstances and resist external pressures and influences to abandon the rule of law.
The legal work to be done is not easy. Although few worthwhile things are easy, the degree of difficulty of the public service lawyers must perform in the present era rivals Olympic gold medal standards. It could give any lawyer “the twisties” like those the greatest gymnast of all times, Simon Biles, experienced and overcame.
Understandably, engulfed by disheartening worrisome news coming at us from all directions, it may be hard for any of us to focus and keep working through the daily grind. It is tempting to ask: “What’s the point? The world seems to be crumbling like there will be no tomorrow and the tough predicaments of our time seem hopeless. Why bother?”
So, it helps to realize that the world never has been perfect, and it never will be. As always, what we can learn and do, especially what aspiring lawyers are studying and members of the honorable profession have learned, can make the world a different, better place, and contribute to history’s steady slow rising arc of progress.
It also helps to realize that the work of changing bad things is never done. Each of us is not required to finish the job or win all the good fights, yet neither should we refrain from taking on the challenge. What is needed is for each of us to try to do all the good we can do.
Maintaining our democratic republic, when the nation is made up of people with stubbornly heartfelt deep differences in needs, wants and beliefs, is a tough job.
Keeping the United States in good working order requires constant effort, patience and time to build consensus through negotiation and coalition building as well as intentional public discourse about civic responsibilities and virtues.
Lawyers know, and students in law schools across the United States are learning, how to make a positive difference in the service of public interests. They can midwife the rebirth of participatory democracy and informed self-government through their hallmark professional tools of civility, collaboration and cooperation.
Lawyers can press the great lever of progress through their daily work on matters small and large, private and public, for rich and poor, while promoting access to quality affordable legal services including spending a significant amount of time working for free.
They facilitate the essential informed consent of the governed to be governed by fulfilling their professional responsibility to educate the public about the rule of law, and about how our brilliant cantilevered self-correcting system of constitutional government and justice is supposed to work.
Lawyers also can help broker desperately needed reconciliations even among the most hostile divided adversaries. They set examples for people to emulate about how to disagree agreeably. And they can promote greater understanding about the benefit of outcomes where all interested parties gain by giving away some of what they wanted.
The need to correct wrongs and the pursuit of justice is never ending. That is no excuse for not trying. Now the legal community can start to pull us back from the precipice of the dystopian lawless world we could fall into. We can begin by together doing the necessary, then turning to do what is possible. Eventually, as the people of the United States have always done when they join in common purpose, we can rise above crises and accomplish what seems impossible.
It is not easy work and is not for everyone. Yet for those who have the ability, creativity and dedication to become lawyers, it can be an extremely satisfying career, a wonderful life.
The law is neither a light nor an instrument of any kind to be used to gain an advantage for any person. Rather in the words attributed to a lawyer for all seasons: “The law is a causeway upon which, so long as he keeps to it, a citizen may walk safely.” Lawyers are the guardians and guardrails for that refuge, in hard times a safe passage to a better world.
